Questions for

Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights:Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice

1.How does Jackson's portrait of MLK differ from the sanitized version of public celebration?Beyond media bias and right-wing propaganda, why don't we know more about King's politicaland economic radicalism?2. Jackson says that to understand King we need to understand those who influenced himintellectually. How many of the people he discussed were new to you?Howard Thurman? Reinhold Niebuhr? (43--47) A. Philip Randolph (p.31) Walter Rauschebusch(p 35)Did you know about the development of American Gandhism beginning in 1928 (pp. 36-38)?How about democratic socialists/social democrats --Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Walter Reuther,Ella Baker, Ralph Helstein of the United Packinghouse Workers?3. How did King and his "social democratic circle" stand outside the student new left and offer an alternative to Marixism-Leninism and revolutionary nationalism?4. What were the dilemmas of class coalitions and power that MLK etc tried to resolve? Whatlessons for today?5. What was the Freedom Budget (257-258)?6. How did King view race and class?7. What did Bayard Rustin mean by "From Protest to Politics?" What was the tension betweenRustin's stress on the (organized) working class and King's placing the rural and urban poor andthe center of his efforts? (p. 189)8. How did differences over the Vietnam war and questions about whether it should be linked tothe civil rights movement affect the democratic left? (pp.319-320)9. What did you like most about this book? What was the most surprising thing you learned?10. What were MLK's greatest strengths as a leader? What were his shortcomings (localorganizing and gender are often mentioned)?11. What would MLK have to say about the politics of immigration reform?12. Members of Democratic Socialists of America frequently describe our organization as being in the tradition of "Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington." Should weadd Martin Luther King, Jr.? A. Philip Randolph?