Contextualizing the State Mode of Production in the ... - SAGE Journals

Environment and Planning A 2013, volume 45, pages 2120 – 2134

doi:10.1068/a45497

Contextualizing the state mode of production in the United States: race, space, and civil rights Joshua Inwood Department of Geography and Africana Studies Program, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37966, USA; e-mail: [email protected] Received 13 September 2012; in revised form 26 November 2012 Abstract. In 1967 Dr Martin Luther King Jr began organizing a “Poor People’s Campaign” in an effort to bring 3000 families to Washington, DC to address widespread poverty in the US. King’s efforts were the culmination of a political transformation that he underwent in the middle of the 1960s concerning his views on Vietnam and US global hegemony. I argue that by focusing on King and the US Poor People’s Campaign we can better understand the changing coordinates of the US political economy, what has been termed the “state mode of production” or SMP. Associated with the gradual decline of the Keynesian state, the SMP refers to new kinds of politicospatial arraignments that emerged during the 20th century and continue the process of capital accumulation. I maintain that in the United States the political–economic transformations encapsulated through the growth of the SMP are inseparable from the USA’s racial legacy. Hence the failure of the US civil rights struggle to remake economic processes demonstrates the limits of social democratic movements to fully critique capitalism. For this reason King’s efforts at leading the Poor People’s Campaign are a model of social and political engagement that has purchase in the wake of current economic and political crises and is transforming contemporary economic processes across the globe. Keywords: Lefebvre, racism, production of space, political economy, Poor People’s Campaign

In 1967 Dr Martin Luther King Jr planned a march that would revolutionize United States society and reorient policies away from war and towards a larger and more sustained sharing of the social surplus. King wanted to lead a multiracial coalition of poor and disenfranchised Americans to Washington, DC in a “Poor People’s Campaign”. There they would camp on the National Mall and shut down the city until the US Congress passed legislation that would redistribute wealth in the US. The goals of the campaign included a program to create “jobs, income, the demolition of slums, and the rebuilding by the people who live there of a new community in their place, in fact a new economic deal for the poor” (King, 1986a, page 651). As King rationalized, “The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have little, or nothing to lose.” King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee just weeks prior to the beginning of the campaign. The revolutionary potential King identified had evolved from concerns over basic political and social rights to a broader and sustained critique of US capitalism. As he took his message from the US South to the urbanized North, King shifted tactics. He included demands for a guaranteed national income and federal action to eliminate poverty. In short, King sought to link the triple evils of modern society: racism, materialism, and militarism to a broader critique of US neocolonialism (King, 1967). Critical for understanding King’s evolution is how his activism arises during the growth of US global capital hegemony and the changing role of the federal government concerning the US civil rights struggle. Specifically, I advance an interrelated argument that first postulates King’s necessary shift in tactics is related to broader transformations in the US political economy, and the Poor People’s

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Campaign illustrates these changes. By focusing on King and the US civil rights struggle, we can better understand the changing coordinates of the US political economy—what has been termed the ‘state mode of production’ (Lefebvre, 2009), or the SMP. Associated with the gradual decline of the Keynesian state, the SMP refers to new kinds of politicospatial arraignments that emerged during the 20th century so that the state and state actors(1) played an increasingly central role in “promoting growth, promoting the national economic interest on a world stage” (Elden, 2004, page 227). However, I maintain that in the United States the transformation Lefebvre identifies through the growth of the SMP is inseparable from the USA’s racial legacy. Second, I argue that the transformations in the US political economy King was grappling with hold contemporary academic purchase in the wake of current efforts to remake and reimagine capitalist modes of production. Hence the failure of the US civil rights struggle to remake economic processes is a result of US nationalism and the growth of the SMP, and demonstrates the limits of social democratic movements to fully critique capitalism. An imperative of state actors in the SMP is to manage the chaos of relations among individuals, groups, and class factions to promote hegemony through the accumulation of capital (Lefebvre, 2009). Federal efforts to reframe the civil rights struggle during the late 1950s and 1960s illustrate the extension of US global hegemony and foreshadow broader efforts by state actors to remake the SMP through neoliberal economic models that focus on individual responsibility. Consequently, the geographic, economic, political and social transformations that characterized the USA during the transition from the Keynesian state to neoliberalism constitutes the growth of a kind of racial state mode of production and an effort to manage race and class contradictions in US society opened up through civil rights and broad economic changes to the US economy. The arguments outlined above are explored through a discussion of the SMP and civil rights, which reveals the link between the growth of the civil rights movement and efforts to manage burgeoning race and class conflicts. I then move on to examine King’s involvement with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the rhetoric of rights that sustained the movement. A discussion of the Poor People’s Campaign and the changing nature of civil rights activism in the last years of King’s life is presented as a basis for understanding the changing nature of civil rights activism for contemporary geographic scholarship. Ultimately, by more fully understanding the geographic implications of King’s political maturation, we can inform models of political activism that arise through the changing nature of economic development in the US. In the last years of his life King was struggling to craft a new kind of political engagement that fundamentally challenged the SMP. For this reason King’s value as a radical social revolutionary is not found in the past per se, but is a model of social and political engagement that has purchase in the wake of the current economic crisis that is transforming contemporary social, political, and economic relationships across the globe. Conceptual framework State mode of production

Emerging from Lefebvre’s De l’État, a four-volume work published in 1976 and 1978, the SMP is an attempt to understand the changing role of the state in capitalist development (Brenner, 2001). According to Brenner, these works, published after the better known (1)

It is important to note, when referring to the state, or state actors, that these are not monolithic conceptions. The term ‘state actors’ in this paper refers to a variety of persons, everyone from President Lyndon Johnson and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J Edgar Hoover to everyday bureaucrats who were responsible for implementing the polices and practices of the federal government. It is also important to note that state actors at different scales were often working at cross-purposes. This is particularly true in the US South where local actors often resisted the integration of US society.

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Production of Space, are an extension of Lefebvre’s earlier writings, and represent an effort to “clarify both theoretically and practically the possibility for transformative political praxis” (page 784). Lefebvre’s primary concern is to understand the “increasingly central role of state institutions in facilitating the survival of capitalism during the course of the twentieth century” and to elaborate “the changing geographies of state power and state intervention” (Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 359). Lefebvre identifies a new state form that increasingly works to homogenize difference and maintain social and political cohesion (Lefebvre, 2009, page 127). Given that portions of De l’État have only recently been published in English (see Lefebvre, 2009) Lefebvre’s work on the state is less well known in Anglo-geographic circles, but represents an important jumping-off point for thinking about the changing role of the state in late-20th-century capitalism. This work is important for extending contemporary understandings of the production of space because, as Brenner and Elden point out, Lefebvre foregrounds his analysis of the SMP through a series of spatial transformations that have the potential to show how “states profoundly transform inherited political economic landscapes contributing in turn to the production of a qualitatively new framework for national and eventually worldwide socialspatial organization” (Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 358). Any attempt to apply Lefebvre’s understandings of the SMP must proceed with caution. His analysis is grounded in a European context and is very much an attempt to engage with European conditions. Yet Lefebvre’s focus on the production of new state spaces as well as on “social relations in space” (Lefebvre, 1974, page 261; as quoted in Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 358) makes his work applicable in other contexts, particularly in the discourse of economic and racial transformations that were occurring in the United States during the same time period. Most critical for engaging the SMP with the US racial project is the way state actors attempt to produce an appearance of homogeneity that masks deeper social contradictions. The SMP and the US racial project

Starting with the worldwide financial crisis (begun in 1929 in the US) government policies took a more active and direct role in organizing space for capital accumulation. As the Fordist– Keynseian system matured through the 20th century, the mobilization of state resources for the accumulation of capital intensified. As a result, “state institutions became more directly involved in constructing, maintaining, and reproducing the political–economic and territorial preconditions for the accumulation of capital” (Brenner, 2004, page 124). Perhaps made most famous by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also extended by the presidential administrations of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, these economic policies resulted in the federal government redistributing “the social surplus to the working classes on a national scale” (Brenner, 2001, page 791). In addition to these economic changes the federal government, for the first time since the end of the Civil War, began to incorporate the labor and political aspirations of black Americans more fully into the political life of the nation. Understanding the significance of this change must begin from the premise that the United States achieved status as a world superpower through a cornerstone of white supremacy (Du Bois, 2001). From the founding of the North American colonies in Virginia in 1607 until the dawn of World War II, slavery, sharecropping, and forced labor camps dominated sectors of US economic development (Blackmon, 2008, page 7). Consequently, the extraction of surplus value from racialized bodies is foundational to understanding the development of US economic power. These practices came under increased pressure after World War II as an expanding global antiracist and anticolonial movement gained visibility and exposed a series of contradictions in US society. Antiracist movements politicized “the depths and injustices of Western and white supremacy, they demonstrated as the United States and Europe claimed


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to be fighting an antifascist war abroad, [they were] practicing racism and fascism against persons of color in the United States, Europe and the colonies” (Melamed, 2006, page 4). This became increasingly problematic in the context of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union was able to leverage these contradictions in the growing postwar confrontation between capitalist and communist block countries (Dudziak, 1988). To meet the challenges posed by the deepening Cold War crisis, and an increasingly militant civil rights struggle in the US, it became necessary for the United States federal government to take a more active role in managing the class and race contradictions that were exposed through Cold War and domestic political confrontations (Melamed, 2006). This led to an increasingly complex form of racial hegemony that “transform[ed] state/economy relations in which the state apparatus [became] ever more deeply imbricated in producing, maintaining, and reproducing the basic sociohistorical and territorial preconditions for expanded capital accumulation” (Brenner, 2001, page 791). This transformation is related to a strengthening of civil society through the growth of the social democratic state (Lefebvre, 2009, page 127). Most critical for this analysis is the way the growth of the SMP focuses on a series of spatial strategies that are organized to “facilitate capital accumulation and to enhance political domination” (Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 359). Within the United States a fundamental shift engendered by the transition from an overt white supremacy to a more nuanced and contextualized racialized position, as well as the strengthening of social democratic practices, is encompassed by a nominal commitment to antiracist policies known as racial liberalism.From the late 1940s until the middle 1960s the role of the US federal government changed from largely ignoring the plight of black citizens to selectively working to secure basic social and civil rights. The US federal government had an “official anti-racist” policy that linked “official anti-racism to a US nationalism” (Melamed, 2006 page 5). Accordingly as the white supremacy that had provided the justification for colonial/capitalist projects throughout the world gave way to new political considerations, racial and economic formations changed to meet the challenges posed by the crisis (Baldwin, 2012; Bonnett, 1997). Specifcally, by engaging with racial liberalism the US was undertaking a broad change in race relations (Melamed, 2011, page x), and it becomes imperative to see the growth of US global hegemony and the shift to racial liberalism as interrelated to the development of the racialized SMP in the US. The SMP and the Brown v. Board of Education decision

Throughout the 1940s and into the early 1960s African American labor and civil rights activists were able to draw the federal government into the fight for equal rights that began to whittle away at segregation and racial inequality. While numerous examples exist which illustrate this point, arguably the most impactful effort at managing growing racial contradictions is the 1954 Supreme Court of the United States decisions in Brown v. Board of Education.(2) In 1951 thirteen African American parents in Topeka, Kansas launched a class action lawsuit to integrate the public school system of the city. In a landmark case the Supreme Court ruled that separate school facilities violated the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. Contemporary scholarship holds that this was a major victory for US liberal democracy. However, the Brown decision came at a time when the US Congress was conducting witch hunts of suspected communists, the constitutionality of loyalty oaths was affirmed, and the federal government was removing alleged communists from the government (Dudziak, 1988, page 106). While the Brown opinion is at odds with the restrictions on civil liberties in other areas of US society, the decision was of great value to whites in policy-making positions and in advancing economic and political narratives at home and abroad (Bell, 1995, page 22). (2)

Other examples include the desegregation of the armed forces by executive order in 1948 and The Civil Rights Act of 1968 that helped to end housing discrimination.

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This understanding of the Brown decision highlights the case’s influence on perceptions of US racism and on redirecting economic development in US society. The Brown opinion provided credibility to US struggles against communist countries in an effort to “win the hearts and minds of emerging third world peoples” (Bell, 1995, page 22). In the years after World War II US racial discrimination received increased attention in the international press and made it difficult to promote democracy and contain communism (Dudziak, 1988, page 106). During Brown the US Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court that desegregation was in the national interest because the United States was attempting to prove that democracy works. Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe writes that the articulation of many of the civil-rights-era court decisions during the 1950s and 1960s was “informed by the Cold War era, during which there was a growing consciousness about what American democracy meant or should mean as contrasted to communism” (2008, page 165). Further, the action of the Supreme Court helped soothe a growing militancy among returning black World War II veterans who questioned why “American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations” (Robeson, 1978, page 137). Indeed, writing during the height of World War II Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy wrote, “statutory racial discriminations are at variance with the principles for which we are now waging war” (quoted in Tribe, 2008, page 165). Following the end of World War II many veterans who had served overseas had come to understand the system of segregation in the US as particularly unjust and were becoming increasingly militant in working towards social and civil rights in the US (Payne, 2007). The activism prompted by the experience of serving in a segregated military during World War II exacerbated tensions in the US South as many African American service members were systematically denied veterans’ benefits such as job and educational services (Payne, 2007). Finally, the Brown decision was significant for white capitalists who “realized that the South could make the transition from a rural plantation society to the sunbelt with all its potential and profit only when it ended its struggle to remain divided by state-sponsored segregation. Thus, segregation was viewed as a barrier to further industrialization in the South” (Bell, 1995, page 23). By opening the US South to economic redevelopment, state actors could contribute to efforts at growing capital accumulation in the nation as a whole. Historically the US South was economically underdeveloped and by creating more favorable conditions for economic growth, state actors were attempting to open up the spaces of the South to widespread economic development. This multifaceted understanding of the Brown decision highlights the way the SMP becomes a particular kind of state form that attempts to manage contradictions in society and to impose order in an effort to promote hegemony (Lefebvre, 2009, page 226). In this sense the SMP consists of the “resources a State has at its disposal and which are integrated, and which it directs toward specific objectives” that ultimately facilitate in the growth of capitalism (Lefebvre, 2009, page 159). By ending segregation in the South the federal government was able to open a region of the country that had historically been economically underserved and to create the conditions necessary for a burgeoning migration to the Sunbelt region of the US. This not only opened up areas of the US to economic development, but it also extended into overseas markets as US policy makers were able to point to the Brown decision as an example of democracy at work. As a consequence, central to understanding the SMP is the way state actors are trying to “reshape the spaces of capital accumulation and commodity exchange, subjecting them, simultaneously, to processes of fragmentation, hierarchization and homogenization” (Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 359). Fundamental to this process is the way the SMP


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relies on conceptions of abstract space. According to Lefebvre the socio/political space that is produced through the SMP is characterized by an “abstract quality” that represents a “qualitatively new matrix of sociospatial organization [and] appears to be homogenous, and thus devoid of difference” (Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 358, italics in original). Abstract space, as defined by Lefebvre, is: “ a space of quantification and growing homogeneity, a merchandised space where all elements are exchangeable and thus interchangeable; a police space in which the state tolerates no resistance and no obstacles. Economic space and political space thus converge towards an elimination of all differences” (Lefebvre 1979, page 293; as quoted in McCann 1999, page 169). In order for abstract space to become dominant a twofold process must take place. First, “there must be a concentrated attempt to define the appropriate meaning of, and suitable activities that can take place within” the abstract space (McCann 1999, page 169). Second, this space must be rendered ahistorical. In other words, abstract space must “be a space from which previous histories have been erased” (Gregory 1994, page 366). As a reflection of racial liberalism, the Brown opinion similarly relies on notions of abstract space that appear to erase racial difference and introduces an official stance of color blindness into the political life of the nation that simultaneously masks the larger struggle over identity that is reflected in the decision.(3) Whereas race had long served as an important distinction in US economic policy and practice (eg, slave versus free labor; segregated business establishments), the Brown decision began a process that fundamentally remade space and place in US society and ostensibly removed racial discrimination from the public life of the nation-state. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the United States federal government became deeply enmeshed in the US civil rights struggle and as a consequence there was a “significant enchantment of the state’s role in mobilizing space as a productive force” (Brenner, 2001, page 799). As a consequence, the Brown decision influence went beyond the desegregation of schools and provided the foundation for broader efforts by the federal government to erase discrimination throughout the public spaces of the nation during the late 1950s and mid-1960s. This liberated new and diverse markets for increased capital accumulation and redirected the efforts of the federal government into managing and imposing race neutral practices. Central to the growth of the racialized SMP is the way the Brown decision laid the foundation for an extension of the federal government’s power in new ways. The production of the sociospatial relations that come to define the racialized SMP in the US “entails transformations not only in political practices and institutional arrangements, but also in political imaginaries: it involves new ways of envisioning, conceiving, and representing the spaces within which everyday life, capital accumulation, and state action unfold” (Brenner and Elden, 2009, page 359). In a series of decisions throughout the 1960s the federal government used the precedent of Brown to extend federal power as it related to interstate commerce and the ending of segregation in the US South. Thus by guaranteeing “equality” in US society, the federal government came to regulate and organize space in more productive ways that facilitated the rapid expansion of US economic power while erasing the foundation of racial exploitation on which the development of the US economy rested. Thus Brown and subsequent decisions allowed the federal government to extend

(3)

I argue a similar process occurred shortly after the US election of Barrack Obama when mainstream academic and news accounts began to refer to the US as having entered a ‘postracial’ society in which the salience of race was deemed to have diminished in the US.

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its power into all kinds of places and spaces it historically had left to the US states to regulate.(4) It is within this context that King’s life and work take on added significance. By exploring King’s political maturation, from an early career focused on securing basic social and civil rights to his later work promoting redistribution of state resources, we can more fully examine the changing role of the state during the middle 20th century and how that framed King’s activism. It is the relationship between the US federal government and state actors with the US civil rights struggle that comes to define King’s political program. Case study King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

On 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress, famously refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested for violating Montgomery’s segregation ordinance. Within days the African American community organized a mass protest movement and boycotted the city’s public transportation system. Formation of an alternative transportation system was critical to the boycott’s success—the African American community organized rides and carpools to run errands and to get to work in Montgomery (Alderman et al, 2013). Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, at 25 years of age, was elected leader of the movement. In explaining the Montgomery Bus Boycott King drew from two important strands of thought that framed his early political engagement with the civil rights movement. He wrote: “ The segregation of Negroes, with its inevitable discrimination, has thrived on elements of inferiority present in the masses of both white and Negro people. Through forced separation from our African culture, through slavery, poverty, and deprivation, many black men lost self-respect” (King, 1986b, page 75). King framed the argument for civil and social rights by asserting a humanity that was grounded in rich traditions of African American protest. In so doing, King argued that it would be impossible for black Americans to accept the status quo of separate and unequal public accommodations. By drawing on black diasporic geographies, King illuminated the way myriad technologies of violence “targeted black bodies” and naturalized a plantation economy that was predicated on “absolute domination, [physical and spiritual] natal alienation, and social death” (McKittrick, 2011, page 949). Thus as the civil rights struggle grew, King drew from themes of suffering and protest and also geographies of resistance to the spiritual and natal genocide of the transatlantic slave trade. It is the ability to draw from the dialectical interplay of white supremacy and resistance that places the Montgomery Bus Boycott at the center of the struggle for social and civil equality in the US. By employing themes of resistance King’s political engagement with white supremacy, though multifaceted, specifically employed racial liberalism that attempted to link the plight of African Americans to broader themes of US democratic traditions. For example, King wrote: “ The tragedy of slavery and segregation is that they [white supremacists] instilled in the Negro a disastrous sense of his own worthlessness. To overcome this terrible feeling of being less than human, the Negro must assert for all to hear and see a majestic sense of his worth. There is such a thing as a desegregated mind. We must no longer allow the outer chains of an oppressive society to shackle our minds” (King, 1967, page 123). (4)

For example, in 1964 the owners of the Heart of Atlanta Motel sued the federal government, claiming that as a private business the federal government could not compel them to serve and accommodate black travelers. In a landmark decision the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government, through the commerce clause and the ability to regulate interstate commerce, did have the power to compel private businesses to serve persons of color. This decision, which used the Brown decision as a foundation of legal precedent, represented a sea change in the way the Supreme Court understood the use of the commerce clause and opened the door to vast expansion of federal power to regulate private business interests (for a broader discussion see Jennings and Razook, 2000).


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By linking the efforts to desegregate Southern society with themes of African American empowerment, King draws from a “black sense of place” (McKittrick, 2006) that situates resistance to white supremacy and racism at the center of an enlarging political project culminating in the Poor People’s Campaign. This effort led King to question the very foundation of US global hegemony and the foundations of US capitalism. Thus King places African Americans in the center of efforts to reorient US democratic institutions not only to live up to the rhetoric of racial liberalism, but also to provide new economic and social spaces that would fundamentally reorganize the US economy. As King’s popularity and reputation grew, his willingness to point to contradictions in US society undermined efforts by state actors to manage the civil rights crisis. Thus as the racialized SMP tried to smooth over racial differences via abstract spaces that gave the appearance of equality, King consistently referenced a three-hundred-year legacy of resistance to white supremacy that grounded the civil rights struggle in a political consciousness focused on destabilizing US hegemony. Over the course of King’s career this project included speeches and direct action protests. For example, speaking in Nashville, Tennessee in 1962 King declared: “ The idea of dignity and worth of human personality is expressed eloquently and unequivocally in the Declaration of Independence. ‘All men,’ it says, ‘are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Never has a sociopolitical document proclaimed more profoundly and eloquently the sacredness of human personality” (King, 1986c, page 119). This passage illustrates the way King used notions of US democratic practices to advance black citizens in the US, and focused on connecting the plight of blacks with a broader constitutional legacy. The engagement with ideas of American liberalism points to King’s early focus on social rights. Because it also exploited the growing international Cold War crisis, the worldwide publicity of nonviolent civil disobedience led to (reluctant) federal commitment to securing basic civil freedoms. In yet another example, Dudziak (2000, page 193) notes during the March on Washington in 1963 dozens of solidarity marches were held across the world at US embassies and the US government worked hard to frame the message of the DC march. For example, John Lewis, a civil rights organizer, was encouraged to tone down his speech by both the US Justice Department and Martin Luther King, Jr (Dudziak, 2000, page 188). King was keenly aware of the publicity that social protest in the US garnered in the international media and he looked for ways to engage with racist forces in public space—both to illustrate the inhumanity of US segregation and to juxtapose these images with nonviolent resistance of black protestors. As a consequence the civil rights struggle leveraged institutions like the Federal Court system to intercede on behalf of African Americans who were advocating social and civil rights. King’s political maturation

By 1966 King began to expand his critique of US hegemony due to disillusionment over President Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Vietnam and failed efforts to eliminate poverty in the US. As the US civil rights struggle expanded outside of the South into the urban North, a series of internal and external contradictions buffeted King as he tried to remain focused on nonviolent direct action protests. Contributing to King’s frustration were efforts by the federal government to control and undermine King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). These efforts included a series of spatial strategies that were deployed to maintain hegemony by reshaping political struggles and which illustrate the way the racialized SMP worked in the US. Perhaps the most apt example of the way the racialized SMP worked is provided by federal efforts to undermine and control political dissent through the FBI and COINTELPRO.

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COINTELPRO was a two-decades-long program in which the FBI and other federal agencies engaged in illegal practices to destroy ‘radical’ elements in US society (Correia, 2008). King was wrapped up in COINTELPRO in myriad ways. The FBI routinely wiretapped King and his associates and bugged King’s hotel rooms while he was traveling. In addition, the FBI coordinated with police forces to engage undercover police officers in infiltrating local civil rights organizing events (Branch, 2006). A well-known COINTELPRO effort to manipulate and discredit King occurred in the weeks before he was to receive the Noble Peace Prize. The FBI created a tape of King engaging in extramarital affairs and this tape was sent to the SCLC headquarters with a note that King interpreted as urging him to commit suicide (Dyson, 2004). However, before King was able to open it the package was intercepted by King’s wife Corretta who listened to the audio recordings. The contradictory relationship between King and the federal government was an effort to “foreclose discussion of African American political and cultural autonomy and the dynamics of race and racism in the postwar expansion of transnational capitalism” (Melamed, 2006, page 8). In addition, it indicates fundamental contradictions in the production of the racialized SMP and abstract space. The appearance of homogeneity that is central to abstract space can be maintained only through “a continued state-sponsored process of fragmentation and marginalization that elides difference and thus attempts to prevent conflict” (McCann, 1999, page 171). Those who challenge the status quo or attempt to draw attention to inequities become threats. As a consequence, through the efforts of the FBI, state actors tried to manipulate the black freedom struggles to the benefit of the state, thus preserving the appearance of equality. To this end, state actors co-opted civil rights rhetoric and directed it towards efforts that would ultimately strengthen the US state while never fully engaging with the intersectionality of race, poverty, and violence. In this way state actors could at once appear to side with civil and social activists and their quest for greater social and political rights, while simultaneously undermining their leadership and broader critiques of US economic relationships. For example, on 15 March 1965 after civil rights workers were attacked by Alabama State Troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson went before the United States Congress to urge passage of the Voting Act—a bill that would guarantee voting rights throughout the United States. President Johnson declared during his speech: “ I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of Democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause. At times, history and fate meet in a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans” (Johnson, 1965, page 281). President Johnson went on to argue that there was no “negro” problem in America, just an American problem and that the way to address the issue of civil rights in 1965 was by guaranteeing that “every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.” Johnson finished his speech by declaring: “ I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of tax eaters. I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election. I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races, all regions and all parties. I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers—of this earth” (page 286).


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President Johnson’s speech is an example of the complicated relationship between the federal government and King. On one hand, Johnson connects the civil rights movement and efforts at securing basic political rights in Selma within the broad arc of American democracy. Johnson is linking the struggle to themes of American Democratic exceptionalism that reinforces democratic institutions. Pauley (1998, pages 40–41) argues Johnson’s “speech contextualizes the events at Selma as part of a larger struggle for freedom and equality” and that it “assigns a civil religious meaning to the current civil rights struggle” which reinforces notions of American exceptionalism around the world. Perhaps more central to understandings of the racialized SMP is his declaration that there is “no negro problem”, but a larger American problem when it comes to the right to vote. In so doing, President Johnson rhetorically combines notions of racial liberalism with the processes of capital accumulation and responsibility by arguing that he wants to be the president who ended hunger and prepared poor folks to become “tax payers” instead of “tax eaters”. This further ties the US civil rights movement into notions of abstract space as it links antiracist rhetoric and African American freedom aspirations to the calculations of US governmentality (Melamed, 2006, page 6). This is part of a broader rearticulation of race in the US during the 1960s that equates racial equality as a way to secure US interests at home and abroad. Melamed argues that this is foundational to the growth of US worldwide economic hegemony because “ the scope of the political in the postwar United States precisely shields matters of economy from robust democratic review, the suturing of liberal antiracism to U.S. nationalism, which manages, develops, and depoliticizes capitalism by collapsing it with Americanism, results in a situation where ‘official’ antiracist discourse and politics actually limit awareness of global capitalism” (2006, page 6). By incorporating elements of the civil rights movement into the national consciousness, state actors are able to protect the foundations of economic white supremacy from a broader critique while creating the appearance of equality. Thus state actors are able to vastly increase the size and scope of the state while simultaneously managing growing economic contradictions in US society which ultimately strengthens the state. For example, in the weeks after the Voting Rights speech President Johnson ordered FBI Director Herbert Hoover and his Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to intensify FBI investigations on “the emerging King position on Vietnam, including possible Communist influences” (Branch, 2006, page 251). During the fall and winter of 1965–66 Dr King had begun to publically break from Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy. This became a turning point in relations between King and Johnson as well as within Johnson’s evolving views on civil rights in the US. Collectively these efforts highlight the role the SMP played in framing and focusing federal efforts concerning civil rights in the US. Recall from the earlier discussion of the SMP that an imperative of state actors is to manage the chaos of relations among individuals, groups, and class factions and to promote hegemony through the accumulation of capital. By first reframing the civil rights struggle into notions of American democracy and then by promoting issues of personal responsibility, Johnson promoted a vision of the state where the federal government is not only responsible for the protection of individual and collective rights, but also responsible for creating productive economic citizens. These themes foreshadow broader efforts by state actors to remake the SMP through neoliberal economic models that focus on individual responsibility. By understanding King’s political project we can begin to see models for political activism that are formed by and through the changing nature of economic development from Fordism to neoliberalism. For this reason King’s value as a radical social revolutionary is not found in the past per se, but instead is a model of social and political engagement that has purchase in the wake of the current economic crises that is transforming contemporary social, political, and economic relationships across the globe.

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By monitoring King’s activities through the questionable tactics of the FBI, Johnson worked to limit King’s growing political influence on Vietnam. This multifaceted relationship with the federal government and an increasing frustration over Vietnam and the inability of Johnson to fully engage with his War on Poverty drove King to refocus his political philosophy of nonviolent direct action, leading to a more critical approach to the federal government and culminating in the Poor People’s Campaign. Dr King, Vietnam, and the Poor People’s Campaign

It was during 1965 in the context of the tenuous relationship with Johnson’s administration that King reformulated his response to white supremacy and US hegemony. Beginning in 1965 King began to question the war in Vietnam and the massive buildup of the military– industrial complex that stripped resources away from social programs designed to alleviate poverty. After spending the better part of three years in Northern ghettos, King realized that Vietnam was a war of colonial conquest for securing new capital markets—and subsequently crippling any effort to address poverty in the United States. It was not until 1967, however, that King publicly broke with the administration of Lyndon Johnson over his Vietnam policy. In a speech delivered exactly one year prior to his assassination, King declared that he had myriad reasons for opposing the war in Vietnam. He noted: “ A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle [civil rights]. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program ... . Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war” (King, 1986c, page 232). King went on to argue that the irony of an integrated armed services fighting “in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit” compelled him to speak out on the war question (page 232). For this reason he had a moral obligation to speak out against the Vietnam War and to embark on a mission that would “save the soul of America.” King declared that America can never be redeemed “so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over” (pages 232). King thus broadened the scope of the US civil rights movement to more fully engage with questions of capital and colonial accumulation. King took on the broad arc of inequality that is foundational to understanding the SMP. While the racalized SMP worked to manage race and class contradictions, state actors simultaneously attempted to reframe internal debates about capitalism and American colonial desires to conform to hegemonic visions of US democracy. Thus King’s public break on Vietnam stood in contrast to these efforts and bolstered the material critique of US foreign policy interests. Jackson (2007, page 336) argues we should see King’s break on Vietnam and his desire to lead a massive social protest against poverty as interrelated responses to US hegemony. According to Jackson, King argued with his SCLC staff that “Vietnam had fueled war in the cities” and “Across the country, the white backlash shattered black dreams of equality. Whites were still murdering southern civil rights workers and attacking nonviolent Chicago protestors” (page 336). As a consequence “[t]he insane pursuit of conquest in Vietnam only increased their contempt for the U.S. government. To war against your own people while warring against another nation is the ultimate in political and social bankruptcy” and that finally “[t]he Negro who runs wild in a riot has been given the example of this by his own government running wild in the world” (page 336–337). From this realization King crafted a response to the racialized SMP that would force the government to address entrenched poverty in the United States. While King had discussed the idea of leading a massive poor people’s march in Washington, DC since 1966, this plan took on particular significance in 1967. The summer of 1967 saw massive urban uprisings and hundreds of mostly poor and mostly African American


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youth killed. In addition, with King’s increasingly militant stance on Vietnam, the Johnson administration and the FBI reenergized efforts to marginalize King’s leadership. It was then that King committed himself to leading a massive march on the nation’s capital that would also include civil disobedience and mass arrests. It is important to note, however, that King’s work to organize the Poor People’s Campaign was the culmination of several internal and external factors. First, there had already been a Poor People’s March in 1966 “when five hundred poor people” marched in Washington protesting cuts to social welfare programs (Jackson, 2007, page 332). After holding hearings and meetings on poverty in Mississippi, Robert Kennedy sent aids to encourage King to bring the poor to Washington and shut the city down in a massive march that would end the war and also increase aid for poor and disenfranchised Americans (Jackson, 2007, page 333). King focused on leading a march that would revolutionize American society and reorient policies away from war and towards a larger and more sustained sharing of the social surplus. He explained that “America, the richest most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing but a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war” (King, 1986c, page 241). King further noted that in the spring of 1968 3000 poor people who would have three months of training on nonviolent, civil disobedience would descend on Washington. King preached: “ We [poor people] will move on Washington, determined to stay there until the legislative and executive branches of the government take serious and adequate action on jobs and income. A delegation of poor people can walk into a high official’s office with a carefully, collectively prepared list of demands ... . And you can settle down in his office for as long a stay as necessary. If you are, let’s say from rural Mississippi, and have never had medical attention, and your children are undernourished and unhealthy, you can take those little children into the Washington hospitals and stay with them there until the medical workers cope with their needs, and in showing it your children, you will have shown this country a sight that will make it stop in its busy tracks and think hard about what it has done” (King, 1986d, page 651). King envisioned a march that would break the obstructive coalition of unreconstructed Southerners and unprogressive Northerners in Congress in a mission that would constitute a massive national program of job creations, wealth redistribution, standing in stark opposition to the racialized liberalism which was foundational to the SMP. More specifically King was advocating an economic policy that was international in scope. King concluded his sermon by asking: “ Can a nonviolent, direct action movement find application on the international level, to confront economic and political problems? I believe it can. It is clear to me that the next stage of the movement is to become international. National movements within the developed countries forces that focus London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa— must help to make it politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism” (King, 1986d, page 652). An imperative of the SMP was to direct the resources of the state towards specific objectives that facilitate the growth of capitalism. This imperative was emphasized at the end of World War II as Western powers were confronted with a growing anticolonial struggle. In this sermon King redirects the energies of the struggle for civil rights, a vision for social justice

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that stands in stark contrast to the SMP and efforts to manage internal and external race and class contradictions. King promoted a vision of society that is focused wholly on transforming capital/colonial relations and undermining the SMP while rededicating the energies of the state from promoting capital growth to spiritual concerns about the poor and underserved. In a series of interviews given just ten days before his assassination, King explained more fully, “in the past in the civil rights movement we have been dealing with segregation and all of its humiliation, we’ve been dealing with the political problem of the denial of the right to vote” (page 672). King went on to state: “ after we get the 3,000 people in Washington, we want the non-poor to come in a supportive role. Then on June fifteenth we want to have a massive march on Washington. You see, the 3,000 are going to stay in Washington at least sixty days, or however long we feel it is necessary, but we want to provide an opportunity once more for thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to come to Washington, reminiscent of the March in 1963 ... we are here because we endorse the demands of the poor people who have been here all of these weeks trying to get Congress to move” (page 678). The Poor People’s Campaign broadened the message of civil rights to one of social justice involving all of the nation’s poor (McKnight, 1998, page 4). The radicalism that King displayed in outlining the Poor People’s Campaign was grounded in a realization that President Johnson and the US Congress would always choose “guns over butter” and that the nation’s leaders were more interested in a “war against the poor” as opposed to a “war against poverty” (McKnight, 1998, page 14). This drove King to seek alternatives to the SMP and state actors who never had the political will to redistribute the resources of the nation towards the broad arc of social justice. Conclusion In the years since his assassination, the economic injustice, rampant militarism, and widespread materialism that Dr King denounced in the 1960s have deepened. Neoliberal economic restructuring has increased the potency of the SMP to remake space for greater and more intense capital accumulation. Coupled with the retreat of the state from basic social service provisions and the elimination of many government programs that were focused on the amelioration of poverty and inequality, we find ourselves in contemporary crisis. The root of this crisis is found in the SMP’s engagement with the US civil rights struggle and efforts to manage race and class conflict during the 1950s and 1960s. As a consequence the same forces that aligned to weaken and transform the US civil rights struggle continue to reorient social justice movements towards their own ends. By better grasping King’s struggle and political program we have the opportunity to more fully engage in a contemporary political project that will attain meaningful social justice goals. Pulido (2002) points out that a major impediment to social justice organizing is race and class conflicts that tend to divide peoples with common interests from working together. Through the organization of his Poor People’s Campaign, Dr King attempted to lead a multiracial, multiclass coalition that would fundamentally reorganize the SMP. Perhaps more importantly his efforts were grounded in an analysis that connected poverty in the US with broader US colonial projects in Southeast Asia. King links the violence against persons of color through the War in Vietnam with the war on the ghetto that was simultaneously exposing persons of color to premature death in the US. In the wake of the contemporary War on Terror such an analysis holds potent ramifications for European and US societies which have increased investments in the military–industrial complex while cutting funding in antipoverty programs, education, and health services. The response of state actors to the growing race and class contradictions in US society in the 1950s and 1960s further illustrates the way the SMP attempts to manage those conflicts


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toward its own end. As the civil rights struggle matured and expanded geographically from the US South to Northern cities, state actors took a more direct role in shaping and coopting civil rights rhetoric for the state benefit. As a consequence King’s political engagement with state actors changed. His rhetoric and political activities were more adversarial and he focused intently on transforming state institutions to reject the rampant militarism and materialism that dominated the era. In the midst of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement, King’s late project offers a prescient and relevant perspective. Geographic engagements with King and his relationship to the SMP can facilitate in contemporary understandings of broader social justice movements. Acknowledgments. I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided timely and thoughtful feedback on this manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the comments of Melanie Barron and Neil Conner who read previous drafts of this manuscript. Finally, I am indebted to Sarah Eichler Inwood. Omissions are entirely my own. References Alderman D, Kingsbury P, Dwyer O 2013, “Re-examining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: toward an empathetic pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement” The Professional Geographer 65 171–186 Baldwin A 2012, “Whiteness and futurity: towards a research agenda” Progress in Human Geography 36 172–187 Bell D, 1995 “Serving two masters: integration ideals and client interests in school desegregation litigation”, in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement Eds K Crenshaw, N Gotanda, G Peller, K Thomas (The New Press, New York) Blackmon D, 2008 Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor Books, New York) Bonnett A, 1997 “Geography, ‘race’ and whiteness: invisible traditions and current challenges” Area 29 193–199 Branch T, 2006 At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–1968 (Simon and Schuester, New York) Brenner N 2001, “Henri Lefebvre in contexts: an introduction” Antipode 33 763–768 Brenner N, 2004 New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Brenner N, Elden S, 2009, “Henri Lefebvre on state, space, territory” International Political Sociology 3 353–377 Correia D, 2008, “Rousers of the rabble in the New Mexico Land Grant War: La Alianza Federal De Mercedes and the violence of the state” Antipode 40 561–583 Du Bois W E B, 2001 The Negro (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA) Dudziak M, 1988, “Desegregation as a cold war imperative”, in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge Eds R Delgado, J Stefancic (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA) pp 106–117 Dudziak M, 2000 Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) Dyson M 2004 Michael Eric Dyson Reader, (Civitas Books, New York) Elden S, 2004 Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (Continuum, New York) Gregory D 1994 Geographical Imaginations (Blackwell, Oxford) Jackson T 2007 From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr.,and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Pennsylvania University Press, Philadelphia, PA) Jennings M, Razook N 2000, “United States v. Morrison: where the Commerce Clause meets civil rights and reasonable minds part ways: a point and counterpoint from a constitutional and social perspective” New England Law Review 35 23–67 Johnson, L 1965 “Special message to the Congress: The American promise”, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Volume I (Government Printing Office, Washington, DC) http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu

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