Martin Luther King, Jr., Was A Democratic Socialist

I was prompted to write this post by Matthew Yglesias's post from Martin Luther King Day.

"[A. Philip] Randolph, of course, continued as a major leader in the struggle until his death in 1979. When I became deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties, I was a conscious Randolphite, dedicated to the program of an integrated class struggle against both exploitation and racism. And when I began to work with Martin Luther King, Jr., I discovered that he, too, had much the same view. After the first time that we were able to talk together at length - which was over several days in Los Angeles in 1960 when we were hiding him in a hotel room so that the representatives of the various Democratic presidental candidates could not pester him for endorsements - I concluded that he was a democratic socialist, like Randolph.

It did not even occur to me to ask King to proclaim publicly those beliefs since I understood he had troubles enough without adding to them an ideological commitment, which would be inevitably misunderstood. Bit I was delight when Bearing the Cross, David Garrow's brilliant biography of King, recently documented the truth of my conviction about him, revealed that King actually called himself a democratic socialist in private conversation." -- Michal Harrington, The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography, Henry Holt and Company (1988): 41-42.

For me, democratic socialism was, for many decades in the United States, whatever Michael Harrington said it was. The Socialist International is also an authoritative source for much of this time.