The horrific shooting death of Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 presented me with another past is prologue moment. The 37-year-old mother of three children was shot in the head by an ICE agent in Minneapolis who Trump administration officials say was justified, despite the evidence on video.
On March 25, 1965, Viola Liuzzo, the mother of five children, was assassinated by Klansmen near Selma, Alabama. She was 39 and had journeyed to the state from Detroit to participate in the march from Selma to Montgomery, when Klan members gunned her down as she chauffeured a protester down the highway.
Of course, any memory of Ms. Liuzzo recalls Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a far more prominent martyr of the Civil Rights movement. Next week, the nation, if not the world, will commemorate the 97th birthday of the great leader, and the times we are currently enduring are very similar to the 1960s, much of it fomented by the illegalities of the Trump administration. It goes without saying that Dr. King would be outraged by the senseless killing of Ms. Good, as he was about the countless number of activists slain during the rallies and demonstrations.
On a more positive note, we recall Dr. King’s socialist and democratic socialist tendencies that began while he was a student at the Boston University School of Theology. Perhaps he would not be overjoyed by Zohran Mamdani’s success here in New York City, but I doubt if he’d be dismissive and denounce it. In the last book he wrote, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” “Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”
While this may be not exactly “tax the rich” it hews close to the economic and ideological outlook that Dr. King was gradually accepting. “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” were words he announced during one of his most famous speeches in 1967 at Riverside Church.
A year later, shortly before his death, during an interview with The New York Times, describing his association and work with the Student Nonviolent Leadership Conference (SCLC), he said “In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.”
So, in effect, from his early years in college to the latter stages of his evolving political vision, Dr. King had strong hints of socialism, and we can only speculate how this may have eventuated had he lived beyond his fortieth year.