Antiracist Politics in A Neoliberal World

Many of the Black social gospel activists who knew King personally did not have to wait until the late 1980s to appreciate the radical King. James Bevel, Vincent Harding, Rosemarie Harding, Jesse Jackson, Bernard Lafayette, James Lawson, John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, C. T. Vivian, and Andrew Young were keenly aware of King’s anti-imperialism, anti-militarism, postcolonialism, and democratic socialism. They were grounded especially in King’s anti-racist postcolonialism, expounding it before and after civil rights liberalism became a passé topic. This commitment united these figures as disciples of King even when “radicalism” otherwise did not. Andrew Young was not radical in any other sense of the term. Otherwise he would not have achieved immense success in electoral politics, diplomacy, and corporate fundraising. The anti-racist postcolonialism that Young, Jackson, and Lewis shared with King gave them a different view of the world than the regnant frameworks of Cold War militarism and U.S. American exceptionalism. It did not fit neoliberalism either—the other regnant worldview framework of the past half-century. But Young, Jackson, and Lewis—especially Young—had too much at stake in corporate capitalism to contend against it.