At the risk of shoehorning every anniversary or holiday into a Debs Dispatch post, I thought I’d bring you an excerpt in honor of MLK’s death anniversary tomorrow. It’s taken from Sylvie Laurent’s fascinating book King and the Other America, which looks at the oft-forgotten Poor People’s Movement and the roots of King’s radical thought. (Jacobin ran an interview with Laurent last year that you can read here.)
King called Benjamin Mays, his teacher at Morehouse College in the 1940s, his “spiritual and intellectual mentor.” The elder minister in turn anointed King his "spiritual son” and delivered the benediction at the March on Washington. It turns out that Mays, as a young man, venerated none other than Eugene V. Debs.
Here’s Laurent:
Mays, an influential figure and a role model for many black Atlantans, had long appreciated Marxists’ increased attention to organizing African American workers and to theorizing about the path to black liberation. Though he bemoaned communist atheism, May publicly praised Eugene Debs, whom he credits for his personal dedication to justice:
Benjamin Mays
“I’m deeply impressed with the words of Eugene Debs writing while a prisoner in a federal prison in Atlanta. These are the words, “As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a man in jail, I’m not free." Eugene Debs inspired me greatly. To me, Eugene Debs has shaped my sensitivity for the poor, the diseased and those who have given their lives for those sick and poor, the great and the small, the high and the law.”
A minor correction: Debs’s “lower class” quote appeared in his September 1918 “Statement to the Court,” not during his time behind bars.
But put the pedantry aside: the point is, Debs’s influence, near the end of his life and after his death, wound its way into an increasingly radical and increasingly mass-oriented black politics that would eventually bring down Jim Crow. As late as the 1960s, Martin Luther King’s “spiritual mentor” was still quoting Eugene V. Debs.
