Martin Luther King Jr.'s principled nonviolent stand and rejection of Che Guevara's guerrilla warfare

"Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1964

Martin Luther King Jr. marching in Memphis, Tennessee., March 28, 1968.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born 94 years ago tomorrow, on January 15, 1929 and assassinated 55 years ago this year on April 4, 1968. On the eve of his death, he gave a prophetic speech that was also a call to nonviolent action and foreshadowing of his own death hours later. Nevertheless, until the very end, Reverend King advocated for nonviolence, noncooperation and dialogue as instruments to push for positive change. 

"We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, 'God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.' And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread."

No one controlled Martin Luther King Jr. and it bothered many 
Reverend King's nonviolent posture was not convenient for those who wanted bloody chaos and violence in the United States.

The world was well aware of the FBI’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. on the orders of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement, but what was only discovered decades later was that a campaign was waged against Martin Luther King Jr. by the Soviet Intelligence agency known as the KGB.

In 1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow. The Russian intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive. In the groundbreaking book, The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details were obtained from The Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokely Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States.

KGB carried out active measures campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.

KGB Campaign to discredit MLK
Pages 237 and 238 of The Sword and the Shield book, partially excerpted below, detail elements of the campaign waged by Soviet intelligence and the active measures arrayed against the civil rights leader:

In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration.

Urban guerilla warfare
Prior to King's death the attempt to ignite urban guerrilla warfare was already underway. The Black Panther Party was founded on October 15, 1966 in Oakland, California and was heavily influenced by Robert F. Williams, a black militant nationalist who fled to Cuba in 1961 and was still there in 1966. Members of the Black Panther Party were also reading Che Guevara's books on Guerrilla Warfare and applying it on the streets of America to deadly effect.  The Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee on November 1, 1967 made public these statistics.

The call for guerrilla warfare in the streets of American cities generated an escalation in violence, lives lost, injuries, and hundreds of millions in material losses in an effort to overthrow the United States government with a violent revolution. The Central Intelligence Agency issued a report "DISSIDENT ACTIVITY: January 1966 through January 1973" that was approved for release on June 19, 2003 that documents the situation in 1967 explaining that "[a]lthough severe racial rioting had occurred in U.S. cities in previous summers, it never had been as widespread or as intense as it became in 1967. In the two cities hardest hit, Newark (26 dead) and Detroit (43 dead), conditions of near-insurrection developed in ghetto areas, and police and National Guardsmen responded with volleys of automatic weapons fire."

KGB wanted to replace MLK Jr. with Stokely Carmichael

Martin Luther King Jr. rejected guerrilla warfare and Che Guevara

Martin Luther King Jr. opposed this approach and advocated for nonviolent, radical change. His nonviolent stance was challenged in 1967 by a black power movement that, rather than accelerating change in areas of social and economic justice, brought it to a halt through political violence. Reverend King cautioned black activists not to follow in the footsteps of Castro and Guevara:

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

These words are as true today as they were over a half-century ago. Reverend King's legacy continues to inspire activists worldwide. This Baptist minister who risked everything for the freedom of all African Americans and the redemption of the United States by fulfilling the creed that all men are created equal. 

 

2023 Beloved Community Global Summit, with Dr. Bernice A. King, CEO of @TheKingCenter. #BelovedCommunityMindset #TransformUnjustSystems #MLKDay https://t.co/09HrCKtLnf

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) January 12, 2023

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s radicalism and his rejection of revolutionary violence

50 years later

"All criticism is not intolerance. I have criticized the revolutionary because I have felt for him. He has the same right to hold me to be in error as I believe him to be in error." - Mohandas Gandhi 2/12/1925

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967) 




Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated fifty years ago on April 4, 1968 by a racist white southerner who hated African Americans. Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated seventy years ago on January 30, 1948 by a Hindu nationalist driven by hatred, who rejected the Indian non-violent leaders teachings.  In both the assassinations of Gandhi and of King there is evidence of a conspiracy by several actors.  

Martin Luther King Jr. had a radical critique of American society, but despite his own claims at times, was not a revolutionary. He repeatedly challenged the United States to live up to its own aspired ideals and sought through nonviolent action and democratic norms, reforms to end segregation and ensure voting rights for African Americans.  Reverend King's political outlook could best be described as falling within what is called Christian Democracy. This political school occupies the center with parties on the center left and the center right, but like Reverend King are based on a Christian view of humanity in which "every individual is considered unique and must be treated with dignity."  In his April 4, 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam gave full expression to this outlook:

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "

Mohandas Gandhi, who greatly influenced King, also spoke of social responsibility and trusteeship. Gandhi, a self-described socialist, was not an enthusiastic proponent of an expanded social-welfare state as commonly understood arguing: 

"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. [...] What I would personally prefer would be not centralization of power in the hands of the State, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the State. However, if it is unavoidable, I would support a minimum of State-ownership."

Furthermore the critique made by both King and Gandhi of a "thing-oriented" society or the state as a "soulless machine" looks to the person or the individual not an economic mechanism  or economic class. The focus is on the human person and polices that recognize and respect the uniqueness of each human being and their dignity. The Konrad Adeneur Foundation in their publication Christian Democracy: Principles and Policy Making offers a vision of this made reality in what is known as the social market economy.

"[T]he principle of  solidarity  is first and foremost an  aspect of human behaviour that arises from the idea of a common humanity and altruism. The idea of solidarity obliges the strong to stand up for the weak. Solidarity comes to play in a social market economy in situations where individuals are temporarily unable  to participate in the workforce.  this may apply, in  particular, to those who are sick, pregnant woman,  the old and the unemployed.  In order to do justice to its socio-political responsibilities – while also meeting other responsibilities of the state including the  guaranteeing of internal and external security, the  provision of education, and the development of infrastructure – the state imposes taxes on its citizens  along with other social contributions dependent upon  the individual’s wage or other sources of income."

This is a departure from a strict market economy, focused on individuals as economic units and one that is arrived at through a process of reforms, not revolution.

This is in stark contrast to what actual revolutionaries in the United States were saying and doing at the same time as King organized in the 1960s and in India were saying and doing in the 1940s as Gandhi continued the nonviolent push for independence. Seeking to harness hatred to violently overthrow the existing power structure through the use of armed violence and embracing totalitarian ideologies.

Hindu nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose allied with Nazis against British

Subhash Chandra Bose who was born in 1897 was an Indian nationalist leader who rejected Gandhi's nonviolent approach. He advocated an armed struggle against British imperialism, and allied with Nazi, Germany and Imperial Japan in 1941 to mobilize 60,000 Indian troops to fight against the British in India. The nationalist leader met with Hitler and other high ranking Nazis in Germany between 1941 and 1943. Chandra Bose exalted violence and bloodshed: "India is calling. Blood is calling to blood. Get up, we have no time to lose. Take up your arms! we shall carve our way through the enemy's ranks, or if God wills, we shall die a martyr's death. And in our last sleep we shall kiss the road that will bring our Army to Delhi." The defeat of the Axis powers meant that this violent approach failed and Gandhi's steadfast nonviolent posture made independence possible in 1948.

Stokely Carmichael with Che Guevara banner in the background

In the case of the United States, Stokely Carmichael who had derisively called the 1963 March on Washington, a "middle class picnic" emerged from the Civil Rights movement and rejected King's nonviolent approach. It is worth reviewing his evolution from an activist to a revolutionary.

Stokely Carmichael, born in 1941, attended the select Bronx High School of Science in New York City in the later 1950s, became friends with the son of Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis and became active in socialist youth politics. Carmichael joined a Marxist discussion group and participated in demonstrations against the House Committee on Un-American Activities that focused on communist subversion in the United States.

Carmichael joined the emerging Civil Rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who advocated nonviolent resistance as a method to achieve profound change. Carmichael enrolled in Howard University and joined "the school's Non-Violent Action Group, a civil-rights organization. In 1961 he participated in a number of anti-segregation initiatives in the Deep South, including "freedom rides" organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Carmichael graduated from Howard University in 1964, with a degree in philosophy. Two years later he replaced John Lewis as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In 1967 Carmichael was interviewed by Mario Menendez, editor of Sucesos, a Mexican magazine, while he was staying in Havana, Cuba attending the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), a communist alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS) and made claims about the SNCC that others would reject:

  "Now, we used the word nonviolent because at that time the central figure in the struggle to defend the black race was no one less than Martin Luther King and anyone who resorted to violence was considered a traitor. Consequently we resolved to use the word nonviolent. However we knew that our struggle would end up in violence, that it was only necessary to wait for the right time. So we accepted this name for the grouping and coordinated activities from city to city, wherever we could engage in nonviolent demonstrations."

Stokely Carmichael told an audience in Havana in 1967: ''We are moving toward guerrilla warfare in the United States. We are going to develop urban guerrilla warfare and we are going to beat them in this field because there is one thing the imperialists do not have: their men don't want to fight, they don't want to fight what they call guerilla warfare, which is really hand-to-hand combat." 

During his tenure as SNCC chairman, Carmichael urged African Americans to engage in urban guerrilla warfare against the United States. He stepped down from the position of chairman in May of 1967. Carmichael went on to have a leadership position in the Black Panthers. He believed that, "[u]rban guerrilla warfare is the only means by which we can win in the United States because they cannot use bombs against us, since we are inside the country. They will have to fight us in hand-to-hand combat and we will defeat them." 

On February 17, 1968 H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael addressed the Oakland Auditorium. Carmichael made the case for armed insurrection  stating that, "We have to recognize the major enemy is the honky and his institutions of racism." ... "Whenever anyone prepares for revolutionary warfare you concentrate on the major enemy." ... "We will not fight each other. There will be no fights in the black community among black people. There will just be people who will be offed." ... "We must first develop an undying love for our people ... an undying love as is personified in brother Huey P. Newton ... If we do not do that, we will be wiped out."

One day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Stokely Carmichael repeated his call for an armed uprising to overthrow the government of the United States. Below are excerpts of the press conference where he spoke out.
 

Diane Nash, a great pioneer of nonviolence from the sit-ins to the Selma march, rejected nonviolence and took up with the call of Black Power. Nash described her reasoning:

"If we've done all this through nonviolence, think what we could do if we were just willing to be urban guerrillas and knock over a few banks. [...] "Of course, ten years later I looked up and I hadn't knocked over any banks and I hadn't been a guerilla. I hadn't even been to the rifle range. But I had withdrawn from this painful, creative engagement with nonviolence and democracy behind a big smokescreen of noise."

In addition to deactivating serious activists the lure of violence and urban guerrilla warfare would exact a terrible cost.  

KGB carried out active measures campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.

No one controlled Martin Luther King Jr. and it bothered many 
Reverend King's nonviolent posture was not convenient for those who wanted bloody chaos and violence in the United States.

The world has been made well aware of the FBI’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. on the orders of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement, but what was only learned decades later was that a campaign had been waged against Martin Luther King Jr. by the Soviet Intelligence agency known as the KGB.

In 1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow. The Russian intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive. In the groundbreaking book, The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details were obtained from The Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokely Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States. 

Fifty years later Russian trolls over social media seek to polarize an already deep racial divide in the United States.  Meanwhile the King family following Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy continues to strive for unity in the beloved community.

This Wed, April 4...50 years since #MLK was assassinated.

Next Mon, April 9...50 years since his funeral procession.

Join us April 9 as we march the path of the procession for our: #MarchForHumanity
12pm EST, #Atlanta

Register: https://t.co/Hdyewm5orI #MLK50Forward #MLK pic.twitter.com/sB9Al4XylE

— The King Center (@TheKingCenter) April 2, 2018

Martin Luther King Jr.'s principled nonviolent stand and rejection of Che Guevara's guerrilla warfare

"Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1964

 Martin Luther King Jr. marching in Memphis, Tennessee., March 28, 1968.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born 89 years ago today on January 15, 1929 and assassinated 50 years ago this year on April 4, 1968. On the eve of his death he gave a prophetic speech that was also a call to nonviolent action and foreshadowing of his own death hours later. Nevertheless, until the very end Reverend King advocated for nonviolence, noncooperation and dialogue as instruments to push for positive change.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say,

"God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread.

No one controlled Martin Luther King Jr. and it bothered many 
Reverend King's nonviolent posture was not convenient for those who wanted bloody chaos and violence in the United States.

The world has been made well aware of the FBI’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. on the orders of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement, but what was only learned decades later was that a campaign had been waged against Martin Luther King Jr. by the Soviet Intelligence agency known as the KGB.

In 1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow. The Russian intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive. In the groundbreaking book, The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details were obtained from The Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokely Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States.

KGB carried out active measures campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.

 KGB Campaign to discredit MLK
Pages 237 and 238 of The Sword and the Shield book, partially excerpted below, detail elements of the campaign waged by Soviet intelligence and the active measures arrayed against the civil rights leader:

In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration.

Urban guerilla warfare
Prior to King's death the attempt to ignite urban guerrilla warfare was already underway. The Black Panther Party was founded on October 15, 1966 in Oakland, California and was heavily influenced by Robert F. Williams, a black militant nationalist who fled to Cuba in 1961 and was still there in 1966. Members of the Black Panther Party were also reading Che Guevara's books on Guerrilla Warfare and applying it on the streets of America to deadly effect.  The Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee on November 1, 1967 made public these statistics.

The call for guerrilla warfare in the streets of American cities generated an escalation in violence, lives lost, injuries, and hundreds of millions in material losses in an effort to overthrow the United States government with a violent revolution. The Central Intelligence Agency issued a report "DISSIDENT ACTIVITY: January 1966 through January 1973" that was approved for release on June 19, 2003 that documents the situation in 1967 explaining that "[a]lthough severe racial rioting had occurred in U.S. cities in previous summers, it never had been as widespread or as intense as it became in 1967. In the two cities hardest hit, Newark (26 dead) and Detroit (43 dead), conditions of near-insurrection developed in ghetto areas, and police and National Guardsmen responded with volleys of automatic weapons fire."

KGB wanted to replace MLK Jr. with Stokely Carmichael

Martin Luther King Jr. rejected guerrilla warfare and Che Guevara
Martin Luther King Jr. rejected this approach and was a voice for radical, but nonviolent change.  In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. found his nonviolent posture challenged by a black power movement that instead of accelerating change in areas of social and economic justice brought it to a halt through their political violence. Reverend King warned black activists not to take the way of Castro and Guevara:

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

These words remain as true today as when he uttered them a half century ago. Reverend King's legacy continues to inspire activists from around the world. This Baptist minister who risked all for the freedom of all African Americans and the redemption of the United States through the fulfillment of its creed that all men are created equal. 

Mugshot of Martin Luther King Jr. taken in 1963 in Birmingham Alabama