In the last months of 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a series of five lectures that stand as his final testament on racism, poverty, and war. Later published as The Trumpet of Conscience, the lectures included King’s urgent call for a global movement for justice:
But we do not have much time. The revolutionary spirit is already world-wide. If the anger of the peoples of the world at the injustice of things is to be channeled into a revolution of love and creativity, we must begin now to work, urgently, with all the peoples, to shape a new world.
That impassioned plea serves now as the epigraph to To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., a new collection edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry, and featuring over a dozen original essays from the likes of Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Cornel West.
The book is an effort to present a full analysis of King’s thinking from the perspectives of political philosophy, political theory, and the history of political thought, fields that have thus far largely failed to recognize King’s contributions. Indeed, though King stands as one of America’s most revered political figures, he has been generously honored but not adequately studied, for a variety of reasons that Shelby and Terry consider in their introduction to the volume. The hope they share with their contributors—who represent different approaches to the history of political thought and political theorizing, and who present differing interpretations of King—is to help readers recognize in King not just a leader to be revered but also an important and challenging thinker whose ideas remain relevant and have surprising implications for public political debate.
Given the crises of our own political and intellectual moment, the volume is imbued with the very sense of urgency that King expressed in those lectures of 1967. Here are Shelby and Terry, who allude to James Baldwin’s 1961 Harper’s piece on “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” in assessing our own path forward:
Not even a decade after the first African American president of the United States installed a bust of King in the Oval Office, our landscape has been dominated by insurgent social movements and urban riots, racist invective and ethno-nationalism, intractable inequality and civic distrust, and a loss of faith in political institutions and, possibly, in democracy itself. In a way reminiscent and resonant with the later years of King’s life, we find ourselves and our students more frequently asking difficult and unsettling questions about what political morality and justice demand of us. On campus, battles over how or whether to forge community, and over the stance we should take toward those persons and ideas with which we have profound disagreements, are waged with passion and often contempt. So, too, are those controversies regarding the role of philosophical reflection on and in politics, and the place of academics and intellectuals within the muck and mire of public debate. Our suggestion is that now, perhaps especially, with all that is at stake, a turn to King and his efforts in public philosophy can provide us with a more robust ethical vocabulary, a smarter set of judgments, a more expansive political imagination, and a richer set of traditions to help navigate our own “dangerous road.”
In this year of the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, we still and again face the need to shape a new world.
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Brandon Terry edited a forthcoming Boston Review forum, Fifty Years Since MLK, featuring contributions from Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Andrew Douglas, Jeanne Theoharis, Elizabeth Hinton, and Bernard E. Harcourt; read Terry’s introductory essay on the intellectual and political significance of King here.
