Notes on King’s “The Ethical Demands for Integration” (speech delivered in Nashville, December 1963)

“The nonviolent technique is double-barreled: not only has the Negro developed a new image of himself employing its practices, but it has also thwarted the growth of bitterness. In a very large measure, nonviolence has helped to diminish long-repressed feelings of anger and frustration. In the course of respecting the discipline of the nonviolent way, the Negro has learned that he must respect the adversary who inflicts the system upon him and he develops the capacity to hate segregation but love the segregationist. He learns in the midst of his determined efforts to destroy the system that has shackled him so long, that a commitment to nonviolence demands that he respect the personhood of his opponent. Thus, nonviolence exalts the personality of the segregator as well as the segregated. The common denominator of the flux of social change in the South is the growing awareness on the part of the respective opponents that mutually they confront the eternality of the basic worth of every member of the human family.”

Recalling my notes on Seneca’s version of “reason” in On Anger, here King seems to be channeling that discussion, but where Seneca remained stuck in a purely personal morality, King creates a precise ethical and political formulation in this speech.

Using my interpretation of Seneca’s framework for how reason works in dealing with anger:

1. First, a technique is activated: Nonviolence is explicitly a “technique”, a “practice”, a “discipline” that operates like Seneca’s “delay” to “diminish the long-repressed feelings of anger and frustration.”

2. Second, a value is activated in the space made possible by the technique: The technique makes room for a value — love, brotherhood, mutuality — “a commitment to nonviolence demands that he respect the personhood of his opponent.”

3. Third, the value guides the ensuing action.

If one needs the most succinct expression of this, we can find it in Stride Toward Freedom (reproduced as “An Experiment in Love” in A Testament of Hope):

Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal. (17)

There is much here that is shared with Seneca’s concept of activating reason in the face of moral anger (On Anger, II.6-10). The ethical move for both is to activate humanity, friendship, brotherhood as the values necessary to manage the conflict. They both marshal techniques and practices that must be trained and learned over time to allow the values to take hold and guide one’s response. (See King’s discussion in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” on nonviolent direct action as a “a series of workshops” that enact a formal “process of self-purification”.)

Seneca’s concept of “delay” keeps his essay firmly entrenched and blocked within the personal ethical realm. I believe that the reason for this is political and cultural. Seneca’s immediate addressees are political and cultural elites. Their sense of “being wronged” generally comes from the slights and transgressions that are part of negotiating a professional career in the Roman Empire. His examples emphasize withholding punishment from an out of line servant or a general treating his troops inappropriately or not going overboard in punishing a crime or an emperor showing clemency. While he identifies “wickedness” as the moral enemy and counsels “forgiveness” as the right response, the result is generally the preservation of the status quo — nobody’s status is diminished; positions don’t change. Seneca’s Stoicism, in this sense, is fundamentally conservative.

How does King escape this Stoic trap? His movements are at least twofold:

1. King starts from long-term, sustained injustice as a fact — as an originating condition of his political practice and philosophy. This makes all the difference and makes him into a true political philosopher to be reckoned with (See To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.). This starting point includes a deep understanding of the history and mechanisms of the injustice, especially their long-term psychological effects on the individuals subject to those injustices. These effects — and therefore the mechanisms of power, culture and policy — must be undone in order to move forward.

2. As he so often did, he firmly takes over white traditions of conscience, justice, freedom and democracy and holds the dominant culture accountable to its own values. He does so from the other side of the equation — as an “organic intellectual” (Cornel West) coming from and speaking for the disposed and truly wronged. In doing so, he returns the ethical from the purely personal to the political without sacrificing personal responsibility as the foundation of a well-functioning and just society.

In “Ethical Demands,” he invokes the Enlightenment legacy of creating political institutions that are accountable to broad human fulfillment and positive liberties — values in this speech encompassed by his term “Integration.”

Explicitly pulling forward the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and even Kant, he activates the values and techniques of conscience and democracy within the Civil Rights Movement as an American undertaking.

Quoting Douglass re-reading the Constitution:

“It’s language is, ‘We the people’; not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people… we the human inhabitants; and if Negroes are people they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established.”

Emphasizing the commitment to positive liberties spelled out in those Enlightenment documents, King asks, “What Is Freedom?” It is threefold:

1. “The capacity to deliberate and weigh alternatives.”

2. This “freedom expresses itself in decisions.” If those affected are not involved in the decision-making about them, how can any law or policy be “just”?

3. “A third expression of freedom is responsibility”. Here the Example of Socrates is clear. “This is the obligation of the person to respond if he is questioned about his decisions. No one else can respond for him. He alone must respond, for his acts are determined by the centered totality of his being.”

Like Socrates’ interlocutors, it is always a question of endurance and the ability to stick with it, and, like Simmias and Cebes, “speak for yourselves” as you make the mutual commitment to the dialog and deliberation about right actions — an ability that is founded in the care of oneself.

For King, it is a commitment to the techniques of democracy — collective decision-making through the capacity to “deliberate, decide and respond.”

The techniques must be cultivated and activated by a shift in values — from humans as “means” to “ends” (quoting Kant), from desegregation as a legal formality (and necessity) to “integration” as the nonsacrificeable positive liberties — “life-quality freedom” (See Danielle Allen’s essay in To Shape a New World). But above all it requires adoption of values as the basis for human interaction — “‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.”

Without this activation/substitution of values, the techniques for dealing with wrongdoing — delay, nonviolence — are in danger of being hollowed out, of falling short.

Desegregation then is not enough for it only travels a part of the distance. It vouchsafes the lack of restriction against one’s freedom but it does not prohibit the blocking of his total capacity…. Integration demands that we recognize that a denial of freedom is a denial of life itself.