Politicians, mostly on the Left, love to misappropriate Martin Luther King Jr.’s promise that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Among the many problems with a flippant deployment of this line is that it gives the sense that social change happens through some disembodied force akin to evolution.
There are philosophical foundations to this worldview. If you read enough Hegel or absorb the teachings of Marx, who tried to channel Hegel, you will find a sense of almost predestination. It’s not predestination exactly, but it does portray societal change as something largely independent of the people involved.
It’s a particularly cruel irony coming from those who would pay tribute to King. It implies that without his efforts and sacrifice, things would have ended up the same.
Conservatives seeking to praise King make the opposite error. They make him out to be a “great man,” the sort of unique individual who with courage, persistence, and self-sacrifice changes history almost entirely on his own.
Neither story is totally wrong. But both miss a crucial, perhaps the crucial, thing about King’s civil rights work.
The civil rights movement was not a movement of history or of a few great men. It was a movement of institutions. Churches, organizations of pastors, universities, and countless other entities brought individuals together for common action aimed at a higher good and strengthened the individuals involved through norms and practices that imbued virtues.
Once you realize the central nature of institutions, particularly churches, to the civil rights movement, you have to wonder whether this could happen today. These days, particularly when compared to the 1960s, Americans are going through a “crisis of dissolution” as Yuval Levin puts it in his important new book, A Time to Build.
Americans have lost trust in the most important institutions, including churches, governments, media, and universities. Levin deftly and concisely explores the many reasons for the dissolution, including the sins of the institutions and their exploitation by those seeking to use them as platforms rather than formative associations.
Levin also explores a more fundamental cause for the dissolution: Americans have always had a natural suspicion of institutions. “Our popular culture has its roots in a dissenting Protestantism,” Levin notes, “that sought a direct connection to the divine and rejected as inauthentic or illegitimate most forms of institutional mediation.”
We therefore try to tell stories about ourselves that are fundamentally false because they zoom in to the individual level or zoom out to the societal level. Thus, we miss where the universe bending happens: in our institutions.
“When progressives tell the American story,” Levin notes, “they often speak in terms of mass social movements crashing as waves upon our shores — notable particularly for their lack of institutional form.”
The New York Times today has a good antidote to that disembodied view of the civil rights movement. It’s a lively profile of one of King’s compatriots, Ella Baker.
“Her political activism began in Harlem in the 1930s,” the New York Times notes. “She worked with the cooperative movement during the Great Depression.”
The cooperative movement, also known as the self-help cooperative movement, was an incredible story about human resilience and American ingenuity. It is tied up historically with communism, but it was also a perfect encapsulation of American institutionalism.
The co-ops were institutions that brought people together, created rules and systems that not only multiplied the power of individuals but also reinforced virtues and work ethics.
Here’s a description from one history:
“At the cooperative in Santa Monica, members worked at local dairies for milk and cheese. They had an arrangement with the College of Agriculture at UCLA to tend the trees at UCLA’s experimental farm in exchange for fruit. The Huntington Park Cooperative had vegetable gardens on vacant land, harvesting more than 27,000 pounds of fresh produce in just one quarter of 1936. Typically, cooperatives were able to find vacant buildings to use at no charge for meeting places, to store their bartered goods, and to conduct business.”
These were little platoons that organized people together to do what could not be done by either the whole (the economy or the central government) or the individual. (Of course, many of the loudest voices involved with these cooperatives tried to abstract from the actual institutions and turn them into an argument for national or global communism.)
Read through the New York Times’s piece on Baker’s work, and you see institution after institution. She played a top role in many local branches of the NAACP. She worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
These were all organizations that sought to connect people engaged in the same struggle and to establish norms and methods, such as nonviolence, for carrying out the struggle. And of course, these institutions provided the philosophical underpinnings (Christian teaching, largely) for both the ends they sought and the means they preached.
Barbara Ransby, the historian who wrote the New York Times piece on Baker, has one particularly incisive paragraph:
“‘Strong people don’t need a strong leader,’ she declared, warning activists to eschew messiahs and saviors and build local leaders by the thousands. ‘Martin didn’t make the movement,’ she said. Rather, ‘the movement made Martin.'”
As Levin would put it, great institutions “form us” if we “pour ourselves into them.”
Individuals acting through and upon institutions, and likewise letting those institutions act through and upon them, is what changes history for the better. That’s why Levin’s message is so important — this is a time to rebuild our institutions.
