How did MLK Jr. Become a Socialist?

Almost everyone left of center now understands that Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical than the milquetoast, “I Have a Dream”-only version many Americans grew up with.

MLK Jr. was a political radical who spent his final years opposing militarism, denouncing capitalism, and demanding a massive economic redistribution. That’s why Zohran Mamdani’s go-to definition of socialism has been to quote King: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

And yet, even many of the most sympathetic “radical King” accounts still cling to a familiar American fairy tale: the Great Man who simply had it in him—born with moral courage, hatched fully formed, and then leading history forward by sheer force of charisma.

That story is wrong in a specific way that matters for today’s left. King’s radicalism wasn’t a private attribute. It was the outcome of apprenticeship inside an organized tradition—a network of socialists, labor radicals, and movement educators who did the unglamorous work of training leaders, building institutions, writing drafts, running logistics, teaching strategy, and connecting civil rights demands to bread-and-butter class politics.

It’s unfortunate that this institutional legacy has been scrubbed out so successfully that people might end up thinking King invented his own politics in isolation. In reality, he came up inside a web of socialist organizers and “movement schools” that treated racial justice and economic justice as inseparable—and, crucially, treated organizing as a craft you could teach.

Part of what makes the erasure so effective is an accompanying myth: that early American socialists—especially those associated with the old Socialist Party—“ignored race,” full stop, and therefore couldn’t possibly have helped seed the Black freedom struggle’s mass politics. There’s a kernel of truth there (the history includes shameful racism and exclusion), but it’s also a caricature that turns a complex tradition into a straw man—and, conveniently, makes it easier to pretend that socialism and antiracism only meet in the 1960s as a kind of happy accident. In reality, the US Socialist movement—including former racists like Victor Berger— after 1917 forcefully attacked white supremacy and empire rather than accommodating them, establishing an organized legacy that went on to play a central role in MLK Jr.’s politics.

This isn’t an argument for diminishing King’s heroism or agency. King was extraordinary. But if we care about the kind of politics he practiced—mass ...