The 1992 rebellions of Los Angeles introduced the world to a slogan: “no justice, no peace.” It originated some years earlier, possibly during protests against the murder of Michael Griffith by a white racist mob in Howard Beach, Queens, and has been repeated since at every demonstration against police violence.
This popular slogan, however, is quite obviously in tension with the voices of self-appointed leaders and media representatives who insist that protests must remain “peaceful.” The charming nickname assigned to them by other protestors, the “peace police,” is revealing of this tension.
The recent proclamation of George W. Bush, to take one especially striking example, also sets out a perspective on justice and peace, which is intended to reconcile the two. He says that “lasting justice will only come by peaceful means,” adding that “looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress.” According to Bush, who launched the so-called War on Terror, “we also know that lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.”
These different and incompatible usages of the terms “justice” and “peace” suggest that they are in themselves contradictory, and divide into different meanings.
Martin Luther King, who is frequently invoked today as a moral authority on the struggle against racism, was a political thinker of both peace and justice. His commentary is important to revisit today, since he is seen both as a leading advocate for the necessity of nonviolence, and a sympathetic critic of the urban rebellions of the 1960s who recognized that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”
Nevertheless, there was something much deeper and more subversive in King’s thinking on riots, which we should consider before proceeding to the categories of justice and peace. Despite how he is misread today, King’s criticism of the riots stemmed from a revolutionary perspective — that is, in his view they were not revolutionary enough. This is the only vantage point from which we can interpret his analysis of riots and its contemporary validity.
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In his commentary on the riots of the mid-1960s, King continually made the move of setting aside moral considerations to prioritize strategic ones. At the moral level, he insisted that it was necessary to indict the white power structure before making any criticism of the riot. “Riots are caused by nice, gentle, timid white moderates who are more concerned about order than justice,” he told a group of black realtors in San Francisco in 1967. They were also caused “by a national administration more concerned about winning the war in Vietnam than the war against poverty right here at home.”