The Italian Political Debate on Civil Rights in America
The Left followed the civil rights movement with interest, although initially conditioned by Marxist and Third Wordlist categories. If the communists wondered whether or not his nonviolent model was to be considered revolutionary, the socialists immediately extolled his universal value as an “apostle of nonviolence”. From Giuseppe Saragat (President of the Italian Republic from 1964 to 1971) to the socialist leader Pietro Nenni, King was an example of opposition to the “racial and political fanaticism” to which he would fall victim. While hosting articles signed by him (as in the magazines Rinascita or Vie Nuove), the left-wing press celebrated him as an “unarmed prophet” particularly after his death. He thus became a point of reference to reflect on the socio-economic inequalities of blacks, the crisis of American democracy and the senselessness of the Vietnam War.
Even among moderates, his nonviolence aroused some interest. Although some newspapers, such as La Stampa, described him as predisposed to “martyrdom” and “exasperated”. The meeting with Paul VI encouraged the Christian Democrats towards a more decisive support of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights, arousing curiosity in some central figures of the party.
Among radical groups, there was no lack of critical outpouring even after his death. In direct conflict to the position taken by l’Unità, his example was contrasted with that of Malcolm X or the vicissitudes of other Black Power leaders.
The multifaceted nature of King’s message is also evidenced in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reflections: as a marxist intellectual, he associated King’s assassination with the martyrdom of St. Paul in the draft script of a film that was never made.
The intellectual portrait of King that emerges thus does not appear static, but such as to have grasped his complexity and courageous challenges, including his attempt to broaden the struggle from civil rights to economic justice and peace: a painful but transformative battle whose echoes still resonate today.
Pasolini for Martin Luther King
“[…] racist hatred – which is but the external aspect of the profound aberration of all conservation and fascism – is a hatred that has no reason to exist. In fact, it does not exist. Those who are affected by it believe they feel it, in reality they ‘cannot’ feel it. For how and why could a poor white man hate a black? Yet it is poor whites throughout the South who, in practice, experience this hatred. It stems
from a false idea of self and therefore of reality: it is therefore false itself; it is a completely alienated and unrecognizable feeling. […]
The ‘negro problem’, united in such a convoluted and inextricable way with that of the ‘poor whites’ (in enormous numbers, greater than we believe), is a Third World problem. And if this is scandalous to
the workers consciousness of the European communist parties, it is even more so to the American capitalist consciousness, which objectively believes itself to be on the clear road to technical progress and economic opulence. One can never cease, therefore, to measure sufficiently, in every sense, the extent of the ‘negro problem”’
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Civil War, in Paese Sera, 18 November 1966)
“…with particular love the camera will frame the very little hotel where Paolo is staying which bears a curious and moving resemblance to the little hotel where Martin Luther King was killed…”
(P.P. Pasolini, San Paolo, Einaudi, Turin, 1977)