Martin Luther King Jr. warned of ‘the white moderate’ 60 years ago. His lesson holds true — with a twist

This was true in August 1963. It remains true in January 2022, but with a 21st century twist.

America is a lot more diverse than it was in the 1960s and the makeup of those stumbling, paternalistic moderates King excoriated for being "more devoted to order than justice," and for living "by the myth of time" has expanded beyond just white people.

We see this in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed recently dusted off antiquated policing tactics in her call for more surveillance and arrests in the Tenderloin.

Her answer to entrenched crises of homelessness, drug addiction and poverty surprised many. As I've written before, it shouldn't have. Breed is and has always been a moderate. Her brief alignment with the progressive voices who called for down-to-the-studs criminal justice reform in 2020 doesn't change that fact.

Breed's Tenderloin strategy has been welcomed by her fellow moderates, who also embrace a conservative fallacy: that the pandemic-related crime that increased everywhere, especially in Republican-voting counties, is because of criminal justice reform policies and police defunding that never happened.

This flawed narrative is baked into the Republican and moderate-led recall against a district attorney who refocused his office's prosecutorial resources on serious crimes instead of quality-of-life offenses.

Unlike the Southern moderates to whom King addressed his letter, the jailed minister wrote that he could not commend police for keeping "order" by trampling the rights and bodies of Birmingham's Black residents. (King wrote that Birmingham police had arrested him for "parading without a permit.")

He could have been writing about San Francisco, a city where Black people are 5% of the residential population and nearly 50% of the jail population.

Outside of San Francisco, we've seen what one or two moderates can do to undermine progressive efforts.

Let's start with voting rights, an issue King dedicated his life to addressing. His peaceful protests, often met with extreme police violence, were instrumental in getting President Lyndon Johnson to sign into law in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, which abolished literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise Black voters.

Today, the right is coordinating attacks against King's work, fueled by former President Donald Trump's lies over voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

One-third of the restrictive voting laws passed in America over the past decade were adopted in conservative state legislatures last year, according to a December report by the Brennan Center, a nonprofit law and public policy institute.

Democrats are trying to stem the tide. With the 2022 midterms this fall setting up a possible congressional power shift, Democrats are pushing for sweeping federal changes to voting laws. Which is also why they're desperately pushing to change a Senate rule on filibusters to try to enact a pair of voting rights bills.

Standing in their way are a couple of moderate Democrats: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who both refused to support the filibuster changes, which Republicans are also against.

It wasn't only progress around criminal justice and voting rights that King criticized moderates for blocking in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." He also wrote about how their inaction hurts efforts to address "economic injustice."

King saw this happen to his Poor People's Campaign, a movement to bring political attention to the financial plight of America's poor through civil disobedience. He was murdered in 1968 while this movement was in its infancy, but vestiges of the campaign show up in Biden's Build Back Better plan.

The 10-year, $2 trillion social spending bill would have helped struggling families make ends meet, including by providing them with paid sick leave, subsidized child care and affordable housing. King's Poor People's Campaign also asked the federal government prioritize the creation of low-income housing.

But when Republicans refused to cross party lines to vote for Biden's plan, the bill was stuck on a 50-50 split in the Senate for months. And the person who ultimately got to decide its fate was Manchin.

Manchin told news media about his disdain for America moving "towards an entitlement mentality" in September. Three months later, he made it known he wouldn't support the bill's most recent iteration, thus dashing hopes Democrats had of passing it.

America has changed a lot since King wrote his letter in Birmingham, yet the descriptions he applied to moderates still ring true: They preach social change, but hinder radical approaches to attain it. They choose comfort over discomfort, and often uphold racist systems while masquerading behind a facade of good intentions.

King chastised himself for thinking moderates would see the world his way. "Maybe I was too optimistic," he wrote.

Almost 60 years later, maybe progressives still are.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips appears Sundays. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @JustMrPhillips