King framed justice as religious redemption that morally restores the white majority.

Evidence

Thus King’s political discourse identifies the guilt of the white majority and urges their repentance, seeking thereby not merely an extension of civil rights to all American citizens irrespective of race but the regeneration of America itself. “Justice” for King is not primarily a secular legal concept, as it is for Malcolm X, but a religious one—the idea of redemption. To be redeemed and to redeem others was to restore an inheritance—the Judeo-Christian heritage in general and the American expression of it in particular. In this way the prophetic language of the Old Testament was fused with the salvationist language of the New. To the extent that the civil rights movement presented itself as an instrument of redemption, its project became the moral restoration of the white majority. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 707

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the civil rights movement paradoxically sought moral restoration of the oppressors, not just liberation of the oppressed — and what that means for contemporary justice movements.
• XREF: Tracks with Asad’s broader project on secularism — and echoes discussions of redemptive sacrifice in the ADDENDUM article on sacrifice.