The First Woke Leader?

Many journalists perceive Critical Race and Social Justice theories as new ways of understanding political issues. However, many scholars suggest that the movement's key sensibilities have been afloat for centuries, even predating Marxism. Greil Marcus explores the concept in his famous book about hidden histories and unorthodox social movements, “Lipstick Traces.”

In May 1534 John of Leyden a Dutch heretic also known as Jan Bockelson, was proclaimed king of the German town of Munsters, the New Jerusalem--and thus, proclaimed king of the Whole World.

Earlier in the year, a group of radical Anabaptists--one of many new Protestant sects bent on replacing decadent church rituals with a literal practice of the Gospels--had seized control of Munster. At first they simply forced the town council to pass a bill legalizing "liberty of conscience"--that is, legalizing heresy, an unthinkable act even in the heydey of the Reformation. The Anabaptists quickly drove out the Lutheran majority, repopulated the town with like-minded neighbors, and, under the leadership of a baker named Jan Matthys, established a theocracy. By Mvarch, Munster was purified: refounded as a community of the Children of God, bound by love to live without sin.

All property was expropriated. Money was abolished. The doors of all houses were made to be left open day and night. In a great bonfire, all books save the Bible were destroyed. "The poorest among us," read a Munster pamphlet meant to subert the countryside, "who used to be despised as beggars now go about dressed as finely as the highest and more distinguished." "All things were to be in common," John of Leyden said later. "There was to be no private property and nobody was to do anymor work, but simply trust in God." In every instance the new commandments were enforced with the threat of execution.

Outside the walls of the city, Anabaptism--bits of which survive t oday in certain Penetcostal creeds--was itself made a capital offense; hundreds, perhaps thousands, were tortured and put to death. The local bishop organized an army of mercenaries and laid siege to Munster; in a divinely ordained sortie against the bishohp's forces, Jan Matthys was killed and John of Leyden took his place.

He ran through the town naked, then was silent for three days. During that time God revealed a new order. Matthys' social revolution was suddenly exposed as abstract; John of Leyden was to take the revolution to the smallest details of everyday life, where death was to be the only sanctioin against any sin: murder, theft, avarice, quarrelling the insubordinaton of children, the naysaing of wives.

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