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Martin Luther King, Jr. Remembrances
There are, of course, a multitude of memorials to the life of Rev. King, as there should be on the day set aside to recall what he did for America and, not to put a damper on these occasions, to mourn at what he would think if he could see what has been done to his dream of being judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin. I thought I would set out below links to some of the most thoughtful of these writings and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
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I find that my view of this particular holiday is quite unfavorable. Maybe that is MLK’s fault, maybe not. His rhetoric turned out to be mixed, with some wonderful aspirational language that has been betrayed in practice, I think, and other statements that seem to foreshadow the entire system of welfare, race-hustling, race-preference, and related policies and views that ultimately led to Critical Race Theory.
I guess that I disagree with the last article quoted:
Our highest aspirations were not realized. The result of MLK’s movement was the system of Black Privilege that has been in place for just about my entire lifetime, and the welfare programs that have decimated both black and white families. Race relations, if anything, seem worse than they’ve been since the 1970s. That’s the legacy.
Yet the man who brought us this legacy is lionized, even while just about every other historical American hero has his statute pulled down, figuratively and often literally.
This is very sad.
I’ve been coming to the view that those of us on the conservative side have been played by the whole MLK/Civil Rights narrative. This narrative is used to promote injustice — the very race discrimination that it supposedly opposed — and to secure the political power of the wicked, who promote other terrible things having little or nothing to do with race, from abortion to sodomy to the mutilation of so-called “trans” people.
Jerry, you said some of the things I knew and had read –there is, as I am sure you know, an extensive literature on his faults, his Communistic leanings at times, and the like– and decided not to include in view of the fact that this holiday is extremely important to many Americans who view Dr. King as their preeminent hero, with the same devotion and love as President Lincoln. I did try to inject at least a flavor of balance with the last quote. In my research, I discovered a website, vdare.com, which has an article out today “Rethinking Martin Luther King Day”, which can be found here. It contains a huge list of links to previous articles along the same line which have appeared over the years. You might find these references interesting. Thank you for your as usual thoughtful comment; much appreciated. Jim
Jim, I know. It’s just terrible to feel about this holiday the way that I do. I’d like to be able to celebrate progress, and there was progress — even more than progress, though. An overcorrection, I think, which has lasted about 55 years.
I understand your point about Americans who view MLK as their preeminent hero. But I have to ask — who are those folks? Are they our ideological and political allies? Or are they the Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory crowd.
I actually worry that these glowing tributes to a questionable historical figure, with a bad practical legacy, are a symptom of . . . something. Lingering white guilt, maybe, though it seems a bit worse than that. It gives me the impression of the fraternity pledge who is painfully paddled and has to say, “thank you sir, may I have another.”
I’m also getting tired of the suggestion that the race discrimination in the bad old days of Jim Crow was some unbelievably awful outrage. You know what? I’ve been racially discriminated against my whole life, and so have my kids. Maybe it ain’t so bad after all.
It wasn’t good. I’m not defending it. But you’d think that we’d committed some sort of historic mass-murder of American blacks, which did not happen. Frankly, I think that abortion is worse, and family breakdown is worse, and the promotion of sodomy and the whole bizarre trans agenda is worse.
So why the continued focus on this one issue, more than 50 years after it wasn’t just corrected, but overcorrected? My tentative conclusion is that it’s a power narrative. I think that we should avoid playing that game.
Sorry if I’ve gone on too long about this. Part of it is just venting. The state of race relations in this country is so far out of touch with reality, and so dreadful, that it’s very frustrating. Not your fault, Jim.
Since we’re in a celebratory mood, today we can also commemorate Lee-Jackson Day, which dates from 1889 and thus has a far longer tradition.
Happy Lee-Jackson Day!
For those who may be interested in another most moving piece commemorating Dr. King, please check out the Powerline piece today, here, which quotes at length from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, along with other sources. I note with great pride and humility that I am and have been for my many, many years, a Son of the South, but I defy anyone to read these excerpts and not be moved to, or at least almost to, tears.
In related news, from the Bee:
Thank you for this information. In trying to learn more about this holiday, I found the following:
While I bow to no one in my reverence for those two heroes of American history, no matter how hard the forces of wokeness try to eliminate them, and I must note in particular my love for so much that Robert E. Lee stood for, it seems that while your holiday may have a far longer tradition it does not, in effect, any longer exist. If I (or Wikipedia, which I try to avoid like the plague….) am wrong in this conclusion, please let me know as I always want to learn.
King is before my time so I have no first hand impressions from when he was alive. I judge him based on the actions of his acolytes who were nearly universally very bad people and race hustlers, including his widow. I remember her appearance at some important event when she more or less declared that we were instructed to not call blacks black and instead we were to use the term African-American. How important that must have made her feel.
Race hustlers have made everything worse for race relations. Affirmative Action makes all of us question the real merits of any minority achievement. Was Michelle Obama really one of our nation’s most brilliant or is she a product of affirmative action? She doesn’t seem so especially bright to me.
Others might genuflect to King for his pretty speeches, but to me the real results of his movement betray a cynicism, at the least, that I don’t admire.
I grew up in Virginia and remember Lee-Jackson Day.
The holiday “existed” until 2020, which means that the other holiday has quite a way to go before matching Lee-Jackson.
A more expansive view is that holidays exist as long as they are observed since they are conceptual, not physical — unlike statues that can be taken down and destroyed. The Wokerati can eradicate the physical embodiments of ideas but they’d need to commit mass murder to destroy the ideas themselves — not that such would be beyond their ken. Religion survived in the Soviet Union in spite of all official attempts to make it “not any longer exist,” up to and including mass murder.
I won’t go as far as to say King was a communist, but he certainly believed in redistribution. He did not believe in curing black ills with free-market capitalism. King would have supported reparations, something we’re unfortunately still seriously discussing 60 years later. Despite all the welfare, despite all the affirmative action. It will never be enough, and that is King’s legacy. I find that to be very Anti-American.
King is one of the best examples of Hallmark Card History. As the story goes, King gave his “I Have A Dream speech,” then all of the sudden Americans realized how bad racism was. They all had a change of heart because King was so inspiring. That isn’t true. Whites were racist in the 60s, but so were blacks.
And racism can’t be blamed for everything. The forced integration that King supported led to an awful lot of violence. While some white parents may have harbored racist thoughts, more importantly, they didn’t want their children going to schools where they were now in danger of getting stabbed or raped. For every Emmett Till, there’s dozens of white girls in places like Franklin J. Lane High School of Brooklyn that were told to keep quiet about their victimization.
And 60 years later, we’re still dealing with this. It’s arguably worse. I often wonder how things would have been if we followed the Malcolm X example instead. Those guys probably would have hated me too, but they were about building their own house. They didn’t need handouts, or my blessings. Would race relations be better off today if we just acknowledged our differences and let each other be?
Good article on the real King
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/from-mlk-to-crt/
The civil rights movement was a tremendous example of what a non-violent, morally disciplined, righteous movement, Christ-like in its appeal to love and justice and higher ideals, can do. It’s more than worthy of a holiday. It’s something Americans ought to be proud of. King deserves a tremendous amount of credit for leading the movement in that way, not letting it (by and large) degenerate into violence and reprisals. It’s no coincidence that this leadership came from a pastor. The temptation to respond in kind to violence perpetrated against them must have been fierce.
I read the first little bit, about the lynchings.
This is the same as the false narrative of BLM. As if there were lynchings all the time.
I’ve seen the data, indicating that there were about 5,000 lynchings over a span of about 80 years (roughly 1880-1960 or so, as I recall). Not all of them were blacks, though most were. It came out to about 600-odd per year.
How many black-on-black homicides occur each year now? I think that it’s up to the 10,000 range.
So, one year of black-on-black homicide today is about twice the number of deaths as about 80 years of lynchings.
Obviously, lynchings occurred and were bad. They are a drop in the bucket of the murder of black people in this country, most of which were perpetrated by other black people.
I don’t think that I realized this before, so thanks for the link, Jim. It’s just like the George Floyd narrative.
MLK’s dream is as dead as he is.
Perhaps, if his dream was as stated. I’m cynical that he was sincere.
Precisely. King was to the 20th Century what Frederick Douglas was to the 19th. Douglas was instrumental in ending slavery and King was instrumental in ending Jim Crow.
The “balancing” thing about King being human I believe to be fraught as it seems to be admixed with smear propaganda from the FBI that was illegally surveilling King and illegally smearing him. Just as King was harassed on taxes.
King is hardly responsible for the fact that grifters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama exploited and corrupted King’s legacy, along with their Progressive fellow travelers. That does not diminish the power of King’s ideas nor his pacific approach, Ghandi-like, to effecting change in a truly horrendous system (erected and supported by Democrats, who now push dependence on the State as the new Jim Crow). To have a corrupt grifter like Joe Biden address the nation from Ebeneezer Baptist Church where the grifter Raphael Warnock is now the Pastor shows how utterly defunct King’s vision is, but we, not King, are to blame for that.
I’ve read a number of things indicating that King’s vision wasn’t very good, and that he was heading in the direction of the grifters. King did say some good, uplifting things, but he said other things, too, and his preferred policies seem pretty bad to me.
I don’t like the loss of freedom of association that resulted from the anti-discrimination laws. I don’t like the race preferences, which he did seem to want. I don’t like the reparations claims, which may be supported by some of the things that he said. I don’t like the exaggeration of the negative aspects of the Jim Crow system, though it was a system that I didn’t like.
I’ve come to think that King has been unrealistically lionized, and that the iconic image of King is now used for nefarious and negative purposes.
I’ve even read some of King’s speeches which don’t quite call for violence, but point out that violence will occur. He seems to have walked a fine line there, talking about non-violence while his followers rioted.
This is “Critical Democrat Theory.” The Republicans were always the good guys, and the Democrats were always the bad guys. Things are not that simple. Jim Crow originated in the north. Several Union states did not initially vote to ratify the 14th Amendment. History doesn’t line up in black and white.
I’ve noticed that modern conservatives are really obsessed with claiming figures as their own that have nothing to do with conservative values. Cherry picking 1% of what they said out of context and ignoring all of the rest. King, Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton. Sometimes I wonder of people actually read what these people said or if they just get it all second hand.
Jerry mentioned above how conservatives are being played with the MLK/Civil Rights narrative and I think that’s spot on. You can’t fix things if you ignore the reality.
Might want to double-check your arithmetic here.
Just because a crime happens infrequently doesn’t mean it isn’t anything to get worked up over. What made lynchings particularly heinous is that they were carried out by groups who sometimes had the moral backing of their communities.
It’s remarkable how James Salerno posits ignorance as the reason for views as I have expressed here. That conservatives are being played by the Left’s narratives? As if Mr .Salerno preferred Jim Crow? As if the North was not compromised? Democrats from the North began deserting the Union army when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Just for the record, I totally disagree with the opinions posted here by Messrs Salerno and Giordano. Jim Crow was horrendous. And they think it wasn’t so bad? Strange fruit was not so strange?
To me, the most authentic and remarkable followers of King are Rev. Alveda King and Robert L Woodson. They are the ones perpetuating and promoting King’s legacy. The ones who’s message and actions are most worthy of emulation and adulation.
Consider that Northern Democrats started deserting the Union Army when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. They were fighting to preserve the Union, not to free the Slaves. The entire war effort weakened. What stiffened the spine of Northerners to finish the fight? Not in small part the actions of freed Slaves. IN the later stages of the war, a third of the Union army was comprised of African Americans. And they were ready and willing to fight. In essence, the willingness of Blacks to fight for their own freedom underwrote the war effort in the North. Who ever gives them credit for that effort. At the beginning of the War, after Fort Sumter, there were northern troops in South Carolina, and Blacks began fleeing to behind Union lines. They had to make a dangerous dash through Confederate lines, and some put their families in wagons and made the mad dash to freedom. The commanding general, Hunter, began handing out citizenship papers to the former slaves, for which he was slapped down by the White House. But those African Americans immediately signed up for duty in the Northern Army, and served WITHOUT PAY.
I have lived in the South, and, unfortunately, have had direct exposure to a degree of residual and deep seated racism. The comments of Salerno and Giordano impress me as of the same cloth. Particularly when there is an insinuation that to deeply respect Lincoln (as one of, or the greatest, of American Presidents) is to be conned. I’ll go with the views of Harry Jaffa (which, yes, hard as it might be for Mr. Salerno to believe, I have read–but he would likely consider me to be brain-washed by those evil West Coast Straussians), and leave these gentlemen to stew in their own juices. Never thought I would see such stuff on Ricochet. I have been the target of a death threat issued against me by a Republican legislator for publicizing his corruption. I’m not lining anything up as black and white, good guys and bad guys, Republicans good, Democrats bad (OK, I’ll give you Democrats bad, with some exceptions that I have known). And am appalled by the smug arrogance and ignorance of these posters.
I think it’s very obvious that your knowledge of the War Between the States comes from Jaffa and his ilk, Nanocelt. I’m sympathetic because I used to think that way. If you choose to stay in that lane, fine. But you have to ignore overwhelming mountains of evidence to keep traveling down that road. And I’m not interested in that.
And I’m not interested in playing dog-chasing-his-own-tail politics, trying to prove how the Democrats were always the real racists, or real sexists, or today, the real homophobes, and in the future, it will be the real transphobes. Liberals will always win that game because it allows them to set the rules.
And I’m not interested in being led by controlled opposition that have nothing to do with conservative values. I’m not interested in the current Conservative Inc. leadership and their obsession with the lionization of anti-American figures. At least today’s left are consistent with their worldview. I have no idea what the heck a “typical” conservative is supposed to be anymore.
Thank you. You’re right. 60-odd per year, not 600.
That’s pretty close to death-by-bee-sting territory, which runs around 50-60 per year, I think.
Nanocelt, re #24.
I think that there’s a big problem with the pearl-clutching shock at the supposed horrors of Jim Crow. Most of it was annoyance — you gotta drink from a different fountain, sit somewhere in the bus, use a different restaurant or table.
It wasn’t good.
But for crying out loud. “Horrendous.”
Most of slavery wasn’t even horrendous. It was bad, but the really bad stuff — the terrible beatings and floggings, for example — were rare. And guess what? Flogging was used on white folks too, in armies and navies.
You seem to have no idea what actual, horrendous oppression looks like. Gulags, man. Deliberate starvation. Death squads. Mass rape.
I think that the supposed horrors of Jim Crow have been greatly exaggerated, for political purposes, to promote exactly the type of policies that were supposedly so “horrendous.” Like official discrimination based on race, which I’ve faced my entire life. The Wokeist idiots are even trying to reinstitute official segregation.
Segregation, of course, remains the norm for a lot of whites and blacks. People seem to like to self-segregate so as to live among people like themselves.
Sometime, you should read Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 essay in Commentary about the violence and abuse that he faced from black students growing up. It’s really ugly.
So I dissent from the exaggerated — and apparently never-ending — self-flagellation about Jim Crow. Because it’s part of a grifter narrative, and has been since — well, pretty much since MLK was buried, as that’s when the Black Privilege of race preferences began, right around 1968.
A man is not defiled by what goes into his mouth….
Hoo-boy.
Doesn’t it seem like an ugly society though, that tells people based on what continent (most of) their ancestors came from, “You’re not one of us. You don’t belong here.”