Some Things We Need to Remember On Martin Luther King's Birthday

 

 

Author's Note: I wrote this article in April of 2024 when America was – truthfully not much different then it is today. I never published because at that point I was afraid of the backlash I might receive from many of the writers on this site. So I put it in a virtual drawer and never published.

Well it's two years later and things have changed at least in terms of politics. Yet again there are people marching in the streets and authorities are behaving contemplatively. What has changed immensely is the threat of political violence which is increasingly becoming more common and more disturbingly has become yet another sign of polarization. Now if there is a killing or  an assassination attempt, mourning has increasingly broken down on party lines and meanness comes depending on who the individual was. It used to be said we have respect for the dead but none for the living. Now it's clear we don't have that any more.

Something that has changed is that I no longer give a flying F as to what the haters think of me anymore, certainly not the readers of this site. I've realized during the past two years their true nature and the vitriol they throw at me I have come to completely dismiss. I once thought many of them might be the solution to the problems of today, now I realize they are just a different part of the problem.

The article is only slightly updated to reflect some of recent events as I thought it might matter. I have expressed many of these beliefs in some of the political articles I've written in the last year. The historical record proves everything I've related in this article is accurate though I know that these days the truth and what it means increasingly breaks down on ideological lines.

Call me whatever names you wish. I know that is the full force of your arsenal and you know what they say about names never hurting you. They certainly don't hurt me.

 

One of my favorite movies in recent years was Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. A superb comedy that focuses on the conflict between a seventeen-year old girl (Saoirse Ronan) and her working-class mother (Laurie Metcalf) it is a triumph on every level. And one of my favorite scenes in it comes halfway through the film.

Lady Bird and her mother are having an argument about college. It has gotten to a point where her mother makes it clear, like mothers often do, about how much she has sacrificed for her daughter. Lady Bird grabs a pencil and paper and tells her: “Give me a number.” Metcalf is puzzled. Lady Bird demands her mother tell her exactly how much she spent sacrificing for her. She tells her mother once she raises this much money, she will give it to her and she will have to speak to her mother again. Her mother looks at her and tells her: “Honestly, I doubt you’ll ever be qualified to get a job where you could earn enough money to do that.” Lady Bird throws down the pad and storms out of the room.

It's very hard not to see that scene and see the relationship that so many minority groups have with all of America. The entire film is a metaphor for it now that I think of. Ronan’s character resents her mother despite everything she has done for her and she and her mother are always fighting. Lady Bird has dreams for an expensive college that, for her working class family, are almost certainly unrealistic but she refuses to relinquish them and constantly considers her mother the villain. The argument I’ve just cited is one that I think is at the core of every discussion one tries to have with certain members of any minority group – African-Americans, LatinX, women, the LGBTQ+ community  - the tension is always there and no matter how unrealistic the dreams, there is a demand for them. Certain parts of the scene don’t fit the metaphor exactly, but I think the demand is basically the same particularly when it comes to elected officials and people on the left, most of whom are in these communities. We know how horrible our history is with them and trying to resolve these demands seems impossible. I often think if we were to ask for a ‘number’ – a metaphor for what it would take to bring about resolution – we would get from members from all of these groups the same response Lady Bird’s mother gives her daughter.

And that may be part of the biggest problem facing so many of our divides today. If we had a ‘number’ – something that could accommodate all these of groups, not so that we didn’t have to ever see them again but so that we could end the argument,  society would at least having something to try and work towards. It might be difficult and it might take a while, but at least we would know where to start.

But when it comes to some of the more extreme members of these communities and the left as a rule, that number can never be reached. Perhaps it is because they don’t know what it is; all they know is what it isn’t. But there’s another truth to this that I don’t think they want to acknowledge. And I think there’s a story that makes the clearest metaphor. It goes back to that ‘golden era’ where so many on the left think ‘the dream was possible’ and then it was killed: the 1960s. I’ve dealt with this a couple of times before but this time I’m going to take it from a different perspective: that of Martin Luther King.

Oh I know how angry so many leftists and African-Americans get when white male conservatives use King’s ‘I Have  A Dream’ speech as a metaphor. I don’t deny they have a justification for it. But I also know very well that many of them are also angry because using Martin Luther King as a metaphor is their department, and how there the right infringe on their copyright?

Because here’s the truth that they don’t want to tell you. By the last years of his life, Martin Luther King – who had shed his blood for the cause of civil rights, who had gone to jail for that cause, who had taking beatings and had been constantly under the threat of a violent demise because of the stands he took – was viewed by a not inconsiderable percentage of the African-American community as behind the times and an Uncle Tom. Just to be clear that had been true throughout his entire career: Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam spent much of their time considering him a tool of the white man and that his approach was ‘too soft’. This has been eroded over time primarily due  to the rehabilitation of the ‘Black Power movement’, something that King and many of his inner circle – including the newly minted hero Bayard Rustin – spent their careers arguing against.

But by 1966 and for the next two years so much of the work King and his followers had strived for during the past decade was constantly under fire by many in the Black Panthers and their increasing message of separatism. King was trying to do the best thing for his people but he had always understood that it was easier to win with your message of non-violence than being violent. Many white Americans saw no difference between men like King and Malcolm X, to be sure, but the reason that King received acceptability and even mainstream acceptance in his own lifetime was because he knew that the only way to win over white America was a peaceful approach. He knew how incendiary lines like ‘by any means necessary’ or getting change ‘by either the ballot or the bullet’ played into the message of the southern mindset that the ‘Negro’ was dangerous. King was trying to win hearts and minds and he knew this was the only way to do it. The Black Power movement was only trying to win the hearts and minds of Black America. King and Rustin were trying to win over all America.

And the irony was that even as King finally began to realize his dreams in the mid-1960s; certain African-American leaders had decided that was not enough. In the aftermath of the 1964 Democratic Convention, a new breed of African-American leaders began to decide that they did not want accommodation among White America or even equality. For all the work that so many writers have tried to do put a brighter shine on the Black Panther movement, the fact remains that they were trying to build a world that was anathema to Brown Vs. Board of Education. The message of men like Fred Hampton and Bobby Seale was to have a world that was somehow separate and equal. This was a contradiction that many in Black America never even tried to resolve and to this day, lingers among so many minorities.

I’m not saying the FBI’s counterintelligence movements were wrong and that their efforts to first undermine and then assassinate major black leaders such as  Hampton  and  Newton were not completely racist and wrong or that the Panthers did not do good things for the African-American community when they were  alive. But the idea that somehow 10 to 12 percent of the population could somehow put together a community that could exist completely independent of White America was always a pipe dream – something that Rustin himself was aware of and constantly argued to deaf ears. King might have amped up his rhetoric in the final years of his life but he was still preaching for non-violence and equality under the law. The same can’t be said for the Panthers throughout their history.

Many years ago I was watching a documentary where several former Black Panthers were talking about the civil right movement with something resembling disdain. “We settled for symbolic victories,” one said. I couldn’t believe it then and I still can’t comprehend it now. Symbolic victories? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was symbolic? The Voting Rights Act of 1965, symbolic? Thurgood Marshall, one of the prime leaders of the Civil Rights movement being named to the Supreme Court, was symbolic? To be clear, we’re still dealing with consequences from all of them: the South went Republican after the 1964 election, the conservative backlash that led to men like George Wallace’s third party rise and the rise of Reagan in the GOP. If some African-Americans really believe that all the legislation that got passed in the 1960s was just tokenism, then it really makes you wonder what that number was and how we could ever reach it.

I find this argument striking throughout so much of the protest movement of the 1960s. One of the most famous chants was: “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!” Well, legislatively in much of the 1960s there had been more change for Americans then there had been in the last twenty and for minorities in the last century. And even though it wasn’t happening immediately, it was still happening quickly. The left took the argument that so much of this change was somehow not sufficient and many minority groups took on the same idea.

I sometimes feel that King’s assassination much like those of the Kennedys in the 1960s, cemented his place among Black America the same way that Jack and Bobby’s death did for many in White America. Being killed at such a young age froze him forever in time and officially got rid of all of the real complaints many contemporary African-Americans and some leftists had of him.

I think if King had lived into the 1970s and 1980s, he would have been reduced to obscurity within his own lifetime. Future civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who thrived in his aftermath, would likely not only have taken the mantle from him while alive but increasingly refused his council. King was a man who believed in building coalitions and trying to win over the undecideds. For all of their rehabilitation of their own images, that was not something either man was known for at their heights or even today.

There are many who believe that King was considering a future in politics. Some thought he might have run for the Presidency on a third party ticket in 1968, which was partly the reason for his assassination. I believe that King probably would have tried to run for higher office at some point: given that his successors Jackson and Sharpton later did on multiple occasions it’s likely and at thirty-nine King was already infinitely more qualified for higher office than either man would be at any point in their lifetimes.

I believe King could have been a good President had he gotten the chance; he certainly would have been a better one than Robert Kennedy ever would have been. King had never been in political office but he had spent his entire public life working behind the scenes and on the front lines, building coalitions with many groups, building links to liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and he had been a major voice in LBJ’s administration. It would have taken some effort, but I think that by 1972 or 1976 he could have taken up the mantle that Shirley Chisholm and Julian Bond had and gotten a place on the Democratic Ticket, though almost certainly as Vice President first.

But I also believe that all the qualities that would have made King a good politician and possibly a great President would have led to immense dismay among so much of the coalition he’d spent years building, not just among some leftists but also students and even some African-Americans. During the 1960s the left had increasingly become intolerant to any kind of accommodation or compromise with their ideals, no matter how unrealistic they were or how unelectable it made Democratic candidates for President. It is clear today, as it is was in the sixties, that among the left the long game of building coalitions that bring about real social change were being cast aside for increasingly symbolic gestures or demonstrations that did much to isolate so many undecided voters. We see it in so much of today’s writing on past  Democratic Presidents such as Clinton and Obama. They were sung as heroes when they ran for office but when they actually had to do the work of governing they were torn apart by leftists as ‘part of the institution’. One can’t make policy on rhetoric or only govern the part of America who voted for you. King wanted to make things better for his people, but he also understood that meant accommodation, not isolation. That would have meant leading all Americans, not just the ones who would have voted for him – or the ones with the same skin color as him.

As we speak countless left-wing and Democratic newsletters are speaking about how on the day honoring Martin Luther King's birthday the current President has not mentioned it in any of his comments and has been talking about how horrible the civil rights movement was for white people. And yet simultaneously on social media earlier today multiple posts have been made about Martin Luther King's positions on anti-Semitism in Israel countless threads have argued either this must be a rewrite of his legacy or that Malcolm X was the better activist. To be clear much of the Civil Rights movement was built between alliances between African-Americans and Jewish Americans and King was good at building the kinds of bridges between them that Malcolm X and many of his successors were famously opposed to – another of the critical differences between them and one that I suspect too many of today's activists would dismiss as compromising.

King was a great man not just because of his speeches and activism but because he understood something that many of this contemporaries and those who follow in his footsteps do not: the battle for equality was a marathon not a sprint. King's willingness to work within the system was responsible for creating groundbreaking legislation that we still believe into this day. The problem was that legislation by necessity can only move as quickly as the will of the legislators and it requires constant pressure and vigilance for those goals to be maintained. By the time of King's assassination many of his colleagues and followers were arguing that going through political means could not achieve their goals. That they never came up with a viable alternative – and still haven't in the more than a half a century since his death – is something they still refuse to acknowledge to this day.

In a sense King’s assassination was the best thing for his legacy: he was another man who was cut down before his potential had been realized. Unlike the Kennedys he had done far more in his short life to make things better for America and he clearly was trying to do that  before he died. Had he actually  lived the long life he had not thought he would in his final speech, had he made it to his sixties or seventies, even if he’d become President, I could see so many African-Americans being interviewed in documentaries about him while he was alive and speaking of him not reverentially but with disappointment and disgust. “Dr. King had great potential,” men like Jackson or Sharpton would have said. “Then he got into politics and he forgot where he came from.” Today many claim that King’s dream was never realized because of his assassination. Sadly I think even if he lived and helped accomplish still more, they’d be saying the same thing. For far too many, the number can never be reached.