MLK and The Continued Erosion of Our Free Constitutional Republic

Well then the ratifiers should have had a bid more foresight.

And Teddy lied his ass off about the non dilution etc of whites with respect to the 65 Immigration Act

And then there was this: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor

Two great suggestions.

Excuse me, but the Constitution is not validly amended by fiat because you think “the ratifiers should have had more foresight.” Are you for real?

I don’t know. I just want, no demand, the monuments be removed from public lands.

Fred Reed’s assessment:
As I write America waits, again, to see whether blacks will riot, this time in Ferguson. Will they loot, burn, kill, and rape? The usual? The police in Ferguson prepare to protect stores from looters, as rioters seem to regard their insurrections as shopping opportunities. Will it come, we wonder tensely? Will the destruction get out of hand, spread to other cities?

It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can’t do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified, where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Nigger Jim, or Conrad write The Nigger of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven’t read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States? We cannot. It would offend blacks.

We must never, ever say or do anything that might upset them, as virtually everything does. It is positively astonishing. One expects the rich and smart to have disproportionate power. But America is dominated from the slums.

One might think that a single set of laws should apply to all citizens, and that things should be done without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, and that all should have the same rights and responsibilities. It is not so.

The dominance of the media by blacks is impressive. If a white shoots a black to defend himself, it becomes national news for weeks, or months, and riots follow, but when blacks engage in their unending racial attacks on whites, the media demurely look the other way. The attackers are never black. They are “teens.” Reporters who say otherwise are likely to be fired. In effect, the thirteen percent censor the national press.

Much of their mastery has become so deeply engrained as no longer to be noticed. There is the DC Bob. In the bars and restaurants of Washington, a man weary of an incompetent affirmative-action hire in his office will, before commenting to a friend, lean forward, lower his voice, and look furtively over both shoulders to see whether anyone might overhear: The DC Bob. People don’t even know that they are doing this.

Defensive behavior by whites has become nearly universal. A sort of Masonic recognition-ritual occurs among white people recently introduced in social gatherings. Is the other person, for want of better terms, a liberal or a realist? Dare one speak? One of them will say something mildly skeptical about, say, Jesse Jackson. The other rolls his eyes in shared disgust. The secret handshake. Or, if the listener is politically correct, the bait is not taken. In either case, blacks dominate political conversation.

So extreme is the power to control speech and even thought that politicians have to avoid mentioning watermelons, that neighborhoods of high crime must delicately be called “sketchy” instead of “black,” though all understand what is meant.

The avoidance of racial reference is not an even-handed if despotic attempt to oppose racism since, as we all know, blacks freely apply any derogatory wording they choose to whites. In short, they rule. Which is amazing.

The dominance extends to children. When in junior high one of my daughters brought home a science handout with common chemical terms badly misspelled. “Is your teacher black?” I said without thinking. “Daaaaaaady!” she said in anguish, having made the connection but knowing that she shouldn’t have. Blacks control what you can say to your own children in your own home. And of course if I had gone to the school and demanded that the teacher be fired, it would have been evidence of my depravity and probable KKK membership.

The word “unbelievable” has lost all force. Things that ought to be unbelievable, and once were, have become routine. Still, there it was: Don’t expect a junior-high teacher to have the level of literacy I had in the fourth grade. Instead, make it dangerous to notice her stupidity.

This is not new, and it hasn’t changed. In 1981, in a piece for Harper’s, I wrote:

“The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers’ colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida (which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater), cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.’s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places.”

Nothing has changed.

Blacks now control the presidency and thus, most importantly, the Attorney Generalship. In this the staggering political power of blacks is most evident. Obama was elected because he was black: an equally unqualified and negligible white pol would have had no chance. He is now fiercely pushing the most profound transformation of America ever attempted, by opening the floodgates to immigration from the south. To effect this end he apparently will simply ignore Congress. The people will not be consulted.

It is hard to imagine why he does it except from racism, from a desire to get even with whites by enrolling their country in the Third World. A short-sighted policy, yes, since Hispanics do not like blacks and will soon be more powerful—but that will come a bit later.

Note that self-inflicted problems of blacks consume inordinate amounts of public and governmental attention, even though only blacks can solve them. I might say, “should solve them,” since they never have and we all know they won’t. Yet we hear about them endlessly.

Are blacks in Chicago killing each other in large numbers? The solution might be to stop doing it, might it not? While I do not wish these young dead, I can do nothing to stop them, and it is not my problem. Are black children growing up illiterate? This gives me no pleasure, and I have various reasons both selfish and moral to wish it were not so. But perhaps the solution is for their parents, or parent, to see that they do their homework, or even to teach them. I cannot do this for them, and it isn’t my problem.

Why do I have to hear, endlessly, about the “achievement gap”? Whether of genetic or cultural origin, it seems as immutable as Avogadro’s number, and I can do nothing about it. I raise my children. They need to raise theirs.

They rule. It is astonishing.

never heard of Penzey’s!!!

Stick to McCormick’s.

Good article, as always, by Williams.

The pat answer is that the evil “majority” should not make the decisions, the minorities should, because... “hate.”

Have you ever heard of such a nonsensical way of thinking? What are we voting for if majorities don’t win? They cast it as a “tyranny of the majority” injustice, when tyrannies are almost always by MINORITIES who seize power. Otherwise, you have democracy.

Good.

I get your point but how many and how often do Americans die to protect these FREE rights?

Freedom isn’t free. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

You would have done better to have simply said something about the price of maintaining our freedoms - I would have known exactly what you were talking about.

Simply stated and powerful analysis by Walter Williams. Thanks for posting.

Here's an easy-reading and well-argumented piece that Hillsdale College's IMPRIMIS circulated in 2015. It really nails the issue of black crime, incarceration, family dysfunction, etc. And it also does a great job of countering Leftist propaganda.

Race Relations and Law Enforcement by Jason L. Riley (2015 Hillsdale College IMPRIMIS)

Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News.

We all knew this 40 years ago.
Happy Robert E. Lee Day! His January 19 birthday was once widely celebrated across the South (it still is mentionable in Alabama) but during the Second Reconstruction has been quietly suppressed to the point where even such a devoted son of the Confederacy as American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor was unaware, when I talked to him on Sunday night, that its local variant in his and Lee’s state of Virginia, Lee-Jackson Day, was supposed to be celebrated last Friday. (Not surprisingly—it seems to have been recently crudely scrubbed from Virginia’s webpage).

But there’s a silver lining, sort of, in this tale of attempted historical lobotomy: it shows that public holidays come—and they go. Martin Luther King Day, rushed through Congress with Obamacare-style disregard of process in 1983, has been by now weighed in the balance for almost thirty years. It has inarguably (but unmentionably) been found wanting. It is time for it to go.

And in fact, I believe it will go, or at least be quietly suppressed like Robert E. Lee Day. The reasons:

MLK Day’s 2027 Problem
It is obvious to everyone that there is a reason King’s FBI files were sealed for fifty years back in 1977, and only the Main Stream Media’s typically relentless Politically Correct air cover prevented this flagrant maneuver from discrediting the Martin Luther King Day legislation in 1983.

The problem that these sealed files pose, the MSM/ Ruling Class determination to repress it—and incidentally the unimpeachably reasonable nature of the MLK Day opponents’ position—emerged at President Ronald Reagan’s famous October 19, 1983 press conference:

[Sam Donaldson, ABC News]. Mr. President, Senator [Jesse] Helms has been saying on the Senate floor that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Communist associations, was a Communist sympathizer. Do you agree?

The President. We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?

No, I don’t fault Senator Helms’ sincerity with regard to wanting the records opened up. I think that he’s motivated by a feeling that if we’re going to have a national holiday named for any American, when it’s only been named for one American in all our history up until this time, that he feels we should know everything there is to know about an individual. As I say, I don’t fault his sincerity in that, but I also recognize there is no way that these records can be opened, because an agreement was reached between the family and the government with regard to those records. And we’re not going to turn away from that or set a precedent of breaking agreements of that kind.

Sir, what do we do then in 35 years if the records are opened and we find that Dr. King was a Communist sympathizer? Do we then try to undo the law? I mean, I’m not quite certain where the logic is there.

The President. The logic is there in that there is no way that this government should violate its word and open those records now.

I happen to — while I would have preferred a day of recognition for his accomplishments and what he meant in a stormy period in our history here, I would have preferred a day similar to, say, Lincoln’s birthday, which is not technically a national holiday, but is certainly a day reverenced by a great many people in our country and has been. I would have preferred that, but since they seem bent on making it a national holiday, I believe the symbolism of that day is important enough that I’ll sign that legislation when it reaches my desk.

The President’s News Conference, Reagan Library, October 19, 1983

At the time, there was much MSM hyperventilating because Reagan had not roundly rejected the idea that King had Communist connections. [Not A 35-Year Question, Editorial, New York Times, October 21, 1983] But this was simply a demand, now familiar, for religious conformity to the burgeoning King Cult. Reagan’s was the only rational position, especially given the (widely-known but little-reported) information that Senator Helms had already placed in the Congressional Record.

Note, also, the bizarre MSM claim (which Reagan sidestepped) that there would be no “logic” in revoking MLK Day if King turned out to be a Communist. To put this in perspective, consider the protracted and merciless persecution, then just getting underway, of Arthur Rudolph, creator of the Saturn V moon rocket, because of the discovery of his alleged connection with forced labor projects in World War II Germany.

More recently, consider the continuing campaign against GOP Majority Whip Steve Scalise—who now, not coincidentally, is being attacked for his votes against the King holiday: GOP House Majority Whip Steve Scalise tried to kill Louisiana resolution apologizing for slavery, by Scott Kaufman, Raw Story, January 15, 2015. What Kaufman calls Scalise’s “ties” to David Duke’s relict organization in Louisiana were, on any reading, infinitesimal compared to King’s relationships with Communists and their causes. And when Scalise gave his speech, the U.S. was not engaged in a global struggle with a white supremacist power, nor losing thousands of men in a desperate war against one of its allies.

The plain fact is that King was a Man of the Left and American radicals are quite right to complain that he has been stolen from them. Thus, given that Leftist agitations are much more organized than the MSM cares to report, it might very well turn out that King’s decision to come out in opposition to the Vietnam War in April 1967 was ultimately at the behest of America’s foreign enemies.

A federal holiday for Benedict Arnold?

All this and serial adultery too.

But whatever embarrassments these files may contain—and chilling as it seems to those of us who were around at the time—only twelve years remain before they will be opened. Of course, the way things are going, criticizing King may then be considered Hate Speech.

“Integration” Just Isn’t working
This week near Dover, Delaware, a viral video appears to show another instance of black-on-white violence among high school students.

Editor’s Note: YouTube has deleted the video originally embedded in this article. Should users navigate to the video’s URL, a message states: “This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy prohibiting content designed to harass, bully or threaten.”

The shaky cell phone video shows a group of black teenage boys punching, knocking down, and kicking a white teenage boy, leaving him dazed and confused on the school bus floor.

The victim of the attack had been riding home from Parkway Academy School near Dover when the assault reportedly began. The video shows him sitting alone, facing front, when the attack begins from the rear – and continues from the side and the front of the school bus. “I didn’t do nothing,” he protests.

Video: Black Teens Assault White Student on School Bus, by Colin Flaherty, Breitbart, April 30, 2014.

Just another day in the life of white America in the aftermath of the Civil Rights revolution —Flaherty has chronicled scores of similar stories. But one entry in the comment thread, and the reaction to it, was really significant:

I noticed that the School Bus driver failed to intervene or notify the police. It is shockingly evident that we need to create a segregated public school system where the victims of racial violence are separated from their abusers…

This comment received a remarkable 868 positive votes.

Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, the sophisticated arguments of its opponents go undiscussed, but the simple reality that drove segregation seems to be winning it a new generation of supporters—albeit silent, for now.

From Selma to Birmingham to Detroit, the results of the Civil Rights revolution have been uniformly catastrophic.

The worst racial conflicts since the 1960s are being used to launch a new campaign of Leftist activism. But, although there has been little overt opposition, the election returns make clear that American whites just aren’t buying it.

How long will they continue to buy the Holiday?

MLK Day can’t be contained
Many Americans unquestionably thought that, if they just made this one symbolic concession of accepting Martin Luther King Day, they would then be left alone. (They probably think the same about homosexual “marriage.”) But it hasn’t worked out that way. Martin Luther King Day has simply become a staging area for the inculcation of more white guilt, above all in the classroom.

Thus when my son Alexander was eight, he came home from public school early in January and told us that he`d been in some kind of play to dramatize an African American being turned away from a restaurant in the bad old days of the segregated South. In honor of Martin Luther King Day. Sort of like a Christmas Pageant. (Remember Christmas Pageants?)

The Connecticut Berkshires, where we lived, are a whitopia with absolutely no history of segregation whatsoever. Alexander was deeply puzzled. He was particularly impressed by the news that it was bad for policemen to use the word “boy.”

But this area of Connecticut was a hotbed of abolitionism. Those Connecticut farm boys joined up in vast numbers, and died in vast numbers, fighting to free the slaves. There was one famous regiment raised in Litchfield County: the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, which despite its name was an infantry regiment and which was shot to pieces at Cold Harbor.

There’s still a substantial blue collar population of colonial Yankee stock in northwestern Connecticut. The woman who cut my hair, the man who delivered my mail, had relatives who died in that battle. They were aware of it—but I have never heard any mention of it in the public schools.

I asked teachers about it, I asked the principals about it. None of them had ever heard of it, although they certainly had children in their classes whose ancestors were involved.

Those children could have been taught, even accepting the conventional Civil War morality play, that their forebears had done a noble thing. Instead, they were taught that they, whites, had oppressed blacks—even though their forebears had specifically not done so.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A patently unconstitutional federal act that should be nullified by the states and struck down by the feds.

I f we cut the feds down to their constitutional size, I think with it will go the phony, hyped-up “MLK Day”.

I want MLK’s statues and street signs off public property—he was a profane religious figure and a close associate of communists, if not one himself. . I’m sick of yielding to the leftist criminals. How many historical figures have they torn down?

The Civil Rights Act of 1964. A patently unconstitutional federal act that should be nullified by the states and struck down by the feds.

What makes this Act unconstitutional? Serious question.