MLK Day, 2005

It's back. The most important day of the year. More important than the deposed Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, respectively. More important than Columbus Day. More important than Thanksgiving. More important than Christmas.

I know what you're saying. How can MLK Day be more important than Christmas? Easy. MLK was the most important person ever to live. Anywhere. Just ask his widow and children.

Let's look at the man's accomplishments. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in competition with Jack Kennedy and Wilt Chamberlain for the title of world's greatest womanizer. His favorite male company consisted largely of communists. He began his last day on Earth by beating the hell out of his mistress of the moment. He was a compulsive plagiarist who not only got his doctorate through fraud, but stole other men's words, and then copyrighted and re-sold the purloined pearls. And as the pre-eminent leader of the civil rights movement, he supported racial quotas, reparations, and racist law. What's not to like?

(As Theodore Pappas showed, in Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other Prominent Americans, one-third of King's Boston University doctoral dissertation consisted of copying directly without attribution from the dissertation of his classmate, Jack Stewart Boozer, in addition to thefts from famous theologians.

And even if King hadn't gotten his doctorate through massive plagiarism, I wouldn't call him "Dr." What is it about the same black folks who show contempt towards whites with legitimate titles, that has them obsessively refer to "Dr. King"? Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the greatest social scientists of all time, and he had a real doctorate, but no one today refers to him as "Dr. Weber." Unless you're Austrian or something, it's not normal to refer to dead people as "Dr." Heck, while teaching college, I stopped referring to the living as "Dr." or "Professor," unless the person in question was my boss or a medical doctor. If you're my colleague, I'm not referring to you by any title, Pal. And nowadays, outside of the real sciences, most of the doctorates being issued aren't worth the paper they're written on.)

Lest I forget, one is nowadays compelled to note that King displayed great physical courage on behalf of his convictions. But having the courage of one's convictions is a dependent variable -- the independent variable is the righteousness of one's convictions. Over 100,000 men and women currently in uniform in Iraq also display great physical courage every day, and the vast majority of them seek to defend, not to destroy America. And yet, to my knowledge, none of them has had a national holy day enacted by Congress in his honor.

About 16 years ago, when I watched the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize for the first time, I loved the first half - the Martin years. But following King's assassination, the second half celebrated the Black Power movement as a seamless continuation of the civil rights movement whose dominant figure the martyred King was. "How dare you sully King's name!" I shouted at the TV screen, or words to that effect.

Eyes on the Prize celebrated black supremacists such as the "community control" activists (Rhody McCoy, Milton Galamison, the Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, et al.) who terrorized white teachers in the experimental, Ford Foundation-funded Brooklyn school district called "Ocean Hill-Brownsville." (Ocean Hill and Brownsville were and are two adjacent, poor, black-dominated parts of Brooklyn.)

For many years, I considered MLK one of America's greatest heroes. I once even published an encomium to him. Then I started to study the man. Big mistake.

For several years now, neoconservatives have presented King as a ... neoconservative, on race, at least. (And race is all they talk about, regarding King.) That means that he opposed affirmative action. They cite his "content of character" line:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"

That line is from King's most famous speech, "I Have a Dream," which he gave on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial. That's the only time he used such language. (Variations on the phrase "I have a dream" were then common in the American vernacular. In the 1959 Jules Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical, Gypsy, for instance, Mama Rose sings, "I had a dream ...")

"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!"

"I Have a Dream" is the speech, whose high points ("Let freedom ring!") King stole from a speech the Rev. Archibald Carey gave, of all places, at the 1952 Republican National Convention. King then copyrighted the stolen words as his own. Since his assassination, his family has compounded the plagiarism by shaking down individuals (including scholars, which no one had ever done before) and organizations for millions of dollars for the privilege of quoting a mishmash of Archibald Carey's stolen words and King's own words. That the copyright is fraudulent is, thanks to my old editor Ted Pappas and a few other writers by now well-known, but no one has so far had the gumption to take on the sanctimonious, self-righteous bunco artists who comprise the King family.

MLK didn't believe in any hooey about "the content of one's character." He was a race man! And taking his fine talk about black and white children playing together and holding hands seriously, requires a belief in race mixing that he also did not have. As journalist George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) understood, integration means, above all, blacks and whites making babies together.

Meanwhile, on MLK Day every year, black leftists insist on King's radicalism. That's the man they want celebrated. And they are right. King was a radical. The neoconservatives notwithstandsing, King supported affirmative action and reparations, and he got both. When the programs of the War on Poverty were initiated, it was understood that they were racial reparations programs. Thirty-odd years and a few trillion dollars later, contemporary civil rights hustlers developed amnesia, and demanded new reparations to blacks, but this time to the tune of as much as $1 million per black (an additional app. $37 trillion).

The proper meaning of "civil rights" is the rights due to citizens. In changing "civil rights" from something due all Americans to something due to some, based on the color of their skin, and not others, King committed the most egregious act of linguistic legerdemain since FDR turned the term "liberal" upside down, from the belief that government should interfere as little as possible in a citizen's life, to the notion that the government may meddle in all of a citizen's formerly private affairs without limit.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest orator I have ever heard. But that too is a cautionary tale: Beware of silver-tongued serpents.

The real meaning of MLK Day is "Black Day." It is a federal holy day celebrating blackness. But if we are going to eliminate all holy days celebrating white men and instead have a holiday celebrating a black, why not at least celebrate someone worthy? Pre-civil rights America had many black heroes worthy of celebration. Off the top of my head, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and my choice, Booker T. Washington, come to mind. Even A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the first successful black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, would be preferable to King, in spite of Randolph's socialism. Those five were real giants, rather than the products of propaganda.

As always, when discussing King, I leave the last word to George S. Schuyler, who, had he had the tuition money, could have buried King's fraudulent Ph.D. dissertation in a pile of real dissertations.

In 1964, when King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Schuyler wrote "King: No Help to Peace":

"Neither directly nor indirectly has Dr. King made any contribution to world (or even domestic) peace. Methinks the Lenin Prize would have been more appropriate, since it is no mean feat for one so young to acquire 60 communist front citations.... Dr. King's principle contribution to world peace has been to roam the country like some sable Typhoid Mary, infecting the mentally disturbed with perversions of Christian doctrine, and grabbing fat lecture fees from the shallow-pated."

Also, now that I've read through all of the posts, I think that it's interesting to to see the difference in the two types of people.....

Those that are open to new opinions on the subject (hey, maybe he wasn't a saint, after all) and those that would criticize anyone with an opinion that differs from the politically correct.

I see that I've got alot to learn about MLK then. But frankly, being in the south it is all we can do just to keep peace around here.

Sometimes I think we've got to pick our battles. So let them have their day.

MLK was a commie and don't forget that his FBI file is still closed and it was closed for 75 years.

I dont know about that. But I was THERE during the MLK RIOTS! I saw with my own eyes what this "great american" accomplished. The only reason there is an MLK day is liberals wanted it that way to shut the Black Caucus , the ACLU, and the NAACP.

I guess that what REALLY went on is just not PC enough for today's 'We Must Like All Blacks Because They Were Opressed" world.

No good conservative should teach in public (government) schools, because there should be no government schools. Only private and home schools. This little idea that the parents should actually provide education for their kids instead of fobbing it off on the rest of society. But I wouldn't expect you to understand that, since you are defending a Commie.

(As an aside, I do think it is important to judge people by what the morality of their day was, and not just by the morality of our day. For example, in that light it is easier to understand why Washington and Jefferson were slave owners. So there might be a time when you would go easier on an American leftist who was sympathetic to Communism. But by the 50's and 60's the evils of Communism were no secret. MLK has no excuse for his Commie sympathies.)

exactly. He wasn't perfect. He did some bad things. But he did some great things as well. He was a great man, and being a man, was fallible. All these attacks on his character and trying to tear him down are transparent attempts to belittle his accomplishments, to say 'well, this awful, awful man put his life on the line to change these things, and since he was bad, his ideas must be bad and since his ideas are bad, blacks should go back to separate drinking fountains.' The veneer of morality over blatant racism.

So you think there's something wrong; an ill in society (bad history teaching), yet you refuse to do anything about it? <<

Who says I refuse to do anything about it? The only thing I refuse to do is take the bait from a troll line.

Jesus- Just give the guy his day.

You have to take the Lord's name in vain in order to support an adulterer and plagerist? That's pathetic.

Sometimes I think we Republicans are becoming too rigid against our fellow Republicans who might have differing opinions.

In my mind's eye, it's the Democratic party which is filled with hate and pious notions, not my party.

I'm acknowledging that he was a leader in one of the most important social movements in our history. For that, I believe he should be respected and honored.

Look at the fruits of that movement and tell me whether life is improved by for the average black family. The number one problem in the black household today is broken homes. Who set the standard and example for adultery? MLK.

there is no evience he was a commie. Hoover tried for years to get some, but never did. Some of his friends were former commies of the card carrying type, but MLK wasn't.

Ended the oppression of millions?...and began the extortion of millions more -tax payers....and made the crime politically correct.

And if anyone was responsible for ending 'racism' I think the millions of 'white' boys who died in combat or later of their wounds...those who were maimed, blinded, amputees..those who lost their farms, their jobs, their families, their livlihood....ought to be thanked just a little...
for having ended racism...they did so at least as much as MLK...

imo

Some of his friends were former commies of the card carrying type, but MLK wasn't.

Yeah right. I know lots of capitalists who prefer to hang around communists.

only problem with your logic is that MLK's adultry is not widely bannied about, so it can't be an standard. Since there are no more lynchings, I'd say it is better no, but there's still a lot that needs fixing.

"(at my house, it's just referred to as mass murderer day" whoa! i HAVE Choctaw ancestry but I am glad white western christians discovered and colonized America before somebody else did. Buts thats just me.

Since there are no more lynchings

Despite, the decrease in lynchings, the average life expectancy of a black male has gone DOWN.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.