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."

" By the same token, you could hardly find a scholar at Harvard whose works weren't plagiarized to some degree. "

When you use others' materials and attribute the material to them, it's not plagiarism. I doubt very seriously you could find much plagiarism at all, at Harvard or anywhere. It's easy to spot, and the penalties are severe.

While I agree that MLK did some good things, I think that he does not deserve to be lionized the way he is today. And that's the point of the author of this article as well. I don't think it's fair to say that the author is pillorying MLK; he's just telling the truth. I think it takes a great deal of courage to tell the truth about a cultural hero like MLK; he was not the man that he or others made himself out to be.

Sidenote: The King family, with their millions, had the gall to request that I law firm where I used to be employed represent them on a pro bono basis. Pretty cheeky, if you ask me.

Sorry about that last post Moderator. Let me try again.

It would have been great if the heroic Jessie "Shakedown" Jackson would have saved Martin Luther King, Jr. from James Earl Jones. That's better, now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

What a crock! Public schools have been around a lot longer than you neo-con anti-school types. Try like a couple of centuries. I know many fine americans that teach in schools. They doing thae best they can with what thet have to work with. Its not the teachers, NEA, unions etc, its the little sh#t heads that so called parents send to school everyday thats causing the problem. Think you can solve that problem by setting up a voucher system? think again.

" If you're so concerned about getting a federal holiday for George Washington, then go lobby for one."

Washington's birthday used to be a holiday. Then they consolidated it with another president's birthday (Lincoln's? Help me out here, folks...) and now they are collectively known as "President's Day."

yeah, poverty kills. I just said there's more work to be done. But at least now we have a system where the chance of some black child making it is better that it was before the civil rights movement.

I am glad white western christians discovered and colonized America before somebody else did. Buts thats just me.

Me too.

BTW, I do not see where Columbus could be considered a mass murderer without revisionist History.

"His due is the fact that he was the leader in the civil rights movement, which to this day remains one of the greatest movements in the history of the United States."

What it is and what it was are 180* apart.
As for his leadership, he can be lumped into the same category as Jackson and sharpton. Profiteers.
The only way to garner respect and acceptance is by doing those things which gain you respect and acceptance. Ask Dr. Rice, she knows.

"Do you agree that the civil rights movement was a just and moral movement?"

As a whole, no. Everyone has equal opportunity, protection and civil liberties., If you don't take advantage of the opportunity it doesn't make you oppressed, it makes you a ward of the State, which is exactly what mlk, jfk,lbj and the liberals want the blacks to be.

"Do you agree that MLK was its primary spokesperson, and easily its most memorable?"

Wiiliam Shatner is the spokesman for Priceline.com and the same could be said about him.

Being a memorable spokesman does not make one a hero, or right. King is what he his, let's not make him something grand.

Wow, you seem to have taken it personally. I wasn't referring to you; I was referring to Jackson and Sharpton. As for George Washington, he had a federal holiday for most of my life and his accomplishments stand with or without one.

You are making a lot of assumptions. And blatantly wrong ones. I have been called many things on this forum, but never before have I been called a neo-con. That is laughable. Go to some of the Confederate threads or the antiwar threads and see what I have contributed before. I am anything but a neo-con. I am a paleo to the core. And what did I say that makes you think I support vouchers? I do not. Vouchers are just another scheme to redistribute the wealth. What I said is there should be no public financing of education, period. The separation of education and state, if you will. Public (government) education is collectivist to the core and is illegitimate. Take a little time to read before you fire off your posts.

"So what were you doing while citizens were being oppressed during Jim Crow?"

Not that your question is germane, but...
I hadn't been born. But since you asked, what were you doing?

Where is your name written as a hero of the movement, or even mentioned as a participant. Do you think all white people who didn't march against Jim Crow are not really people. That white people didn't live through those times, but somehow appeared from nowhere once the battle had been fought? Isn't enough that whites can accept blacks because of who they are, not what they are?(sounds familiar somehow)Must all whites be punished and taxed and trodden upon simply because they are white and do not believe the "party line".(sounds familiar also) Excuse me while I refuse to bend over backwards to not appear racist. You feel free to bend as far as you like though, really, it's OK.

Ok. Point taken. But you do recognize public education has been around a long time. I think Thomas Jefferson was a strong supporter because of his belief in an educated electorate. A more important concern than just having private education as a matter of principle.

Let the man have his day. He did give a great speech, and helped his people achieve some measure of equality in those days- would some of you on this thread prefer the "White/Colored" drinking fountains come back?

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