In other words, provide leadership and a voice to people who had been suffering too long under an unjust situation? So what was wrong with that? Character flaws aside, he did step up and provide that leadership. And he and other leaders with him paid a price for that in beatings and jailings and more than a few assasinations. Are we not a better country overall for it? Someone mentioned Justice Thomas and Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice before. Those three could never have risen to the position that they have under the conditions prevelent in the south, and much of the North, at the time of King and the Civil Rights movement.
See post #9:
"In the final analysis...it is up to the machinery of the culture to decide what he was and what he accomplished. So far, the Left has been in firm control of that legacy and they have sainted him with honors far, far beyond his ken. In any event, he was the lightning rod for social change and a good deal of that was good and necessary. A good deal of it, however, was just plain bad and we still suffer the ill effects of the 'moral' crusade of those times...In the future, the debate may be rejoined with the restraint of political correctness gone. Then the true measure of the man will be taken - when all those that would bludgeon legitimate questions are finally seen as the true bigots of the present age."
"In other words, provide leadership and a voice to people who had been suffering too long..."
No, those are your words. What he did, he did because he was annointed by the national media - not because of his personal moral merit. Today's annointed leadership in the persons of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are products of the same machine.
Ask yourself this question: Why was the party of Jim Crow, the KKK, lynchings and all of the repression you speak about so closely allied with that age and movement in spite of their historic crimes and their actual resistence (Against CRA: %D's > %R's) to change?
Somehow Democrats and black leadership were able to conceal all of that history and baggage and transform traditionally Republican voting blacks into a stable of state dependent wards. Today, after nearly $6 trillion dollars spent in erradicating poverty and the supposed ills of racial injustice, we now have a legacy of more poor, greater social disintegration and demographics amongst black America that they may never recover from. All, I might add, as direct products of the "dream" as it was actualized by King and his fellow crusaders.