Posted on 01/21/2008 6:02:55 AM PST by BenLurkin
NEW YORK - They are some of the most famous words in American history: "I have a dream ..." And the man who said them has become an icon.
Martin Luther King Jr. has certainly gotten his share of attention this year, the subject of a presidential campaign controversy over his legacy that blew up just around the time of the holiday created to honor him.
But nearly 40 years after his assassination in April 1968, after the deaths of his wife and of others who knew both the man and what he stood for, some say King is facing the same fate that has befallen many a historical figure — being frozen in a moment in time that ignores the full complexity of the man and his message.
"Everyone knows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King, can say his most famous moment was that "I have a dream" speech," said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo.
"No one can go further than one sentence," he said. "All we know is that this guy had a dream, we don't know what that dream was."
At the time of his death, King was working on anti-poverty and anti-war issues. He had spoken out against the Vietnam War in 1967, and was in Memphis in April 1968 in support of striking sanitation workers.
King had come a long way from the crowds who cheered him at the 1963 March on Washington, when he was introduced as "the moral leader of our nation" — and when he pronounced "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
By taking on issues outside segregation, he had lost the support of many newspapers and magazines, and his relationship with the White House had suffered, said Harvard Sitkoff, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire who has written a recently published book on King.
"He was considered by many to be a pariah," Sitkoff said.
But he took on issues of poverty and militarism because he considered them vital "to make equality something real and not just racial brotherhood but equality in fact," Sitkoff said.
While there has been scholarly study of King and everything he did, that knowledge hasn't translated into the popular culture perception of him and the civil rights movement, said Richard Greenwald, professor of history at Drew University.
"We're living increasingly in a culture of top 10 lists, of celebrity biopics which simplify the past as entertainment or mythology," he said. "We lose a view on what real leadership is by compressing him down to one window."
That does a disservice to both King and society, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University.
By freezing him at that point, by putting him on a pedestal of perfection that doesn't acknowledge his complex views, "it makes it impossible both for us to find to new leaders and for us to aspire to leadership," Harris-Lacewell said.
She believes it's important for Americans in 2008 to remember how disliked King was in 1968.
"If we forget that, then it seems like the only people we can get behind must be popular," Harris-Lacewell said. "Following King meant following the unpopular road, not the popular one."
In becoming an icon, King's legacy has been used by people all over the political spectrum, said Glenn McNair, associate professor of history at Kenyon College.
He's been part of the 2008 presidential race, in which Barack Obama could be the country's first black president. Obama has invoked King, and Sen. John Kerry endorsed Obama by saying "Martin Luther King said that the time is always right to do what is right."
Not all the references have been received well. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton came under fire when she was quoted as saying King's dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
King has "slipped into the realm of symbol that people use and manipulate for their own purposes," McNair said.
Harris-Lacewell said that is something people need to push back against.
"It's not OK to slip into flat memory of who Dr. King was, it does no justice to us and makes him to easy to appropriate," she said. "Every time he gets appropriated, we have to come out and say that's not OK. We do have the ability to speak back."
Nobody wants to talk about the real King because then you are defaming a black hero, even if it’s all true, perhaps especially if it’s all true, and by extension all black people. Can’t do that.
I’m with others here in believing the man was a good deal more good than bad, but it is interesting that the article doesn’t even discuss the issues that really made him a complex character.
I’ve often wondered, if he had lived, how the black “civil rights” movement would have evolved. I see three main possibilities:
1. King might have evolved away from the color-blind ideology in a Jackson/Sharpton race-baiting direction in order to stay out in front of his followers.
2. He might have stuck with his color-blind approach and been discredited and abandoned as an Uncle Tom.
3. He might have kept the civil rights movement from deteriorating to its present pathetic whitey-blaming condition, which would have resulted in much better race relations in America by this point in time.
Only the third would be a real improvement over what we have today, but due to his murder we’ll never know whether it could have happened.
King's popularity had dropped before his death because he was being attacked by more militant types. I think the King vs. Malcolm X contrast is sometimes cast as a replay of the Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. DuBois opposition of an earlier generation (although King was far removed from BTW's views).
One good thing that came out of the King holiday is that it saved lives in 1994--the Northridge earthquake happened on the holiday, so traffic on the LA freeways was much lighter than normal. If it had been a normal work day, more people would have been killed when a portion of the freeway collapsed.
The Left just wants us to ignore King’s message of a colorblind society ideal and instead to focus on his socialistic economic and anti-war views.
King was even booed by New Leftists in 1967 when he addressed them at their "National Conference for a New Politics" that took place in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend. Seems they considered him a has-been who was no longer radical enough for their tastes.
Helms haters conveniently overlook the fact that James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi and later was shot while participating in a civil rights protest march, served for a time as on Helms' Senate staff.
Hear! Hear!
Well Said!
Carver was a genius, an honorable man, a humble man, a great innovator.
I vote for George Washington Carver Day!
Dr. King was the right man at the right time. The old racist system had to be done away with. King’s non-violent strategy was not only ethical, it was also very smart and pragmatic. Some communists insinuated themselves into the civil rights movement. They were not concerned with the well-being of blacks. They hoped that blacks and whites would go violent and destroy America in a race war. Thanks to wise people like King, that did not happen (white Americans deserve some credit, too, to more or less willingly abandon the preferences that the old system gave them). There were black riots and white mobs who lynched blacks, but there was no racial war.
THE SOFT-MARXISM THAT HAS PENETRATED AMERICA HAS SEEN THE ELIMINATION OF WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN’S HOLIDAYS(NOW CALLED “PRESIDENT’S DAY”). BUT, STRANGELY ONLY ONE MAN’S NAME NOW APPEARS AS A NATIONAL HOLIDAY. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? HOW COULD THE NAMES OF THE MAN WHO LED THE CONTINENTAL ARMY AGAINST THE BRITISH AND FOUNDED OUR NATION, AND THE MAN WHO FREED THE SLAVES BE ELIMINATED FROM NATIONAL DAYS OF MEMORY? WHO DID THIS? REMEMBER PICTURES OF SADAAM’S STATUE BEING TOPPLED AFTER US TROOPS INVADED BAGDAD? WHAT IS IT THAT NATIONS’ DO WHEN ENEMY NATIONS ARE VANQUISHED? WHO INVADED OUR NATION? WHO VANQUISHED US? WHO ERECTED “STATUES” TO JUST ONE MAN? (PS, WILL THERE SOON BE A NATIONAL HOLIDAY FOR A HISPANIC WHO LED THE LETTUCE-PICKERS? TO PLACATE ILLEGAL ALIENS? JUST VOTE “D”.)
M. Savage
Fine!!! We’ve heard over and over again what a saint MLK was. Isn’t it time that his entire FBI file be released for public consumption? Let’s find out if he had sympathies to the Communists.
Was there ever any question?
Great question.
bump
The Democrats ??? ... that was the Party of Lester Maddox, Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Estes Kefauver.
King saw Marxism as an easy path to social equality, ignoring the general impoverishment of Communist dictatorships. He lived long enough to see the beginning of the impoverishment of his Black Community, as Johnson offered Welfare in payment for Black Democrat votes.
Why Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-gop/1957006/posts
His notions of militarism were absurd and reflect little credit upon his ability to analyze the situation in the US and world. And his ideas of equality (that it could not be achieved without a massive redistribution of income were foolish and naive) were those of a man with little understanding of economics.
I meant that had King lived, his reputation would have suffered enormously as he involved himself in political movements that moved him further to the left of the political mainstream. I doubt that if the man lived the length of a normal life - say, he lived as long as his wife - it is unlikely his birthday would have become a national holiday.
I wish to make it clear that I think that Martin Luther King was a man of enormous courage, charisma, and intellect that profoundly altered the course of American history and made it a better country in so far has its promise of justice for all is concerned.
This does not mean however that his legacy to the Civil Rights movement has been one of unalloyed good. I believe much of his bequeathment resulted in an over reliance on big government statist solutions to problems within the black community that require individual initiatives to correct. Martin Luther King’s frequent references to this nation’s founding documents are well known. His reflections on Communism are much less well known and undoubtedly contributed to his general philosophy. We owe it to ourselves to examine the effects of this legacy and contextualize it so has to solve the problems facing the black community today.
While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.
King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC.
Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O’Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) “A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s SCLC. He is Jack H. O’Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.” Dr. King fired O’Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.
King himself expresses a Marxist outlook in his book “Stride Toward Freedom” when he stated, “in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system”
King, unfortunately, didn’t understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By “better distribution of wealth” King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for “the profit motive” was unfortunate given that African-Americans should’ve been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King’s leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.
In “Stride Toward Freedom” Dr. King states “In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.”
King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had “a dialectical point of view.” The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.
All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that “progress” is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.
This belief in dialectical progress is why liberals pit the rich against the poor, old against young, black against white, men against women, gay against straight, ad nauseam.
This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book “Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story”, in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the Communist super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
“During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.
First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an ‘interim’ reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself.”
Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93
Let us not forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time Stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the leftist tinted civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism generally more palatable.
While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.
The fact is that he WAS a socialist and that goes to the heart of what went wrong with the civil rights establishment after the legal battles against codified discrimination were won.
I am a black man who has been getting callouses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaquing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance.
MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assesment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the “indispensable man.” Without his courage, acumen, honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.
MLK’s birthday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK’s association with the most anti-freedom ideaology (Communism)of our time will prove to very embarrassing when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK’s legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment, that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today’s black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.
LBJ wasn’t just a sinister politician, he was downright evil!
How apropos that it was he that rigged a national holiday to honor a dishonored man.
MLK is as valid a hero as Kwanzaa is a legitimate holiday deserving of celebration
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