Posted on 08/28/2013 4:30:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
Amid the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, one complaint became almost a refrain: What about economic justice?
After all, the official title of the event was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The line "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" resides in the rhetorical pantheon with "Four score and seven years ago" and "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union."
But in one of the fascinating ironies that make history so compelling, King didn't plan to use the "I have a dream" line. His prepared remarks were winding down when gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted to him, "Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream!" -- a passage she had heard from him previously.
Even after the march, A. Philip Randolph, the march's director, received more coverage than King. Randolph spoke of civil rights, too, of course. But he also emphasized more typical left-wing economic fare: "It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits."
The left-wing journalist Murray Kempton said of the march's overall message: "No expression one-tenth so radical has ever been seen or heard by so many Americans." Many on the left have felt frustrated that this agenda -- which King subscribed to wholeheartedly -- doesn't share the same moral and political stature as King's dream of a colorblind society.
The frustration is understandable, but it stems from a fundamental confusion. As countless commentators have long noted, the genius of King's appeal to an ideal of colorblindness was deeply patriotic, rooted in the foundational principles of the republic. The march was set in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which King invoked: "But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination."
"In a sense," King continued, "we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
In the American context, these are universal appeals. King pleaded for the fulfillment of America's classically liberal revolution. At the core of that revolution was the concept of negative liberty -- being free from government-imposed oppression. That is why the Bill of Rights is framed in the negative or designed to restrict the power of government. "The Congress shall make no law" that abridges freedom of speech, assembly, etc.
This arrangement has never fully satisfied the left. The founding philosopher of American progressivism, John Dewey, argued for positive rights: We have the right to material things -- homes, jobs, education, health care, etc. Herbert Croly, the author of the progressive bible "The Promise of American Life," argued that the founding was unfinished and only by turning America into a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy could our "promise" be fulfilled. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to in effect replace the Bill of Rights with a new "economic bill of rights" along these lines. That was the intellectual tradition of Randolph and, to a significant degree, Barack Obama.
The problem is that, in America at least, appeals to social planning and guaranteed economic rights are not universal. They are, deservedly, controversial and contestable. They are all the more so when decoupled from the idea of colorblindness.
Which brings us to another compelling historical surprise. Conservatives, who were too often on the wrong side of civil rights in 1963, are champions of race neutrality, while King's self-appointed heirs are more inclined to champion the ideas that never spoke to the hearts of all Americans, or to mint new causes they assure us King would have cared deeply about had he lived. That's their prerogative, but they shouldn't be surprised when such efforts fail to capture the hearts and minds of all Americans.
NARRATION---MLK Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut (then a common practice for Southern college students who wanted summer jobs).
“On our way here we saw things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in June 1944. “After we passed Washington, DC, there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”
MLK spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury with white and black students. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.
“It’s clear that this little town, it made a huge impact on his life,” said John Conard-Malley, a Simsbury High School senior who did a documentary with other students on King’s experiences in Connecticut. “It’s possibly the biggest thing, one of the most important things, people don’t know about Martin Luther King’s life.”
Until then, King was thinking of becoming a lawyer, Conard-Malley said. But after his fellow students at the tobacco farm elected him their religious leader, he decided to become a minister.
In his later application to Crozer Theological Seminary King wrote that he made the decision that summer “when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.” “Perhaps if he hadn’t come to Connecticut, hadn’t picked tobacco up here, hadn’t felt like a free person, hadn’t felt what life was like without segregation and been elected the religious minister, he may not have become such a leader in the civil rights movement,” he said.
In a letter to his mother, King marveled over a trip he took to Hartford. “I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” King wrote. “And we went to the largest shows there.” He wrote of going to the same church as white people.
His new calling as a religious leader was emerging, too. “I have to speak on some text every Sunday to 107 boys. We really have good meetings,” he wrote.
In a speech in Hartford in 1959, King recalled how hot it was working on the tobacco field and how he looked forward to relaxing on weekends in Hartford. Byer says King and other students often worked in temperatures that reached 100 degrees or higher. The students, who were earning money to pay for college, made about $4 per day, Byer said. They lived in a dormitory built at the edge of the tobacco field.
That taste of freedom in New England ended as King returned home. When he got to Washington, he had to ride the rest of the way to Atlanta in a segregated train.
“After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation,” King wrote in his autobiography. “I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.”
Shortly before coming to Connecticut that summer, a Southern bus driver ordered MLK to give up his seat for a white passenger on the way to Atlanta.
King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, wrote in her memoir, “My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.” that her husband talked of the exhilarating sense of freedom he felt in Connecticut that summer.
Martin Luther King Jr. took his “I Have a Dream Speech” from a Black Republican…
Without ever giving proper credit to that Republican.
“Even the much celebrated “I have a dream” speech of 1963 was plagiarized. By a peculiar turn of events, the source King raided for this was a speech given to the Republican National convention of 1952, by a black preacher named Archibald Carey.”
Archibald Carey was appointed Chair of the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on August 3, 1957. He was the first African-American to hold this position. Mr. Carey also served as an alternate delegate from the United States to the United Nations from 1953 to 1956.
In 1952 Rev. Archibald Carey gave his speech at the Republican National Convention.
And wasn't King a Republican himself?
It is completely unture that Conservatives were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement.
Conservatives ARE the civil rights movement.
Fredrick Douglas Republicans ARE conservatives. Conservatives do not care about pigmentation, and DO care about the US constitution and our founding documents, which says we are equal. So we are equal, and that is what we know.
No matter who screwed the pooch on the message, the civil rights movement was the right thing to do, because this is America, the greatest country in the world.
People have equal rights under the law here. Conservatives were the reason the Civil Rights movement had and has any integrity at all in the first place.
Thank God! It amazes me that a bunch of economic imbeciles in Washington think they can make a billion economic decision per second and do it better than an unfettered market. Gees...they don't even read the legislation they pass. Save a scant few, they are all idiots.
Well said. I liked Jonah’s piece, but he got it wrong when he said Conservatives were on the wrong side in 1963.
Ahh have a dreem..........
That mah little children.............
Can mug all you whiteys with IM-PUE-NIT-EEE!!!!
Wow, CT, where I am from had a part in the MLK Jr. legecy.
Only to the extent that we could see that the Civil Rights movement was going to be hijacked by the Marxists. A remarkable prescience, I must say.
If he had gone to Tennessee instead, he could have been whipped by Al Gore’s father.
You good people.
Gee! I wonder what real religion all of those guys standing behind him with those funny little white caps are?
Baptists?
Wish he'd kept the appeal right there. Within a couple of years, he was selling the same pro-Soviet, treason-chic rant as the rest of the hard Left. In 1967, he made a grandiose announcement at (Left-wing) Riverside Church in New York that he now opposed the Vietnam War, and that the United States was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
This was considered a watershed event at the time. The Washington Post denounced him in an editorial. But it probably represented more a change in tactics than a change of heart. The white, pro-Soviet Left had always been a crucial part of his support base, at least financially. In the early 1950s, they had founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as a vehicle for him.
It's notable that King was widely considered washed-up as a Negro leader by the mid-1960s, overshadowed by more militant types such as Stokely Carmichael of SNCC—the "Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee" (which soon endorsed violence and changed its name). King's last big event was his 1968 "Poor People's Campaign," which was a push for flat-out socialism. As King put it:
"People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, 'We are here; we are poor; we don't have any money; you have made us this way . . . and we've come to stay until you do something about it.' "
There was a nationwide push by the SCLC to bring in Chicanos, American Indians, and white liberals to join a caravan making its way to D.C. to occupy the city. About a month before the Poor People's Campaign was to build a Tent City on the National Mall, King was shot in the midst of promoting a garbagemen's union strike against the city of Memphis.
In his final, "I've Been to the Mountaintop!" speech in Memphis, King says, "The masses of people are rising up." He singles out for praise not only Negro strikes and protests in the U.S., but anti-government insurrection movements in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. All these African campaigns happened to be sponsored and promoted by the Soviet Union. In the case of Ghana and Kenya, native governments had overthrown Soviet-backed governments in the face of economic disaster and corruption, and the Soviet factions were now fighting to regain power.
“The founding philosopher of American progressivism, John Dewey, argued for positive rights: We have the right to material things —”
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A classic case of forgetting the basics, going out on a limb and sawing it off behind you. There are not rights to anything that would not be available to the last person left alive on Earth. If it demands the existence of even one more person you do not have a right to it, you only have a right to bargain for it. You don’t have a right to a job, you only have a right to bargain for a job with someone who has a job to offer. You DON’T HAVE A RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE, you only have a right to bargain with others for medical care. It is so simple that people cannot comprehend it.
Yes, I DO mean that no one has a right to even something so basic as food unless they are capable of providing it for themselves, you do not even have a right to have a grocery store in your neighborhood, you certainly don’t have a right to have me pay for your groceries in that store. To say otherwise is simply to ignore reality. Let no one ask whether I am too hard hearted to offer food to someone who is starving, that is not the point, the point is that no one has a RIGHT to have me furnish him food. Should I do so it is out of kindness, not because they have a right to it, they are living in an absurd fantasy if they believe they have a right to demand that I furnish them food. Yes, without a doubt there are millions of Americans who do live in that absurd fantasy.
“People have equal rights under the law here.”
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That was the plan at one time but it is far from the case now, laws have been written in violation of the constitution and have created very UNEQUAL rights for people based on skin color. If you are white and think you have equal rights just go and apply for a government job, your thinking will soon be set right.
Your post is about the dumbest post I have see. *rme*
I would say yours is about the dumbest, where on Earth did you get the crazy notion that I said no one has a right to pick wild edibles? Obviously if you were the only person on the Earth you would have the right to pick any wild edible you could find. You DON’T have the right to have someone else pick them for you.
What I said is that you don’t have a right to food unless you can provide it for yourself, picking wild edibles is obviously providing food for yourself, think before you call someone else dumb, please. Try reading your last sentence, it doesn’t even make sense. “...I have SEE..”
No, this a myth. He was for mostly for scum like Lyndon Johnson. People keep repeating that falsehood to try to paint this guy as a Republican so we look good, we don't want this guy, he wasn't a very good guy, I mean he wasn't a piece of feces like Jesse Jackson but he wasn't some damn paragon we should build statues of. He called Goldwater the tool of racists and spent most of his free time banging his white groupies.
I've never heard of Archibald Carey, King plagiarized him? That wouldn't shock me.
Rev. Carey was a Chicago Republican. Ran for Congress in IL-1, but by the time he did, Black support for the party in the city was in freefall (if you weren’t a Dem, you weren’t going to get much in the way of patronage or other goodies).
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