Posted on 01/20/2020 11:00:57 AM PST by Kaslin
Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Bruce Eberle.
While Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and Republicans passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution as well as the civil rights act of 1875, it fell to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to actually bring about full citizenship rights for black Americans. Booker T. Washington had advanced the cause of black Americans into the twentieth century, but the situation worsened as progressives introduced segregation in the South that then spread to virtually the entire nation.
These progressive intellectuals who orchestrated segregation were certain that science proved black Americans to be inferior to white Americans. Edward Ross, a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, wrote in 1901 that “The superiority of a race cannot be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races.”[i] Ross further, “advised progressives to discard the sentimental, religious equalitarianism of the old abolitionists and base their ideas of reform on hard science.”[ii] The hard science that Ross referred to was, of course, not science at all, it was just an ideologically warped justification for segregation.
And, to keep black Americans from voting progressives in the South used poll taxes and literacy tests to deny them their full rights as citizens under the 15th Amendment. The evil of segregation endured until one man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a massive civil rights movement in the 1960s. That movement was amazingly successful, but it cost Dr. King and others their lives to secure voting rights and an end to the corrupt policies of segregation that held black Americans back from having the opportunity to fully enjoy the American Dream. Because of his efforts the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 as well as the very important Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dr. King worked with both Republicans and Democrats to advance the cause of civil rights. When Richard Nixon fought hard for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (only to see it effectively neutered by Lyndon Johnson and the Southern Caucus) he still received these encouraging words from Dr. King:
“Let me say how deeply grateful we are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality. This has impressed people all across the country, both Negro and white. This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.”
Nixon justified Dr. King’s praise when he was elected president in 1968. When Nixon took office, only 5.2% of black children in the South were attending desegregated schools.[iii] Thanks to Nixon’s efforts in 1972, just three years later, 90% of black children in the South were attending integrated public schools.
Not only Dr. King, but other Americans, black and white, gave their lives so that black Americans might have their full rights as American citizens. And, just because laws were passed, it did not mean that black Americans were fully accepted into American society. But, the foundation was laid for eradicating roadblocks to African American advancement economically, socially, and politically.
Too often politicians have looked upon black Americans only as a voting bloc to be manipulated and used to advance their causes. And, sadly those causes have too often affected black Americans negatively. While segregation may have been formally eradicated, in reality it still exists. The Great Society programs of the 1960s led by liberal Democrats successfully destroyed the intact black family, driving fathers from the home. This loss of male role models in the home caused far too many young black men to seek out gangs to prove their manhood.
The situation was further compounded when poor black children were denied high quality schools, education being the primary criteria to escaping poverty. Democrat politicians chose the money from the teacher’s union over the welfare of poor black children by blocking high quality school choice schools, while they send their own children to private schools. They also chose money from Planned Parenthood that targets unborn black babies. And, they callously disregard the impact of a flood of illegal aliens on the jobs and salaries of black Americans.
This year as we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day there is much good news. The Trump Administration has not only pushed hard for the introduction of high quality schools into poor black communities, but also signed into law the First Step Program granting early release from prison of nonviolent offenders and setting up programs to facilitate a successful transition to a good job after their release.
Perhaps more important, Donald Trump has severely curtailed the flood of illegal aliens that steal jobs from black Americans and drive down the wages of those who have a job. On top of that, we can all celebrate the fact that the roaring economy we are all now enjoying has driven black unemployment to its lowest level in recorded history, and raised black wages significantly.
Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “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.” Great progress has been made toward the realization of that dream. That progress is not due to the efforts of Republicans for Democrats, but to the ongoing efforts of black Americans whose strong faith in God, and capacity to forgive are helping to bring our nation together.
Dr. King would not believe that minorities are incapable of getting Voter IDs
bttt
And that King liked to patronize and beat young, white prostitutes. And that there were prostitutes in King's hotel room when he managed to get hisself shot.
And that his alcoholism was getting worse and his popularity was in decline.
Is there anything else?
All Americans and most especially those of African ancestry need to be reminded of this inconvenient fact.
Dr. King worked with both Republicans and Democrats to advance the cause of civil rights
The Democrats Fought Tooth and Nail against every piece of Civil Rights Legislation and Filibustered them
Abernathy, as you may know was Dr. King's right-hand man and was present with him in Memphis when he was gunned down. This was roughly a quarter century later but before King had been elevated to sainthood, so someone asked Abernathy about all those prostitute rumors.
Abernathy admitted King had a weakness for sex, but he did not hire prostitutes. He was famous enough at the time that women, black and white, threw themselves at him and Abernathy's job as just one of his trusted inner circle had to screen out those who were potential blackmailers versus those who were just interested in boinking a famous man.
Abernathy told us that he and the other screeners should have been more careful and discreet, but they were just doing what Martin wanted. Their biggest fear was that Dr. King would be shot by a jealous husband or boyfriend, not a nobody like James Earl Ray
Abernathy would not speculate on who did the actual shooting, but he strongly felt it was NOT James Earl Ray. It was an interesting and memorable evening to say the least.
Plagiarism
And yet still called ‘Dr.”
They keep up printing and espousing the legend. The prodigious plagiarizer, womanizer, prostitute beater, and moral corrupt icon keeps getting the legend treatment.
A) that is a bad statue. Carve something better.
B) he had 2 hookers in the hotel room when he was shot.
C) his family members and Jesse Jackson are all greedy / crooks.
Not progressives. They are democrats.
FTA: While Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and Republicans passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution as well as the civil rights act of 1875, it fell to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to actually bring about full citizenship rights for black Americans. Booker T. Washington had advanced the cause of black Americans into the twentieth century, but the situation worsened as progressives introduced segregation in the South that then spread to virtually the entire nation.
IO was in the recovering room of the old Fort Campbell hospital recovering from a surgery when it was announced that he had been shot.
I forgot the plagarism.
PAPERS WRITTEN BY MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. REVEAL HE WAS NOT A CHRISTIAN AND PREACHED SOCIAL JUSTICE AND NOT SALVATION IN JESUS CHRIST ALONE
In the 52 years since he was killed MLK has achieved Myth Like Status. Whatever he really was has been supplanted by Myth, Legend, and Hyperbole. Just like a number of others in history, John F. Kennedy, etc. and etc..
Plus it is ‘white’ marble statue.... maybe black granite.
Martin Luther King was a man of enormous courage, charisma, and intellect who profoundly altered the course of American history and made it a better country in so far as its promise of justice for all is concerned. He is quite credibly ranked as one of the greatest men in US history.
This does not mean 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 as 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. His closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist. 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.
King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? “I am now convinced…the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” But “to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure” it “must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income” and “must automatically increase as the total social income grows.” So far, his proposal was not materially different from Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program. This was from his later works, but he had voiced support for “a modified form of socialism” for some time. While accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King told the press, “We feel we have much to learn from Scandinavia’s democratic socialist tradition and from the manner in which you have overcome many of the social and economic problems that still plague far more powerful and affluent nations.”
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
Don’t 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. MLK claimed to be working for liberty. and notwithstanding the egregious racial bigotry of his time, he should have completely rejected the murderous tyranny of Marxism and communism as an unacceptable palliative in ANY context.
I am a black man who has been getting calluses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing 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. The two parent black family was destroyed by LBJ’s welfare state. That was the worst cultural calamity to EVER befall the black community in the US, and the most destructive force in its cultural life notwithstanding the imposition of Jim Crow law via the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Fergueson decision. MLK was a leading proponent for expanding the welfare state, whose baleful effects were just beginning to be seen in the black community.
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 assessment 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 holiday 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 ideology (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.
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