Posted on 01/21/2008 5:24:25 AM PST by Kaslin
History is up to its old tricks again. The radical agitator of one generation becomes the conservative icon of another. Martin Luther King Jr. meets the very definition of an American conservative, that is, someone dedicated to preserving the gains of a liberal revolution.
Even when he was leading the civil rights movement, what appeal could have been more conservative or more American than his now classic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963?
"I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. 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."
Is any passage more frequently cited against the quota system called Affirmative Action? Is any passage so clear a call for what conservative candidates for president always seem to be calling for - character?
Even then Martin Luther King's words sounded conservative to those with ears to hear and minds to comprehend, for his message was rooted in traditional values. No wonder the young black radicals of the Sixties used to deride him as De Lawd. It was a toss-up whether his politics or his religion offended them more; the two were inseparable in his case.
To watch this black Baptist preacher out of Alabama on the old, black-and-white television tapes as he describes his very American dream is to realize how easily his ideas could have come from a conservative political tract - if only conservative political tracts were better written. Nothing was clearer about Dr. King's dream than the transformation of political struggle into morality tale. Which explains his effectiveness. He appealed to a common moral ground.
There were always those who thought of Dr. King's sermons as just window dressing for his social aims. They had it backwards. It was his religious ideas that compelled him to make the case for social and political change, and seek to create what he called The Beloved Community.
"Black and white together," the demonstrators used to sing. You don't hear that song much any more. Which may explain why the civil rights movement stopped moving. It became infected with much the same racial myopia it had fought, only with the colors reversed. (Black Power!)
After he was gone, a new black intelligentsia arose that knew not Martin. His would not be the name embroidered on the baseball caps of another generation. The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. would give way to the frustrations of a Malcolm X, the demagoguery of a Louis Farrakhan, and the general hucksterism of the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons.
Today, any black leaders who don't adhere to the party line - a Ward Connerly or Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell - are called traitors to their race. Others are dismissed as "not black enough" because they reach out to all of us. This is the new racism, and it needs to be called such.
A new intolerance divides us by Race and Gender, and into Minority and Majority. It strives to make many out of one. It's called multiculturalism, and it reverses that most American of mottos: E Pluribus Unum.
But the light can be blinked only so long. John Marshall Harlan's old ideal of a color-blind Constitution still shines, and begins to be reflected in Supreme Court decisions - and in a general American indifference to racial appeals. Barack Obama runs for president not as a black candidate but as one more choice, and does well. Indeed, he demonstrates daily that a black presidential candidate can be as vacuous as any other. It's progress of a sort.
You can tell a lot about an age by the heroes it chooses. While the Malcolms and Farrakhans come and go in favor, Martin Luther King Jr. remains the standard by which all other leaders are measured, and not just black leaders. That's a hopeful sign.
I’d like to comment on this but all we had was the MSM when it happened. All I remember from that period is that whenever King showed up in a city, riots and murders followed.
Some wiki excerpts from an article on Thurgood Marshall....
“Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. His original name was Thoroughgood but he shortened it to Thurgood in second grade. His father, William Marshall, instilled in him an appreciation for the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law. Additionally, as a child, he was punished for his school misbehavior by being forced to read the Constitution, which he later said piqued his interest in the document. Marshall was a descendant of slaves.”
“During the 1950s, Thurgood Marshall developed a friendly relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, the director the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1956, for example, he privately praised Hoover’s campaign to discredit T.R.M. Howard, a maverick civil rights leader from Mississippi.”
I therefore tend to think he was much, much more influential in White America accepting Black Americans based on one’s character than MLK and all of the Civil Rights leaders combined.
I love this quote and use it often on my lib coworkers who insist on making good liberal decisions on the basis of skin color rather than character.
MLK liked to cheat on wife like Clinton and Earvin Johnson.
I’ll save my worship for God.
MLK appreciated Free Speech for Everybody, not just the people he agreed with.
Isn’t that just a rumor?
As I stated on another thread, creating a holiday for a man who regularly consorted with known communists in order, apparently, to get his marching orders, was extremely foolish. But then so is the entire Congress.
Why Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican
By Frances Rice
It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.
And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S’s: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism.
It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860’s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
During the civil rights era of the 1960’s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court which resulted in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman’s issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was President Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.
Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Senator Al Gore, Sr. And after he became president, John F. Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.
In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King’s leaving Memphis, Tennessee after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a “trouble-maker” who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860’s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon‘s 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation‘s first goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.
Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.
Critics of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater who ran for president against Democrat President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.
Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater, also ignore the fact that President Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on January 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only thirty five words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King’s protest against the Viet Nam War, President Johnson referred to Dr. King as “that Nigger preacher.”
Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist “Dixiecrats” did not all migrate to the Republican Party. “Dixiecrats” declared that they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was known as the party for blacks. Today, some of those “Dixiecrats” continue their political careers as Democrats, including Democrat Senator Robert Byrd who is well known for having been a “Keagle” in the Ku Klux Klan.
Another former “Dixiecrat” is Democrat Senator Ernest Hollings who put up the Confederate flag over the state capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd praised Senator Byrd as someone who would have been “a great senator for any moment,” including the Civil War. Democrats denounced Senator Trent Lott for his remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond. Senator Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Senator Byrd and Senator Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.
The thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970’s with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which was an effort on the Part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.
Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.
After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3rd kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29th. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004 blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Bill Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).
Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30-40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. Over $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.
In order to break the Democrats’ stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party’s economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity. bttt
All I have to say is this: it's only in the perfuntory clips of his speeches that I hear things like, "black and white children playing together" (of course, this was the norm in my childhood, until "bussing." but I digress).
Think about it. "Black and white children playing together." That's a great dream. It's too bad that race peddlers of our day don't invoke it.
It's also a sweet irony that black and white children do play together, and then grow up to work together, in very large numbers. This reality is, of course, a terrible affront to the fairytales of the Al Sharpton ilk.
Do you have proof of this? Your hatred of the man that we honor today shows
You can tell a lot about an age by the heroes it chooses. While the Malcolms and Farrakhans come and go in favor, Martin Luther King Jr. remains the standard by which all other leaders are measured, and not just black leaders. That's a hopeful sign.
King gets “grandfathered” into being a “conservative” today because he was tragically murdered. I’ve also heard people claim JFK was a “conservative”. They weren’t considered to be conservatives when they were alive. It’s just that their tragic deaths froze them in time. And as liberalism has moved further and further leftward, their speeches seem conservative by comparison. But if they had lived, they would have moved to the left along with all the other liberals.
We keep hearing that there’s no mention in any of King’s speeches about affirmative action or race preferences. But there’s no mention in anyone’s speeches from that era of such things. Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, and Ted Kennedy all swore during the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act that it didn’t permit quotas or reverse discrimination. By 1970 or so, they were all saying otherwise. If King had been alive in 1970, he’d have been howling for quotas.
America has moved to the left incrementally. The Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have passed if they had told us the truth about it. So all those speeches from that era by King, JFK, and others seem downright “conservative”.
People here have often quoted Ted Kennedy during the debate on the 1965 Immigration Bill, where he assured the Senate that the bill wouldn’t change America’s demographics. I have no doubt that every single Senator who voted for it assured their constituents that they had no desire to alter America’s demographics. Those speeches and press releases would sound quite conservative today. But today Teddy has changed his tune and he openly boasts that America is going to change and that whites will be a minority by around 2050 and we should all “celebrate” it.
King plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, abused women (according to Rev. Ralph Abernathy and almost certainly documented on the FBI tapes we aren’t allowed access to), and supported the imposition of a Communist dictatorship on the Vietnamese people. His views were as far to the left as was politically acceptable in his lifetime. The nation has collapsed further to the left in the nearly forty years since his death.
Would he have shouted “halt”, as did David Horowitz and some other former leftists? Or would he have joined Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and all the rest and moved to the left with them? I think it’s a virtual certainty that he would have done the latter.
See King’s speech on Vietnam below:
If it were a lie I think I would have heard somebody refute it. I never have. The bigger point is that the whiners who want to cleanse America of Washington and Jefferson because they owned slaves don't see the imperfection in their own false idols. King was brave, but also imperfect.
Do you know if he was a philanderer?
I don’t know for absolute certain. Is there a source?
“MLK liked to cheat on wife like Clinton and Earvin Johnson.”
It seems Martin liked to chose his whores by the color of their skin. He preferred white whores, church bought scotch, and he liked to beat those whores.
If Martin Luther King was such a great man why is his FBI record sealed for my lifetime? Fifty years.
Is there any source or are those just rumors?
Ralph Abernathy, a long-time associate of King, admitted that King was a serial adulterer and on at least one occasion beat up a prostitute he had hired. Abernathy wrote about this in his autobiography in 1989. Carl Rowan, the liberal black journalist, reported that members of Congress as early as 1964 had told him the FBI had tapes of King participating in orgies. Those tapes have been sealed for an unprecedented fifty years, and I expect that when those fifty years are up, Congress will seal them for another fifty.
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