Didn’t MLK want everyone judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character?
I’m not saying he was a great man, but might things have been different if he survived?
i know nothing of his politics so i could be completely wrong.
Yes, things would have been different.
Yes, and he seems to have meant it. A movie that was made while MLK was alive, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? about an interracial romance, has the son (played by Sidney Poitier) in the romance saying to his father:
"Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man." (cf. here)
That is what conservatives want men to think of themselves as: men. Not white men, not black men, not red men, not yellow men, not rainbow men, MEN. (That includes Bruce Jenner, but I digress.) And women to think of themselves as women, not white women, not black women, not red women, not yellow women, not rainbow women, WOMEN. In the world that King and Poitier wanted, the only problem Rachel would have would be finding a productive job, because she wouldn't have had to con the NAACP into making her executive director in Spokane, because there would be no need for an NAACP, because there would be no CP or WP or AP or IP, only P.
Very very short version: towards the end of his life he was becoming increasingly progressive in his politics, so if he had lived he might have ended up as a sad caricature of himself, the way most of his younger contemporaries (Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Julian Bond, et. al.) have become sad caricatures of themselves.
The reason King in his heyday of the late 50s and early 60s was important was because he was the only person in the history of civil rights to be able to forge a wide coalition of the three main competing groups: those who follow Booker T. Washington (black conservatives, people today like Larry Elder, Herman Cain, and Ben Carson), those who follow W.E.B. DuBois (black liberals, basically all Democrats), and the combination of Maoists (Black Panthers, US) and Fascists (Nation of Islam). The moment he died, the coalition fell apart, because there was no one able to take his place.
MSM has spent the last 47 years convincing the American people in general, and the African-American community in particular, that the Bookerites do not exist, and when they do, they are Uncle Tom turncoats on their own race. A Republican being the first black President would have gone a long way to ending the fiction; having a Maoist follower of Bill Ayers and Valerie Jarrett as the first black President makes that essentially impossible for the next generation, which will ensure that racial politics will remain for at least the next generation.
(I-might-be-totally-wrong-but-I'm-a-)
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