Great posts, Restorer.
Now, I have a question. Why is it that no one will ask the most obvious question when it comes down to King and the Civil Rights Movement? That question is simply this:
Why was someone like King needed in the first place?
That's the question no one seems to want to ask, ponder, or answer.
Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
I'll take a whack at it.
Because most Americans did not think of blacks as fully human, and therefore their oppression was not taken really seriously.
The magnificent ideals MLK articulated so well forced most of us to realize that blacks are indeed human, and that their oppression was a great betrayal of American ideals. He led, and to a large degree forced, a huge change in American attitudes towards race.
One of the greatest and most influential Americans of the 20th century.
That begs the question of whether he was needed or not. Also, "someone like King", would be Jesse Jackson or many other African American leaders then and now.
In my opinion, government policy and social change was inevitable with the change in society that had occured for many reasons after WWII and the rise of Liberalism. King, and others, focused these changes in such a way as to lead to the race consciousness that now pertains in America.
Liberalism focused this change in attitudes to give us "civil rights" laws which were largely opposed by the Right back then because they were seen as distructive of our federalistic system. Federalism and state's rights, local rights, are now essentially dead because of the liberal Warren Court which was the handmaided to this focus, and no conservatives supported that Court in it's efforts. How else would a rationale for overturning state laws against abortion be explained?
One of the curses of old age is that we live long enough to see our predictions proven correct. Another is to see the Orwellian "rewrite" of history occur before our very eyes.
Regards.
You seem to be suggesting, as the liberals do, that the injustice of racial preferences is a necessary evil to correct "past wrongs." Do two wrongs make a right?
I won't defend Jim Crow, but are laws which force integration just because Jim Crow was unjust? Why do we have to have either forced integration or forced segregation? Both have been the policies of the Democrats. Why must we be forced? Doesn't anyone believe in freedom anymore? The freedom to employ who you please, to go to whichever school you please, without interference from racist social engineers?
And the forced separation of people is American? Makes you wonder why it came to this, doesn't it?
Again, you seem to have an attitude of "well how do you like it?"
We don't like it. It shouldn't have happened to blacks, and it shouldn't happen to whites.
Lott and Frist have been accused of racism because they voted against a MLK holiday. They were right. King doesn't deserve to be held in such high esteem and our children don't deserve to be lied to about what a great guy he was. The issue here is not civil rights, but King himself.
King opposed the VietNam war because he didn't see why black should have to die fighting a war for the white man. Indeed, why should blacks have to fight for the freedom of yellow VietNamese from Communist slavery? I guess for the same reason so many thousands of whites dies to free the slaves.
I haven't the slightest doubt that if King were alive today he'd be at the commie antiwar rallies calling Bush a warmonger nazi. He'd be undermining our national unity in a time of crisis, just like he did when he was alive. He'd be arm in arm with Arafat, Mugabe and Castro, just like Mandela. Cheney was called racist for voting not to free the cop-killer Mandela. He was right, but it's not PC these days to condemn a communist terrorist for what he is.
King embraced the abortion agenda of Margaret Sanger whose idea it was to exterminate the "lesser races" through eugenics. That's your hero. A dirty hypocrite, and pawn of nazis, commies and other socialist scum who want to tear this country to shreds.
When I hear King speak of "freedom", I hear a Communist crying, "Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
I don't celebrate the birthdays of peacenik America-bashing communist sympathizers.