I know there are people on the right who aren’t fans of MLK Day. I myself would prefer we mark emancipation and the extension of civil rights to all our citizens on another day, not an individual’s birthday but on, say, Juneteenth. What’s more, many of those claiming King’s mantle today are indeed charlatans and con artists. And yes, he had extramarital affairs (like, you know, Hamilton and Franklin). He also clearly seems to have plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation. All of which means he was a sinner like the rest of us.
But we were still blessed by Providence to have had him, because he was the right man at the right time. It was he who rose to be the leader and articulator and symbol of the civil-rights movement, a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” and not the loathsome racist Elijah Mohammed or the criminals of the Black Panther movement or even Malcolm X and his late embrace of mainstream Islam. Would any of these men, or the frauds and swindlers who claim to be “civil rights” spokesmen today, give a speech that ends this way?:
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
"Would any of these men, or the frauds and swindlers who claim to be “civil rights” spokesmen today, give a speech that ends this way?"
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Or cite St. Thomas Aquinas, as MLK did in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo - and neither would MLK in this day and age.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou're probably right, but we can say that about any dead political figure. Would JFK have remained a tax-cutting, cold warrior had he lived? Would FDR and the congress that passed Social Security have supported the measure if they knew life expectancy would skyrocket? And would the founding fathers have enshrined our natural inalienable rights if they knew how they would end being abused into meaning things they didn't intend them to mean? Would we really want to know the answer?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's not the inalienable rights that are the problem: it's the gloss, spin and embroidery that have been put on those rights beyond their plain meaning.
Even a beautiful woman looks awful when dressed like a tart.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou mean emanations and penumbras?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell put.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBut Hamilton and Franklin do not have national holidays.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes we are all sinners. But MLK is the only American whose birthday is a national holiday. As a plagiarist, serial adulterer and ally of Ho Chi Minh he does not deserve that status. Unfortunately, in MLK's case, perception has become reality. I would hypothesize that if MLK were alive today, his political positions would be indistinguishable from those of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer, et al. Oh well, as the saying goes, "When legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Nope, Comrade King is indefensible. His philosophy and his heirs have done nothing but damage to American blacks.
Henry Ford did vastly far more good by opening up a world of living-wage jobs to both black and white sharecroppers, and by helping the workers AND THEIR WIVES to learn the organized ways of the middle class.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI was never against the MLK holiday, but now I wish it had never passed into law. My reasons have nothing to do with affairs, or plagiarism, or the expense it would incur giving all federal employees a day off, but everything to do with what it has become. Instead of taking this day to remember the words of King as it applies to universal human rights, or to take account of all the positive changes his crusade brought to this great nation, it has become a day of complaining about what still "needs to be done", as though nothing has changed. Worse, it's become an opportunity to bash Republicans, as we saw earlier with Valerie Jarret's graceless comments, with church's being used as smoke-filled rooms once were, for base politicking. . Would the King holiday have gotten large scale public support if it was known that it would eventually become just a Democrat Party holy day of obligation.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAbsolutely, Joey....sentiments that I included in my own remarks in this thread, although less gracefully.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's a shame that King was memorialized with that awful Chairman Mao-nesque statue.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse>>It's a shame that King was memorialized with that awful Chairman Mao-nesque statue.
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Seems appropriate to me...one of the few really appropriate remembrances of MLK. (My basis for approving remembering a communist in communist style is elaborated higher in the tread.)
"Juneteenth"? Really? How about the date of the signing of the emancipation proclamation, or the day of the enactment of the 13th Amendment? Or the end of the Civil War?
Not a fan of MLK, but given the increasing compartmentalization of our population into interest groups, i guess -- as a descendant of Europeans -- I don't have to. I simply don't acknowledge it.
I'll celebrate great men like Washington and Lincoln, and national events like the 4th of July and Memorial Day and let others have their Cesar Chavez Day, MLK Day.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs a Southerner with our love for lost causes, I sneer at MLK day. I will never respect or honor it in the least.
I used to admire King as having been the essential man at the critical moment....the case that Mark has made. And I do not disqualify him from the pantheon of great men because of his moral failings. I disqualify him, because he was a communist. I surmise that it was a gradual drift in his life, but shortly before his death he was actively strategizing with civil rights leaders on how to convert their movement into a broad "social justice" movement emphasizing jobs, housing, and other good things that most of us regard as proper rewards for good decisions in life; he wanted to turn all these things into "rights." He said explicitly that he understood that such things were not really "rights," but that that rhetoric had so much momentum for them that they should stay with it.
And there is another thing. MLK -- especially in the South -- has become a mode of cultural warfare. Every important new road should be named "MLK." Schools. Parks. You cannot possibly have enough MLK icons in public spaces. It is a large piece of an aggressive push to claim a dominant place in the culture for a minority that, although it has suffered and been historically mistreated, has more in common with third-world cultures than with the once dominant, European-based American culture.
So, yea, I have completely lost touch with the respect I once had for MLK and consider every invocation of his memory just another bit of incoming cultural fire from the Left. When I walk by a statue of MLK, I do not feel reverence. I feel something much less polite.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"It is a large piece of an aggressive push to claim a dominant place in the culture for a minority that, although it has suffered and been historically mistreated, has more in common with third-world cultures than with the once dominant, European-based American culture."
What an historically ignorant analysis. More in common with third-world cultures? African-Americans as a group have contributed virtually nothing to US culture? Your real problem, obviously, is the insecurity you feel about being part of a wrongly displaced once-dominant European-based American culture.
I won't even start unpacking your characterization of the institution of slavery as mere "suffering" and "mistreatment." You can argue legitimately about present-day programs that are proffered to remedy what slavery did to the ancestors of many Americans, but shamelessly mischaracterizing slavery itself is reprehensible.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEd: you write: "It is a large piece of an aggressive push to claim a dominant place in the culture for a minority that, although it has suffered and been historically mistreated, has more in common with third-world cultures than with the once dominant, European-based American culture."
Slavery was mere "suffering" and "mistreatment"? Try educating yourself a little and you'll discover it was a lot worse than that. "More in common with third-world cultures"? Not part of "dominant" American culture? Such ignorance of the many contributions of slaves and their descendants to this country, Everything about MLK is "cultural fire from the left"? Really? It is indeed a shame we don't have the orderly little world of segregation and Jim Crow laws. How dare these people assert themselves!!!!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Krikorian, thank you for a sensitive, uplifting essay. Cordially, Bill
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI could care less about the affairs. The plagiarism is even a relatively small matter with me. His advocacy of socialism... real, massive government, redistributive socialism... is why I have a problem with the man. Not all national heroes were really heroes (see the disgusting and overrated Thomas Paine, favorite of Glenn Beck).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI would happily take Juneteenth over MLK day for two reasons: One, it celebrates the totality of the freedom of blacks, and not just one man. Two, the holiday food for Juneteenth would be Texas barbecue and Texas sheetcake.
Reason three: refer back to reason two.
Reason four: refer back to reason two.
Get the idea? Human freedom and great food.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDr. King's greatest contribution was keeping the civil rights movement from exploding into even more violence, as so many on the left wanted. Equality of opportunity would have come eventually without any one individual. But it is very likely that given the tenor of the times, without Dr. King's moral leadership, it would likely have come at a much greater cost.
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