1/15/01 4:00 p.m.
The King of Politics
Skills overlooked.

By Robert A. George, an editorial page writer
for the New York Post------------------------------------RAGGEDmail@aol.com

ad he lived, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 72 years old today. The cliché each year is to say, "What would King have said about the current state of black America?" In that context, the inclination is to look simply at his words — his philosophy — rather than his actions. In other words, what would King actually do?

It's an important question because, lost in the legitimate admiration of the man for his "I Have A Dream" and "Promised Land" ("I may not get there with you") orations, his skill as a political pragmatist is often overlooked.

Two political choices made at the apex of his career contrast rather strongly with those of the contemporary civil-rights leadership. First, there is the story of the Montgomery bus boycott. As everyone knows, Rosa Parks was the woman who refused to give up her seat for a white person. Her subsequent arrest helped launch the boycott which thrust King into the public spotlight. What few recall, however, is that she was not the first to be arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Fifteen-year old Claudette Colvin did the same a few short months before.

Initially, the civil-rights movement championed Colvin. However, along the way, she became pregnant. The leadership felt that an unwed pregnant child was not an appropriate symbol for the cause. Another young woman, Mary Louise Smith, was also not used due to reports that her father was a drunk. Now, one can criticize the movement for these decisions — after all, if one’s rights have been violated, a defense of those rights shouldn’t be contingent on whether one becomes pregnant or whether one’s father has a problem with alcohol. However, these decision to wait until the “ideal” case came along — Rosa Parks’ — demonstrated that the civil-rights leadership was as much interested as holding onto its moral foundation as it was concerned with the public image of its cause.

Such a pragmatic decision contrasts strongly with, say, Jesse Jackson’s championing in 1999 and 2000 of young black high school students in Decatur, Illinois, who helped create a near riot at a football game. After the school decided to suspend the students, Jackson descended upon the town with threats of multiple protests. It came as a surprise to the reverend that he found little support either in the town nationwide for ultimately was a defense of thugs. A case could have been made for saying that the young men in question might not have deserved a two-year suspension, but Jackson was not making the best case: He had completely lost the moral high ground.

In other areas, Rev. King demonstrated rather cool insight into the electoral process. In 1960, despite his gut reaction that Kennedy was marginally better on civil rights (Kennedy had called Coretta while King languished in an Atlanta jail on a trumped-up charge), King felt it better for the cause to stay neutral. “I took this position in order to maintain a nonpartisan posture, which I have followed all along in order to be able to look objectively at both parties at all times,” he said at the time. While his father endorsed Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. refrained. As a result, Nixon still received 33 percent of the black vote in 1960.

He became more partisan in 1964, following what he saw as a dangerous betrayal of the cause of civil rights on the part of Barry Goldwater.

It is sad that Goldwater’s legitimate conservative viewpoint led him to completely dismissing the importance of the Civil Rights Act. Furthermore, his 1962 statement that, electorally, Republicans should “go hunting where the ducks are,” a de facto rejection of the idea that Republicans should support the act or compete for the black vote, caused King to practically declare war on the GOP ticket. Even though Republicans provided the winning margin in passage of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the wary and hostile relationship between blacks and Republicans had begun. Goldwater got only 6 percent of the black vote in 1964.

Even though, he had started drifting in a more straightforward left-leaning direction, prior to his April 4, 1968 death by championing causes such as poverty and anti-war, King nevertheless was first and foremost a pragmatic individual aware of how the “movement” would fit in the nation’s broader political picture. The civil-rights leadership of the time, again, was committed to balancing its moral integrity and public-relations awareness with whatever could be gained politically. It would have been interesting to see exactly how King would have greeted Nixon’s political revival later in the year.

It would have been even more intriguing to have seen King’s reaction to this year’s political campaign. Considering the olive branch that George W. Bush offered the black community, why would the civil rights leadership respond with such venom as the NAACP’s horrific and unfair James Byrd ads? It’s difficult to believe King making that choice, considering his pre-1964 stance of neutrality.

The mixture of pragmatism and politics in the civil rights movement is gone now — just one more reason why King’s loss at the unfairly young age of 39 is still such a tragedy.