Claiming Dr. King only for one particular political ideology skips over the first question of what this holiday honors.
Claiming Dr. King only for one particular political ideology skips over the first question of what this holiday honors.
W hy exactly does Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have his own national holiday? It is a rare thing in America: Now that we compress the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln into “Presidents Day,” Dr. King is the only American so honored. Every politician, business, and institution in the nation pays him homage annually. That leads to contentious arguments by those who feel that Dr. King’s memory is theirs alone and should not be shared by others.
Claiming Dr. King only for one particular political ideology skips over the first question of what this holiday honors. If today is simply a day to celebrate racialist leftism, it should not be a national holiday. We could say that today belongs only to African Americans, but that, too, misses the reason why we have chosen this day to elevate the memory of this man, and what we hope to accomplish by doing so. By thinking about what today means as an American holiday, we can reflect more generally on what historical commemoration is all about.
Of course, Dr. King reached the status of a kind of national saint in part because of his martyrdom. He was gunned down at the age of 39 by a white racist. It was a death he saw coming: It was not the first assassination attempt on Dr. King, and he had received all manner of threats and chosen to continue on the path of his life’s work in spite of the risk to his own skin. His speech the night before his death, warning his audience that (like Moses) he might not reach the promised land with them, is often taken as proof that he knew or at least suspected that he was in graver danger than usual in April 1968.
But America has many martyrs to many different causes: think of Joseph Warren, Nathan Hale, Joseph Smith, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, George Custer, Crazy Horse, Huey Long, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, Christa McAuliffe, Meir Kahane, and Pat Tillman, just to name a few. George Wallace was nearly one of them. Martyrdom alone does not make a national hero. It is the life and the cause that matters more than the willingness to die for it.
It is closer to the mark to say that Dr. King’s holiday is not his alone, but honors the entire African-American civil-rights movement and the long struggle up from the end of slavery in 1865 to the end of de jure discrimination, which was deeply entrenched when Dr. King arrived on the national stage in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and was almost finished being dismantled when Dr. King was assassinated. The collapse of legal and political defenses of segregation and disenfranchisement between 1965 and 1969 was, in retrospect, staggering in its speed and scope. A nation that had legal discrimination in many states in the mid 1960s had a national system of affirmative action, endorsed by both political parties at the time, by the decade’s end.
The civil-rights movement of that era was, for the first time in American history, a political movement visibly led and justified by black Americans. Abolitionism and its end in emancipation was often prodded forward by black Americans, but it was nonetheless a white-led movement. It was Harriet Beecher Stowe who caught the nation’s literary imagination. It was Lincoln and the Republicans who freed the slaves. Most of the men who fought and died to make that happen were white.
Not so the civil-rights movement. White Americans still held the levers of power — the Supreme Court that decided Brown v. Board of Education, the presidents who proposed and signed civil-rights laws and deployed troops to integrate the schools, the Congress that passed those laws. But just as the abolitionist movement was experienced and understood in its time as a white-led movement, the civil-rights movement was experienced and understood in its time as a black-led movement. Dr. King was by no means its only leader, but he was its most prominent and most eloquent, its deepest theorist and the man most identified with the cause. To celebrate him is to celebrate the point at which black Americans not only received the rights that America promised to all, but demanded them and shamed the conscience of the nation into recognizing them.
On the other hand, calling Dr. King a national hero does not mean he was faultless, saintly, or always in the right. Most historians agree that he was serially unfaithful to his wife. A 1991 Boston University panel found that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis. But our national heroes are often flawed men.
Likewise, Dr. King was a man of the political Left and a man of his time. The epoch from 1955 to 1968 was the era of the Vietnam War and the high tide of the runaway Keynesianism that drove the U.S. economy into a stagflationary bender in the 1970s. We know many things better now, and can see why many of Dr. King’s ideas about economics and foreign policy were misguided. Some of those views contributed a good deal to why he was unpopular in his own time with conservatives and, more broadly, with white Americans. Of course, some of that unpopularity was also because he was right about uncomfortable things.
Even the modern Left would not embrace all of Dr. King’s ideas; while he was personally tolerant of gay allies such as Bayard Rustin, he embraced an orthodox Christian view of homosexuality, describing it in a 1958 advice column as “probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired” and should be treated by a psychiatrist. The pervasively Christian, Biblical nature of his outlook and sense of moral justice would sit uneasily with modern progressives.
That is the problem with the game that progressives play: It is not enough for them to argue that we should use the credibility of Dr. King’s heroic status to give a listen to his less-heroic ideas. Instead, they argue that those who don’t buy his entire philosophy on every issue cannot join in honoring him. But they don’t apply that to all of his philosophy, much less to everything that Lincoln or Washington believed.
Properly understood, Americans have traditionally had a broader idea of heroes: people who made the world and the country better, people who got the biggest causes of their lives right. That means we honor Thomas Jefferson for his monumental virtues, not his many vices and contradictions. It even extends to more fraught figures: Charles Lindbergh was a great pioneer of aviation, and Henry Ford had a revolutionary impact on American business, labor, and transportation, and one need not endorse the darker turns of their bigotries and corrosive political activism to see them that way.
Even the greatest men are not always right, but the question is whether they got the biggest things right. Ronald Reagan was wrong about Nelson Mandela, but right about Communism and the world; Mandela was right about apartheid, but wrong about much else outside South Africa. Winston Churchill was wrong about Mahatma Gandhi, but right about Hitler and Communism; Gandhi was right about British imperialism, but wrong about Hitler. And so on.
In Dr. King’s case, then, the question is not whether everyone can embrace everything in his life or philosophy, but what about his life and philosophy appeals to our common values and has been vindicated by history. In that regard, the common denominator is how he grounded his “promissory note” appeals in the common foundations of the American idea — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the moral principles of Christianity, the classical liberalism of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington — and how he pledged himself to a dream of a nation that placed the common rights of the individual above the categories of race. Dr. King spoke of a color-blind America not because he was naïve about the history of black Americans but because he was all too familiar with how racialist thinking had worked, time and again, against the liberty of his own people.
That is the aspect of Dr. King’s dream that stirs schoolchildren and can be embraced by businesses, schools, and churches without being political in any but the most general sense. It is the aspect that appeals to conservatives and Republicans today, not least because it calls us back to the founding principles of the Lincoln-era Republicans as well as the founding ideals of the nation. It should be the aspect of his dream that is above partisanship or ideology.
But it too often is not. For progressives angry at conservatives and Republicans for invoking the dream of a nation of individuals united in equal rights, rather than a nation divided among racial groups, the important thing is Dr. King’s harsh — and fair — diagnosis, in 1963, of how America had failed to deliver on its promissory note, and instead gave black Americans “a bad check.” But to treat that diagnosis in the present tense is to dishonor everything that Dr. King and his movement accomplished. To scorn the color-blind dream he aspired to is to tell white and black America alike that it was Dr. King who was writing a bad check. Taken seriously, that is an argument against him as a national hero, and an argument for considering him a fraud, a failure, or both.
Perhaps some progressives and Democratic politicians truly believe that John C. Calhoun was right about the American Founding, and that both Dr. King and Lincoln were wrong. Others are just being opportunistic, using their claims of sole ownership of Dr. King and his ideas to promote partisan racial polarization, prop up failing legislative efforts and sagging approval ratings, sell books, indoctrinate students in racial resentment, retail false claims about voting in America in the 2020s, and denigrate the American idea.
Either way, they should face the question: Why don’t you want everyone to share the dream and labor to make it a reality?