East Carolina students recently were treated to an address by Gloria Steinem on feminism. Keeping the trend of major talks by intellectual dabblers going, UNC just hosted actor Danny Glover as its speaker for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My Pope Center colleague Jay Schalin attended the talk and writes about it in this week’s Clarion Call.

The trouble with Glover isn’t so much that he doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about (unlike Gloria Steinem), but that he uses MLK’s infatuation with socialistic redistribution programs (and it’s worth pointing out that King knew nothing about economics) to advance his own fevered ideas about the need to radically change the U.S. by dumping what is left of laissez-faire capitalism in favor of an egalitarian nanny state.

It’s too bad that few if any UNC students will ever hear that there were civil-rights leaders of the MLK era who adhered to the Frederick Douglass/Booker T. Washington approach that blacks should demand only freedom and look to their own efforts to improve their conditions, not to the government. Such a leader was T. R. M. Howard, about whom Prof. David Beito and his wife have written a splendid biography, Black Maverick. Back in 2008, Beito spoke about Howard and other black entrepreneurs at North Carolina State, and I wrote about his talk here.