Moreover, there is much about King’s life that should command our respect, and particularly his personal courage. During his crusade against segregation in the Deep South and in his fight for black voting rights in the same region, he stood up against threats to his life. These went on from his participation in the boycott of segregated public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 down to his voting rights march in Selma in 1965. Throughout this period, and actually down to his violent death, King had to deal with hostile opponents, who threatened danger to him and his family. Not surprisingly, he was arrested and put in jail in Birmingham in 1963 for his violation of municipal ordinances. But King also made clear that while he was breaking laws that he found to be unjust, he was also willing to pay the penalty. And in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” penned in 1963, he shows as an ordained Protestant minister at least some acquaintance with theological sources that could be cited, however selectively, to legitimate his stand.
There is also much to object to about racial segregation. In its heyday it was extended to a plethora of public and private institutions, and, from what I recall, Jim Crow made few exceptions for worthy black would-be users of libraries and decent state universities. And Southern whites could have cleaned up this act for generations—before it became a cause célèbre for the Left and government social engineers. While no one comes in second to me in lamenting the effects of the Civil Rights revolution and especially its excesses, it would be foolish to deny that it began with a just cause. The same is of course equally true of other political disasters such as the French Revolution.
As someone whose family suffered grievously under the treaties ending World War One and later under the Nazi regime, it seems to me that complaints about the first were justified even if vicious people later exploited them. And there is no need to believe that by criticizing civil rights activists, one is expressing approval for what they sometimes correctly brought to public attention. Forcing some elderly black lady to sit in the back of a bus because of her skin color is not only degrading. It also provided a moral excuse to get federal bureaucrats and judges into the never-ending enterprise of reconstructing American society—an experiment that has now been extended to every aspect of our communal and commercial lives.
I would even surmise that had the issue of racial segregation not become a major national moral concern, with considerable media assistance, King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, would not have been able to move as easily as they did, with broad national endorsement, into mobilizing black voters. Our Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, with disproportionate support from the Republican Party, to ensure federal supervision of areas in the South in which blacks had been kept or were suspected of having been kept from voting. Such steps contributed considerably toward moving our electorate toward the social Left, where about 99% of the black electorate can now be found. The leftward lunge in our presidential politics—represented by the recent victory of social leftist and, as Steve Sailer has revealed, black nationalist, Barack Obama—has been made possible by the changes accompanying the civil rights revolution, namely a large black electorate on the left that supports, with few exceptions, Obama and a white population that has been relentlessly instilled with a sense of racial guilt. Quite possibly, if the South had voluntarily desegregated its institutions, or had displayed more flexibility about race relations, some of this radicalization could have been avoided. By creating an eyesore, Southern whites contributed to the storm that later erupted.
It not hard to show King was a badly flawed public figure. But one can no longer do that in the US without being suspected of being a “rightwing extremist”—often by self-described “conservatives” in the press. King’s frequent acts of plagiarism, extending from his doctoral dissertation to his renowned “I Have a Dream” Speech delivered at the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963, have long been matters of record. One diligent scholar, Theodore Pappas, has devoted an entire work, Plagiarism and the Cultural Wars, to identifying King’s borrowed sources. Pappas proves to what extent King as an orator and author engaged in “voice-dubbing” and “textual borrowing,” as the mainstream media have referred to his frequent verbal thefts.
He was also a notorious philanderer who was not above using his pastoral activities to “counsel” young, voluptuous women. Some of his own advisors complained that his amorous activities got in the way of his political activities, although in his defense it might be argued that he had plenty of time for both. His connection to Communist friends, and most notoriously from 1957 onward to veteran CP activist Stanley Levison, and the pop Marxist phrases that laced his political commentary suggest that King was something other than the “Christian” idealist whom the GOP have discovered in his biography.
In his defense it is questionable whether King would have had anything but contempt for those “conservative” publicists who have tried to turn him into an advocate of free market economics, meritocracy, and war-mongering American patriotism. King already in the 1950s had called for government-introduced racial quotas in employment; he was also demonstrably a socialist with Marxist overtones in economics, and he famously denounced the Vietnam War as a struggle that hurt blacks by delaying their quest for equality. Although King had indeed just grievances, at least in the beginning of his career, his politics quickly descended into those of his disciple Jesse Jackson.
But my purpose is not to run him down. It is rather to stress his unsuitability for the role into which he was thrust after his death. I still recall standing in line to buy stamps in a post office in 1983 when a mother was explaining to her son who was looking at a newly minted stamp: “No, that’s not the famous Martin Luther. It’s a monk who was born five-hundred years ago, somewhere in Europe.” This woman had, if anything, understated King’s rising value, which was not to replace the father of the Protestant Reformation but Luther’s savior. For this is certainly what King has become, a martyred deity, in today’s American political culture.
