It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day
What a complex man! Inspirational, courageous, transformative, flawed in his private life. People continue to argue about what he stood for in terms of the relationship between black people and white people, and what he’d be saying about it all if he were alive today at 95. I don’t know the answer, so I’ll just post a famous speech of his:
I share the dream of this speech. We were on the way, I believe, until Obama’s election. Democrats have chosen segregation instead of equality for all.
It would be not unusual for black outlooks in the mid-1960s to be cautious and somewhat ambivalent about how to deal with the white majority. The so-called “antiracist” approach of today is counterproductive and dangerous.
I also agree with Reverend King’s speech. I believe it comes down to respect. I don’t think he expected blacks and whites to fall into each other’s arms, but to treat each other with the respect due to people created by God.
How can you treat people fairly if you don’t respect them?
martin’s road was hard to traverse, look at the hacks from jackson to rogers (kendi) who pull out the eloi klaxon over minor slights,
Like most people, MLK Jr. was a mixed bag. Does he deserve to be the only American with a legal holiday honoring him? I can think of dozens of Americans more consequential than King, and none of them have their own holiday. The reason King is honored this way is politics. We all I am sure have our own ideas as to the motivations of those who pushed for the King holiday, but let’s just say that not all the impulses behind it were pure and selfless.
Definitely complex and flawed, but we can still draw inspiration from him. I do think it’s stupid for conservatives to try to make people hate him now (not saying you’re doing this, Neo, but there are conservatives who do). People associate him with peace, justice, and fairness, and that’s not so bad.
Great Speech, Great Man, No Holiday though
neo, there’s a typo in your title. Should read:
It’s Martin Luther King Jr./Fani Willis Day
Regarding Dr. King being the only American with a legal Holiday in his name; I think it is appropriate. No question he was a great, admirable man.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had their named holidays until they were combined. Christopher Columbus. Jesus has two and Good Friday used to be a common observance in most states and still is at many businesses; so maybe even three. O.K., Jesus and Columbus weren’t Americans, but Washington wasn’t born American either.
By far the gravest political error in our nation’s history was withholding rights from a group of people based on their origin (came here enslaved) and, after the Civil War, solely on skin color (segregation). Abraham Lincoln was the U.S. citizen most instrumental in ending the first travesty and Dr. King was the U.S. citizen most responsible for ending the second. Both men paid with their lives and both men were very aware death would be the likely outcome of their fearless work. Moses freed fewer people than Dr. King and we still celebrate Passover.
Are there other Americans worthy of honor? Of course. But there is no question Dr. King is in a very select group of the most worthy.
“MLK Worship Gives Us DEI”
https://vdare.com/articles/mlk-worship-gives-us-dei-scott-greer-is-right-and-here-s-24-years-of-vdare-com-coverage-to-prove-it
King is a lie.
We live in a world where people openly discriminate and hate on the demographic most open to the outsider.
All in the name of DEI idol.
MLK was a man for his time. That time, the era of “the Revs”, (King, Abernathy, Jackson, Sharpton), has passed and it’s time for new voices in the black community to take the mantle and run with it. The black community needs younger, intellectual leader’s who believe in and promote family, community, generational wealth, work ethics, and free enterprise. MLK was more of a socialist than what is needed today.
I am certain none of the people here speaking against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. have done anything remotely close to his courageous and inspirational leadership in ending segregation in this country. A truly great American, a truly great man, worthy of remembrance and praise.
King’s been a front for awhile now.
MLK was a great man, granted. But I rank him several floors below Washington and Lincoln, who founded the country and then saved the country. The US would have survived without MLK.
I greatly resent sandwiching Washington and Lincoln, nameless, into something called “Presidents’ Day”, which includes, seemingly on an equal basis, Joe Biden.
Furthermore MLK’s inheritors are now destroying the country, while claiming legitimacy from MLK and at the same time subverting his work and insisting much American history made by white people be canceled.
And now the Biden administration has made “Juneteenth” a federal holiday.
When do black reparations end?
MLK Jr. day is in remembrance of the movement that ended the great injustice of legalized segregation. Juneteenth is to remember the end of chattel slavery, although I would prefer the date in December 1865 when the amendment ending slavery was ratified.
I only wish that people today would stop twisting these remembrances towards reinstating the racial separation they ended.
Kate:
Sure. Great. But does that put those days above Washington and Lincoln?
When do black reparations end?
Kate, 12:59pm: “We were on the way, I believe, until Obama’s election. Democrats have chosen segregation instead of equality for all.”
I think the fatal misstep occurred almost immediately after the passage of the civil rights laws in the mid-’60s: affirmative action. No sooner did we outlaw racial discrimination than we put it right back into the law, just reversing the poles, so to speak. Granting for the sake of argument that it was well-meaning, it was nevertheless a poison pill. DEI is AA carried somewhat further, and with the addition of sexual “identities.”
I would prefer remembering Washington and Lincoln separately, and to ditch Columbus Day, which was instituted by Italian immigrants who felt they were not properly respected (which they weren’t). Columbus never came to what became the USA.
It’s foolish to pretend that having a Day really makes any difference, though.
It’s foolish to pretend that having a Day really makes any difference, though.
I disagree. It’s a zero-sum culture war and on this front we are losing.
When do black reparations end?
“Private life”
https://www.ajc.com/news/breaking-news/biographer-garrow-pens-explosive-report-martin-luther-king/fqPKW1dndGA5g4oAkzRoIJ/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7071713/FBI-tapes-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-40-affairs-laughed-friend-raped-parishioner.html
Now, some will say, “Oh, he did so much good” ; Or ‘I love inspirational rhetoric, no matter who wrote it or how he obtained his credentials.”
And perhaps the thing some will care least about, is his blaspheming Jesus Christ while banging whores. ‘I’m doing this for ole JC'[ a paraphrase of recorded material I cannot bring myself to quote word for word]
So, if you are into the “big man theory of history”, love praising famous men, and figure what you imagine to be the otherwise unobtainable ends justify whatever means helped effect them, then you are likely to take a rather blase stance toward some of this stuff. Kind of depends on what you imagine ” morality ” to be and in what realms it operates.
And yet, considering he was a minister of the Gospel, we see other views recorded as well.
DNW:
Yet I will defend, human-to-human, Martin Luther King.
I make no claims for him as an particularly virtuous human. But he put his life on the line for a greater cause than himself and he knew he was doing so.
I don’t know I would have been so virtuous.
An old friend called me today, and asked me when and how it was that I went from being an ardent acolyte of, to becoming an enemy of the King cult. I responded that I believe it was during the late 1990s, when I read my old Chronicles editor, Ted Pappas’ book on King’s plagiaries, including his stolen doctorate.
People come to things via different routes. I have a murderous hatred for plagiarists.
Reading a somewhat muffled account of King’s whoremongering in David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, circa 1987, I overlooked King the alleycat.
However, once I read Ted, the damn burst. Eventually, I would also learn that:
Far from being a proponent of color-blindness, King believed in a world of racial spoils for blacks, no matter how unqualified; the line in the speech was just meant as a pull-quote for his press allies;
He was a thief, who stole charitable donations, and spent them on prostitutes and booze;
He supported black criminals, and denied White policemen the right to arrest them (“the unspeakable horrors of police brutality”);
He spoke obscenely of his great benefactor, President Kennedy, on the day the latter was laid to rest; and
He was a brutal rapist.
Our culture seems to be ok with jettisoning truth for ‘means to an end’ imagery.
And then we wonder how we got here.
Sometimes, the truth hurts.
He was a brutal rapist.
I would like to see some links on this claim. That MLK was a philanderer I have no doubt.
As well as other claims.
Whereas I would argue on behalf of the goal so far as publicly announced, but not particularly the man.
In any event, I’m not much disposed to panegyric.
DNW:
That’s perfectly clear. Not.
Would you have allowed yourself into rifle sights?
MLK knew he was risking his life. No one can take that away from him.
Well, he knew that he was risking assassination many of the places he went. And he reportedly became a fatalist But I don’t think you mean he deliberately stepped into the crosshairs at that moment. Not any more than did Huey Long, Malcom X, JFK, and Robert Kennedy; or George Wallace, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, for that matter
No one is. Unfortunately the list of men both good and bad who have knowingly placed their lives second to their ambitions for political influence or change, and have lost it, is too long to recite.
No one is.
DNW: You seem to be.
It’s hard for me not to understand your comment as a cynical counter-claim against the principled action of anyone who disagrees with you.
I do not idolize Dr. King, and never did. He was flawed. He led a movement that ended unjust policies in our otherwise egalitarian country. He deserves credit for that, and in these days when forces are pushing identity politics we ought to remember the moment when we rejected it.
King’s commitment to socialist/redistributive policies was regrettable but common in his day. As Dr. Sowell points out, it’s not going to work for American blacks or for anyone else.
If we’re going biblical, let me point to King David. He accomplished great things for his people. He had a man killed so he could take his wife. David repented of his personal sin. I don’t know if MLK Jr. repented.
Other than Bayard Rustin, there was no one in King’s circle who offered a complaint about the racial preference schemes which have been escalatingly common in institutional policy since 1968 (to the point where they are now job one in higher education). That strongly suggests that the psychology of that set was ordered in a particular way, and they ultimately never had an interest in establishing a system of natural liberty. The most consequential legal counselors for the nexus of organizations around King were Thurgood Marshall, Joseph Rauh, and Jack Greenberg. See Ed Koch’s memoirs on his discussion of affirmative action with Rauh in 1971 (if Rauh’s pontificating could be called a discussion).
People continue to argue about what he stood for in terms of the relationship between black people and white people, and what he’d be saying about it all if he were alive today at 95.
For what it’s worth, King’s former speechwriter is critical of where the “civil rights” movement has gone.
In 1939, we were sorely lacking in impartiality and professionalism from our police forces, courts, prisons, voting registrars, poll inspectors, tax assessors, and those responsible for recruitment, promotion, and discipline of public employees. We’d have benefited from amendments in the way local government and schools were financed. We’d have benefited from dismantling regulations driven by caste attitudes (the parallel school systems, the bathrooms). We’d have benefited from replacing cartels in the labor market. We’d have benefited from a partial retreat from government intervention in housing markets. We’d have benefited from redoubled efforts at preventing urban neighborhoods and the institutions therein from descending into a stew of social pathology. We’d have benefited from more courtesy and congeniality in everyday life (without coercing it).
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We received some of that, in a spotty sort of way. The cultural moment we’re in right now is an unhappy one. Best example: the encomiums for a one-man social disaster like George Floyd. (Appended to putting police officers in prison for doing their jobs). Second best example; Ibram Henry Rogers and Robin diAngelo have faculty appointments and ample income from speaking fees.
King’s commitment to socialist/redistributive policies was regrettable but common in his day. As Dr. Sowell points out, it’s not going to work for American blacks or for anyone else.
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Social security programs work satisfactorily if you contain the perverse incentives incorporated within them and structure them to be actuarially sound. What occidental society did not need was state-owned enterprise taking over swaths of the economy for which private enterprise was satisfactorily competent and widespread interventions in the form of subsidies and price controls.
[I]t’s possible to read Kendi’s prize-winning book, Stamped from the Beginning, and “come away believing that America is irredeemably racist, beyond redemption.”
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Kendi is a rather gross example of a cultural phenomenon of our age: an indifference to palpable accomplishment and an exaltation of victims and faux victims. (Kendi himself is a mediocrity showered with benefits he does not merit).
If we’re going biblical, let me point to King David. He accomplished great things for his people. He had a man killed so he could take his wife. David repented of his personal sin. I don’t know if MLK Jr. repented.
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King was an extraparliamentary politician who was effective toward certain ends. We’re certainly better off in a state where King is lionized than we would be if it were Malcolm Little (aka Malcolm X). That having been said, his main accomplishment was legislation which had some salutary effects and some unsalutary ones. He wasn’t someone who actually built something and he seems to have been fuddled about our actual social issues.
Leaving the moral character of King himself aside for just a moment, I’ll expand on the point of my initial comment.
In a society where spiritual faith has been hollowed out, become instrumental, and “for show”, the desire to elevate a man (or an ideology or human institution) to the status of and substitute for the now vanished divine, which will then inaugurate the new kingdom on earth, is particularly notable.
This is not to say that emotional types who are prone to deifying others don”t exist in ordinary circumstances too. But the worshipful madness of teenaged girls over a pop “idol” [ and the common word recognizes the psychological phenomenon] has less direct impact on all people sharing a geographic location and political system than does the apotheosis of a social movement leader.
The peculiar reverance with which the name of Martin Luther King is uttered always with the [perhaps undeserved or arguably fraudulent] honorific attached parallels to some lesser degree the way devout Christians used to refer to the person and name of Jesus Christ, with a slight Catholic bow of the head, or a Protestant appending of ” our Lord and Savior”.
Returning to King, himself.
Now the fact that King was not only the leader of a social movement but ostensibly a Christian minister of the Gospel complicates matters. For therein lies the point at which by means of his own public profession, his private behavior thereby becomes public and is rightly seen as a test of his own sincerity and conversion; versus some instrumental employment of the institutional outcroppings of Christianity in order to buttress a vocabulary of “rights” and a to utilize a borrowed moral force as per Rules for radicals #4.
It is at this point one might turn the proposition direcred at me around, and ask: “Who’s the cynic?”
As I wrote earlier:
DNW, clearly, as a minister of the Gospel, King had obligations he did not meet. No one should pretend he did. But despite the descent from the end of Jim Crow restrictions to new racial quotas, the end of legalized segregation and second-class citizenship for black Americans was a positive accomplishment. We should embrace and emphasize “no racial quotas and no racial restrictions” as foundational principles. God judges MLK Jr. and he will judge every one of us too.
Related:
Prof. Martin Kramer reveals MLK’s 1967 “Lost Interview” on the Middle East conflict:
“MLK: The Six-Day War interview”—
https://martinkramer.org/2024/01/15/mlk-the-six-day-war-interview/
Sure, if you adhere to an intrinsic value theory of humanity, and accept that what we call “race” , i.e., a genetic inheritance or membership in a lineage, is completely disconnected from behavioral dispositions, it naturally follows.
That is quite a different thing from adopting a worshipful posture toward a particular man.
And for believing Christians who are aghast at not so much his infidelities and his whoring – which can be shrugged off – as his reported blasphemies, and an instrumental use of their faith, it should be quite a different matter indeed.
DNW, don’t know at whom that is directed, but “worshipful” does not reflect my view of MLK Jr.
Yeah sure. But some descriptions of him are so extravagant, some refrences to him so awed and reverential, that they verge on, if not cross over into, a form of secular worship.
I think it here might be worth pulling up a definition of “worship” to remind us – I needed to do it for myself a couple years back – of what part of religious practice and profession is constituted by “worship” per se.
That expression of emotional devotion then would be distinguished from broader but included elements of: ritualistic practice, the recounting of sacred text, formulaic incantations, public recitations and professions of personal fidelity as a good person, and so forth.
In this case we might also derive some benefit by looking up the definition of “religion”, and its etymology.
Putting together some of the elements in no particular order we have an extravagant respect or homage paid to an individual, accompanied by certain taboos with regard to his mention, and which demand a public profession as a sign of inclusion within the system of ties that bind.
This is familiar to us all from a movement spawned generations ago with the Deweyite description of “Democracy” as ” our secular” or public, “religion”.
You will also recall the explicitly “religious” aspect of the original secular humanism and the first secular humanist manifesto.
In the case of King it includes:
The ‘Dr. Reverend’ formula required for uttering his name, the posture of reverence and awe which it is assumed must accompany it, the expected professions of unconditional appreciation, and the expectation that this due reverence will be professed by one and all as a token of their inclusion within the sacred circle. These, are all elements which fit the religious paradigm and a worshipful stance.
Now, how much of this is based on fear of breaking taboos and how much the result of heartfelt feelings of authentic veneration is anyone’s guess.
I suspect it is a mixed bag.
We saw the same “worship” thing with Obama. Some people and media treated him as a Messiah. Believing Christians need to be careful not to treat any politician like that.
Huxley:
Alleged journalists and others, including self-styled “conservatives” claim that King “watched and laughed” or “was present at” a rape. No, he was guilty of a violent rape.
When a powerful man, the head of an organization, orders an underling to commit a crime, they are both guilty of the crime. When John Gotti ordered Sammy “Bull” Gravano to murder 18 men, they were both guilty of 18 murders. Gotti didn’t get to push off the guilt on Gravano.
When you refuse to submit to a powerful, black preacher, bad things happen to you. My hunch is that the lady in question was pretty and relatively light-skinned, but had refused to sleep with King.
King opened the occasion by addressing his victim, saying that they (the men present) were going to commit acts, natural and unnatural, upon her person. And then one of his preachers, Baltimore’s Logan Kearse, proceeded to rape her, over her objections and physical resistance.
But at least Kearse’s parishioner (presumably) lived, unlike rev./cong. Floyd Flake’s beautiful mistress, Velma, and men who worked for “dr.”/”rev.” Jeremiah T. Wright, who were murdered, when they complained.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/martin-luther-king-rape-fbi-tapes-video-mlk-laugh-files-a8932206.html
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-sordid-legacy-of-dr-king/
https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2019/03/sex-lies-and-murder-barack-obama.html
Nicholas Stix:
Wasn’t all of that based on FBI notes that were in turn based on an audio surveillance tape? I don’t think the FBI – which was certainly hostile to MLK – should be totally trusted to be presenting fairly what’s on the tape. On the other hand, the UK article you linked says the tape is under seal till 2027. So perhaps at that point people will be able to judge for themselves.