A friend wrote:
While I was in Alabama (Hoover), I made a point to visit Brimingham and walk through the grounds/parks where the civil rights movement had so many moments.
Dr. King called for non-violent civil disobedience, in refusing to accept the separate-yet-equal-doctrine and arguing that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws. Writing letters on the margins of found papers, the imprisoned King wrote his letters essentially addressing the white clergymen that were upset of the criticisms (they felt it was an inappropriate attack on them, even though they did nothing to stem the tide of racial attacks) and that argued no demonstrations should occur
In the brilliant letter, King wrote that “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.”
The attached pictures are statues memorializing the subsequent protests. The police unleashed dogs and water cannons on the non-violent protestors, including children….harming many of them. Four months later, Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church (pictured), killing 4 young girls.
Walking through the downtown area where all this occurred, and visiting the various monuments (albeit with a really crappy camera), was very emotional. It was a great and valuable learning experience. There are still many lessons that can be learned from this today; to apply to our personal lives and our communal lives.
Conservatives have long been skeptical of Martin Luther King while neo-conservatives have regarded him highly.
Martin Luther King, in my view, is a good litmus test of whether or not someone is truly conservative. Anyone who thinks Martin Luther King is an American hero is not conservative and is sadly misguided on important matters. I would not trust the person’s judgment on politics.
Dennis Prager often praises Martin Luther King. On Jan. 27, 2011, Dennis’s Facebook page said: “Celebrate Martin Luther King day today by reading and sharing the profound ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.’ Print it out and put it on the kitchen table for the kids to read. It’s an important national holiday. Put the flag out and talk about the Reverend and read excerpts at dinner tonight.”
National Review through the 1970s supported white segregation around the world while Dennis has always called such segregation “evil”, including in his first edition of Ultimate Issues.
Will Herberg, who Prager often cites about Judaism, blamed Martin Luther King for the 1965 Los Angeles Riots, writing in the Sept. 7, 1965 National Review:
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the ‘cake of custom’ that holds us together. With their doctrine of ‘civil disobedience’ they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes…that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance… And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted ‘school strikes’ sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit violation of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed.
In its August 24, 1957 issue, National Review’s editorialized against giving blacks the right to vote because it would threaten civilization in the South:
The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.
National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct… It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class… Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
Sam M. Jones wrote for National Review (NR) in 1957 that “the problem of school integration in the nation’s capital may be eventually solved by the steady migration of the white population out of the District of Columbia.” Jones cited IQ differences, “a white average ranging from 105 to 111 and a Negro average of 87 to 89…. Data on juvenile delinquency…revealed a marked increase in truancy, theft, vandalism and sex-offenses in integrated schools. Dances and dramatic presentations have been quietly given up by most high schools. Senior and junior class plays have been discontinued. Inter-racial fights are frequent and constant vigilance is required to prevent molestation or attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls. In contrast, the schools outside the integrated neighborhoods have no more such problems than they had four years ago.”
On the the tenth anniversary of Brown, NR editorialized June 2, 1964:
But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named ‘civil rights movement’–that is, the Negro revolt . . . . But the Court carries its share of the blame. Its decrees, beginning with Brown, have on the one hand encouraged the least responsible of the Negro leaders in the course of extra-legal and illegal struggle that we now witness around us… Brown, as National Review declared many years ago, was bad law and bad sociology. We are now tasting its bitter fruits. Race relations in the country are ten times worse than in 1954.
In the Nov. 2, 1957 issue, classicist Revilo Oliver reviewed Ashley Montagu’s Man: His First Million Years:
Dr. Montagu, who composed the UNESCO Statement on Race, has again skillfully trimmed the facts of anthropology to fit the Liberal propaganda line. Every anthropologist knows, for example, that aborigines in Australia propagated their species for a hundred thousand years without ever suspecting that pregnancy might be a consequence of sexual intercourse. Equally striking evidence of intellectual capacity is provided by the many peoples that never discovered how to kindle a fire or plant a seed. But Dr. Montagu, after making a great show of cautious objectivity, proclaims that ‘anthropologists are unable to find any evidence’ of ‘significant differences in mental capacity’ between ‘ethnic groups.’ If you can tell such whoppers with a straight face, you too can ask the ‘United Nations’ to recognize your right to largesse from the pockets of American taxpayers.
In 1979, William Buckley said about Martin Luther King: “When it was black men persecuting white or black men–in the Congo, for instance–he was strangely silent on the issue of human rights. The human rights of Chinese, or of Caucasians living behind the Iron Curtain never appeared to move him.”
American Renaissance magazine said in 2007: “Once the ancient distinction between black and white was broken down, the 1960s made short work of virtually every other distinction whites had taken for granted: man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and perverted, diligence and sloth, health and sickness, good and bad.”
American Renaissance magazine said in 2009:
In the minds of many, King towers above other Americans as a distinguished orator and writer, but this short, 5’6½” man often stole the words of others. People believe he was a Christian, but he doubted some of the fundamentals of the faith. Our country honors King, but he worked closely with Communists who aimed to destroy it. He denied racial differences, but fought for racial favoritism in the form of quotas. He claimed to be for freedom, but he wanted to force people to associate with each other and he promoted the redistribution of wealth in the form of reparations for slavery.
Jared Taylor wrote in 2012:
In the late 1990s, the magazine was saying sensible things about immigration, multiculturalism, and even race and IQ. It defended The Bell Curve, called for serious immigration reform and published Philippe Rushton. This was too much for the NR’s founder, William Buckley, who removed the two men most responsible for honesty. He forced out Editor John O’Sullivan in December 1997, and in February 1998 exiled Senior Editor Peter Brimelow to the powerless position of Contributing Editor. Mr. O’Sullivan’s replacement was none other than the Mr. Lowry who now finds Mr. Derbyshire’s work “nasty and indefensible.”
In an Apr. 2, 2013 column praising the greatness of the Bible, Dennis Prager included Martin Luther King in the same sentence as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln:
It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as “deists.” It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. (yes, “the Reverend,” almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, “Dr.”) Martin Luther King, Jr., got his values.
It is values, not genetics, that account for white and asian accomplishment, according to Prager. Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis wrote:
In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race…
For example, from the day they enter college, many students are taught about white privilege — how innately advantaged white students (and all other whites are). Last week, the president of Western Washington University posed the question on the university’s website: “How do we make sure that in future years we are not as white as we are today?”
Imagine if the president of the University of California at Berkeley had posed the question, “How do we make sure that in future years we are not as Asian as we are today?”
Inner city young blacks who work hard in school are routinely chastised by other black youth for “acting white.”
Regarding white privilege, last year, three academics at the University of Rhode Island wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
“The American Psychological Association’s educational goals for the psychology major include sociocultural and international awareness, with learning outcomes regarding mastery of concepts related to power and privilege. Other professional organizations, including the American Sociological Association, have developed similar learning goals for teaching in higher education. Instructors have been charged with teaching their white students to understand their own privileged positions in society relative to those of marginalized groups.”
The key point here is that the word “values” never appears. Instead of asking what values made America’s Founders great, the left asks what race, gender and class privileges enabled those men to found America. Instead of asking what values does the white majority (or, for that matter, on some campuses, the Asian majority) live by in order to succeed, and how can we help inculcate those values among more less successful people of all racial and ethnic groups, the left asks what privileges do whites have that enable them to get into colleges and graduate at a higher rate than blacks and Latinos.
The undermining of the very concept of values was starkly made clear last month at a national inter-college debate tournament.
As reported in the Atlantic last week:
“On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.”
In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like ‘nigga authenticity’ and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. ‘F— the time!’ he yelled.
In a national intercollegiate debate contest, a black debating team won by transforming the topic of the debate, one that that had nothing to do with race, into a race question.
But to object to this, or to argue that a team might be disqualified for yelling “f— the time” when told it had gone over the time limit, or to ask what performing hip-hop has to do with the topic “whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted” — is now deemed to act white.
Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis said: “The American dream, the American value system, the Judeo-Christian value system is that race does not mean anything. It is the only moral belief. The Left has picked up where racial fascism left off.”
“The answer to the racism of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, was to end racism, not to institute it in a different form.”
“Why would I want to answer negative racism with affirmative racism? You have the same treatment of all people irrespective of color. The only answer to racism is to be color-blind. When you are not color-blind, you are racist. Well-intentioned racism is not better than ill-intentioned racism.”
May 14, 2014, Dennis said: “We’re told about old white men. The bane of society. Guess who supports the arts? Old white men. As they move on, who’s going to support the arts. Boy, is this country going to long for old white men one day, especially left-wing institutions, all supported by them.”
“Old white males should go on strike. See what happens to the institutions of America. To the museums. To the orchestras. To the ballets. To the operas. To the colleges. Who do you think gives to all these endowments? Who do you think buys the tickets to these [classical music] concerts? Last time I was at Disney Hall, it didn’t look all that multi-racial and multi-ethnic to me. Pretty much all old white males and females. Maybe the group they love to attack has done some good for society or is that racist? Whenever the Left uses ‘racist’, it means that they don’t have an argument.”
“These WASP males made the greatest country in the world. It had nothing to do with their color. They could have been BASPs — Black Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But they weren’t. You are only allowed to crap on WASPs. If you say anything good, you’re called a racist.”
“You can have this stupidity about white privilege but you can’t have white contributions. Can you imagine that? White contributions. Which do you think has been greater?”
“Why are Nigerians among the most successful Americans? What privilege did they have? What privilege did Koreans have to make such success in one generation?”
American Renaissance published in 2009 this evaluation of Martin Luther King:
As a young man, King started plagiarizing the work of others and he continued this practice throughout his career.
At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951, many of his papers contained material lifted verbatim and without acknowledgement from published sources. An extensive project started at Stanford University in 1984 to publish all of King’s papers tracked down the original sources for these early papers and concluded that his academic writings are “tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism.” Journalist Theodore Pappas, who has also reviewed the collection, found one paper showing “verbatim theft” in 20 of a total of 24 paragraphs…
King lived a double life. During the day, he would speak to large crowds, quoting Scripture and invoking God’s will, and at night he frequently had sex with women from the audience. “King’s habits of sexual adventure had been well established by the time he was married,” says Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University, a King admirer. He notes that King often “told lewd jokes,” “shared women with friends,” and was “sexually reckless.” According to King biographer Taylor Branch, during a long party on the night of January 6 and 7, 1964, an FBI bugging device recorded King’s “distinctive voice ring out above others with pulsating abandon, saying, ‘I’m f***ing for God!’”
Sex with single and married women continued after King married, and on the night before his death, King had two adulterous trysts. His first rendezvous was at a woman’s house, the second in a hotel room. The source for this was his best friend and second-in-command, Ralph Abernathy, who noted that the second woman was “a member of the Kentucky legislature,” now known to be Georgia Davis Powers.
Abernathy went on to say that a third woman was also looking for King that same night, but found his bed empty. She knew his habits and was angry when they met later that morning. In response, writes Abernathy, King “lost his temper” and “knocked her across the bed … She leapt up to fight back, and for a moment they were engaged in a full-blown fight, with [King] clearly winning.” A few hours later, King ate lunch with Abernathy and discussed the importance of nonviolence for their movement.
To other colleagues, King justified his adultery this way: “I’m away from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month. F***ing’s a form of anxiety reduction.” King had many one-night stands but also grew close to one of his girlfriends in a relationship that became, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Garrow, “the emotional centerpiece of King’s life.” Still, sex with other women remained “a commonplace of King’s travels.”
In private, King could be extremely crude. On one FBI recording, King said to Abernathy in what was no doubt a teasing remark, “Come on over here, you big black motherf***er, and let me suck your d**k.” FBI sources told Taylor Branch about a surveillance tape of King watching a televised rerun of the Kennedy funeral. When he saw the famous moment when Jacqueline Kennedy knelt with her children before her dead husband’s coffin, King reportedly sneered, “Look at her. Sucking him off one last time.”
Despite his obsession with sex and his betrayal of his own wife and children, and despite Christianity’s call for fidelity, King continued to claim the moral authority of a Baptist minister…
David Garrow found that in private King “made it clear to close friends that economically speaking he considered himself what he termed a Marxist.” Mr. Garrow passes along an account of a conversation C.L.R. James, a Marxist intellectual, had with King: “King leaned over to me saying, ‘I don’t say such things from the pulpit, James, but that is what I really believe.’… King wanted me to know that he understood and accepted, and in fact agreed with, the ideas that I was putting forward — ideas which were fundamentally Marxist-Leninist … I saw him as a man whose ideas were as advanced as any of us on the Left, but who, as he actually said to me, could not say such things from the pulpit … King was a man with clear ideas, but whose position as a churchman, etc. imposed on him the necessity of reserve.” J. Pius Barbour, a close friend of King’s at seminary, agreed that he “was economically a Marxist.”
…His closest political advisor, Stanley Levison, said King was “an intensely guilt-ridden man” and his wife Coretta also called him “a guilt-ridden man.” Levison said that the praise heaped upon King was “a continual series of blows to his conscience” because he was such a humble man. If King was guilt-ridden might it have been because he knew better than anyone the wide gap between his popular image and his true character?
My friend responds: “Someone take away this man’s keys….seriously. Stop. Nothing Im unaware of. He could have plagurised every letter and slept with every woman…he still was the only one that put himself out there and made a change. All the others sat back and wrote letters while doing nothing…sounds familiar, dont it? So quit it.”
I agree that Martin Luther King made a difference. And that difference he made was for the worse. Civil Rights made America worse. The great black crime wave was launched as a direct result of Civil Rights legislation. That crime wave has destroyed black life and hurt America. Blacks were better in the Jim Crow era, they had much stronger communities, schools and families. But who cares about results, right? Let’s just feel good.
On Dec. 20, 2013, I posted to FB: “Phil Robertson stood tall for his beliefs [about homosexuality] and A&E caved.”
My friend Michael responded: “Phil’s “beliefs” include black people supposedly enjoying living under racist Jim Crow laws.”
Michael, Phil didn’t give any “beliefs” as you describe. He said this: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
In this GQ interview excerpt, Phil simply described what he saw. That was his experience. But let’s extrapolate out from what Phil Robertson saw to the general condition of blacks in America under Jim Crow and today. The black family under Jim Crow was in better shape than the white family. As the black economist Walter Williams wrote: “In 1960, only 28 percent of black females between the ages of 15 and 44 were never married. Today, it’s 56 percent. In 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 19 percent, in 1960, 22 percent, and today, it’s 70 percent. Some argue that the state of the black family is the result of the legacy of slavery, discrimination and poverty. That has to be nonsense. A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families, comprised of two parents and children. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents. In fact, according to Herbert Gutman in “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925,” “Five in six children under the age of 6 lived with both parents.” ”
So, yes, I suspect that blacks in America were happier and better off under Jim Crow laws than they are today under rap culture. Do I think Jim Crow culture was superior to rap culture? Yes. Do I want America to go back to Jim Crow culture? No.
Gays were better off under a repressive America than under today’s America. Just look at AIDS. AIDS exploded after it became socially acceptable to publicly identify as gay. Black crime rates exploded after the 1960s Civil Rights legislation. South Africa’s average life expectancy has plunged a decade since the end of apartheid. The average black (and white) in South Africa was better off under apartheid than he is today.
In many ways, Jews in America were better off with a mildly anti-semitic America that did not always allow them into certain hotels and country clubs and limited their admission to Ivy League schools because that segregation promoted group cohesion and discouraged inter-marriage and assimilation.
Freedom and equality of opportunity are not always the greatest values.
John* emails:
There are a couple of very important points about Jim Crow laws that are usually ignored by people who view segregation as unspeakably evil. Under segregation, there was generally a thriving black business class who catered to blacks. Once segregation was lifted, and blacks could shop anywhere, some did and that cut into the black owners’ business but whites did not start patronizing black owned establishments. So integration had the unintended consequence of eviscerating black stores (excepting undertakers, barbers and hair salons.)
The other problem arose with school segregation. Within the black community, teachers, administrators and principals formed a respected middle and upper class. When the schools were desegregated, many of the teachers lost their positions. They may have been graduates of Negro teacher’s colleges, but those schools were thought of as inferior to their white counterparts. Black principals were not put in charge of an integrated or white faculty.
This also had the unintended consequence of undermining discipline in the schools. If a kid acted up, the principal and/or teachers knew the family and would speak with the family about the problems with the child. With white teachers and principals, this didn’t apply. They may have held positions of authority, but they didn’t personally know the family or interact in the community in the same way.
On the anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, I read some interviews with prominent blacks who had received education in the segregated south and then were part of the first wave of desegregation. They said that they felt that the education they received from their segregated teachers surpassed what they received in an integrated environment. Some of this may be due to white racism, but at least part of it, is that they could identify more closely with their black teachers and their black teachers understood them better.
If you want to read more about the impact of the Brown case on education, Raymond Wolters, a history professor at the University of Delaware, has written a couple of books about it.