A 2023 MLK Retrospective. This week was the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day holiday. His is the only national holiday named for one man. Formerly, that honor was reserved for George Washington. But, his birthday was watered down to “President’s Day” because Lincoln wasn’t honored in like manner and two holidays in the dead of a February winter seemed too much for government and business. Recently, someone published a poll from 1968 saying 75% of Americans didn’t approve of him then. Now, he is an icon. An icon of what? Why?
I was 17 year old High School senior when Dr. King was assassinated. I had a week’s work as an electrician’s helper for the 1968 Cherry Blossom Festival in DC. That means I carried stuff. We set up lights and speakers around the Washington Monument and Sylvan Theater on the first day. The next day, Dr. King was shot. We could see the city on fire from the shop on the Clarendon high ground of Arlington, VA. We went into the city to retrieve the electrician’s gear. His van had a CB radio so we heard the police reports.
We were the only vehicle on the road going into DC. I saw the convoy of Army soldiers in “Deuce and Half” trucks come down the middle of Independence Avenue and then circle the White House. When we finished, we drove by 14th Street and saw a lot of looters a block away. I missed a Pulitzer Prize picture of the Capitol in a wreath of smoke.
The damage from the riot left some parts of the city in ruins for decades. Literally. No one wanted to invest and rebuild to have it torn down again.
The explosion of violence was the first legacy of Dr. King’s death. Not something he wanted. It’s the opposite of his non-violent doctrine.
The genius of Dr. King’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, and there were many vying to be the leader, was combining Christian values, legal challenges, and non-violent civil disobedience. It worked to produce the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Legal, de jure, segregation was over and done by 1968.
Dr. King criticized the Vietnam War, but hadn’t stepped out as a leader in that movement. He found a new cause in a labor dispute in Memphis.
The garbagemen’s strike looked to be a municipal labor union issue about wages. But, since the garbagemen were Black and the city leadership was White back then, it became about race. The garbagemen carried signs that read “I am a Man.” Why was that a question in 1968?
Because the legacy of a hundred years of Jim Crow segregation was a bitter residue of accumulated abuse, slights, disrespect, and open bigotry. The striking garbagemen wanted something more than money. The Black men wanted respect.
An assassin’s bullet unleashed pent up rage across America.
I wasn’t surprised that Dr. King was killed. I wasn’t a self-consciously cynical 17 year old, but merely an observer of the violence and death inflicted on Civil Rights workers in the South. Likewise, the summers of Black ghetto violence across the country since Watts in 1965, made it all commonplace.
A month later, a young Marion Barry spoke to concerned citizens on a Saturday morning in my High School gym. Young Marion Barry was quite different from the cynical, drug-using Mayor of DC. He was dynamic. Frankly, he was one of the most impressive men I’d ever seen. In retrospect, very few speakers have ever reached me as he did.
He talked about the burden of past hurts. He talked about the present disadvantages. He compared his burned out neighborhood the well-kept lawns and tidy houses of the Arlington suburb. He spoke with passion about his hope for the future.
What happened since 1968?
At least three major muscle movements transformed America.
The Good.
As racial integration and inter-racial marriage became an accepted part of life, racial prejudice diminished for most Americans. Millions of White Southerners had the transformation of the human heart that only Jesus can perform to disdain racial prejudice and embrace Christian love for all others.
Racial slurs have become such a social anathema that they aren’t acceptable in polite company. They aren’t excused in private conversations. Displaying racial prejudice, if you are White, will get you fired, socially ostracized, and de-platformed. Racism is anathema for most Americans.
The Bad.
The Civil Rights movement became a cause without a purpose. As barriers fell, the Civil Rights workers had to find work that paid. They became race pimps. They became the professional racists dedicated to identity politics as the only means for their livelihood.
The racists had to create crises in turn – each a playable cause celebre – to survive and thrive. In the early 1990s the NAACP made all things Confederate their target. Polls at time in Southern states indicated a minority of Black citizens objected to Confederate symbols. That changed over 30 years of hype and hysteria. It became shameful, divisive, and created grievances in its own right.
The race pimps raced back and down to a new racism, going from Affirmative Action to the fully “Woke”, Catch-22 silly but dangerous syllogisms of “Anti-Racist” prejudice against Whites.
The “Civil Rights Leaders” betrayed their own people for decades. They didn’t address the issues that matter – like fatherhood, work ethic, competing for excellence, self-reliance, etc. Over a trillion dollars in government handouts passed through their hands without fixing a single problem, improve a single community, or slow the downward cycle of drugs and alcohol abuse, fatherless families, gangs and violence – failure of every sort.
Ghettoes still explode in violence when instigated. Violence that simply doesn’t happen in other communities, no matter the provocation or excuse – like a natural disaster.
The Ugly.
The Leftists evolved Cultural Marxism from Classical Marxism. The substituted “Race” for “Class” in their flawed, and proven failed Marxist view of history, economics, politics, and culture. As the Leftist gained control as the elites dominating the American institutions of government – including the military, business, education, media, arts and entertainment, some religions, and too many families, they’ve promoted identity politics with permanent victim classes of protected persons.
The Left, actually the Commies who call themselves Democrats, are doing what the Whigs and the Democrats did in the 1850s. The national parties didn’t have national issues to unite their Northern and Southern wings. So, politicians spent a decade promoting regional identity and issues to stay elected. Today, the Democrat can’t win an election without enough voters voting their Identity politics. The Commies are pumping up Identity politics at the expense of the American polity.
In Conclusion – 2023.
Since a race-hustling, community organizer got elected by millions of Americans who wanted to virtue signal their vote for a Black President, the public square has been dominated by false accusations of racism. The truth of race relations for the majority of Americans is quite quietly the opposite. Americans of every ethnicity get along well together in mutual respect, trust, and kindness as the individuals we actually are.
Americans are a good people. We’re divided by race only by those who maliciously seek to do so – and benefit like Black Lives Matter taking their guilt and cowardice tribute to the bank.
The MLK legacy in 2023 is much better America – undivided by race except by those who choose the division of identity politics.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
Parler: https://parler.com/AFNNUSA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA