Less of a superhero and more of a human being

In American Thinker, Monica Showalter tackles the subject of the new information we learned about Martin Luther King this week.

King was and remains a great leader despite this shadow because he led the civil rights movement for legal equality and equal opportunity. He remains great for the things we know he was great for: Having his children judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character. Having favored one set of laws for everyone, not two-tier systems.

Great personalities often have great flaws, and people with the big egos needed to be drawn to political things can often be guilty of appalling acts in private life, which might be one way of explaining King. The awful details on King's private behavior, culled from illegal surveillance, doesn't change the good that he did. It just gives some context and raises a note of humility, making him less a superhero and more of a human being.

...it's increasingly coming to light that Democrats aren't on the same page as King. He's no hero to them. Not only was King a lifelong Republican, his vision for the U.S., with equality of opportunity rather than equality of results, of judging each person individually rather than by members of their color-matched group, of a single set of laws for everyone, is a quintessentially a conservative American idea. Democrats, remember, were his biggest opponents during his heyday, and in way, they still are now.

Read more here.

A gun owner on the FBI watch list

On Twitter David Burge reminds us that Martin Luther King was a gun owner on the FBI Watch list

Comparing Garland to Selma

At Breitbart, John Nolte compares Garland, Texas to Selma, Alabama. He makes six points, and backs each with persuasive reasoning. Here are the six points of comparison:

1. The Oppressor Chooses the Form of Protest, Not the Protester
2. The Deliberatively Provocative Symbolism of the Site of the Protest
3. A Righteous Cause for Civil Rights
4. I Come In Peace
5. Democrat Bigots Victim-Blame
6. For the Righteous Cause of Freedom, People Risk Their Lives

Read more here.

LBJ and MLK: partners?

LBJ, who delighted in listening to surveillance tapes of Martin Luther King, when King was being sexually unfaithful to his wife, and who was known for using racial slurs, is back in the spotlight today because of the movie Selma. Was he Martin Luther King's partner in seeking justice for black Americans?

Adam Serwer writes:

Lyndon Johnson said the word “nigger” a lot.

In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the nigger bill.”

For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation. As Caro recalls, Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia. Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it.

In Flawed Giant, Johnson biographer Robert Dallek writes that Johnson explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court rather than a less famous black judge by saying, “when I appoint a nigger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a nigger.”

According to Caro, Robert Parker, Johnson’s sometime chauffer, described in his memoir Capitol Hill in Black and White a moment when Johnson asked Parker whether he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” When Parker said he would, Johnson grew angry and said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”

After Johnson’s death, Parker would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, “I loved that Lyndon Johnson.” Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.”
Read more here.

Thanks to Mary Grabar

The majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood

Just as some are criticizing Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists for going too far in continuing to lampoon the "prophet" Mohammed, Martin Luther King was criticized by some of his fellow ministers for going too far. He decided to write them a letter while passing time in the Birmingham, Alabama jail. Some excerpts follow.

We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

You can read the whole letter here.
Thanks to Seth Godin, who reminds us that

Taking action is a choice.

Speaking up is a choice.

And yes, standing on the sidelines is a choice.

The South

One of my best friends at work is a black man who grew up in Mobile, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia. Getting by on canny social skills, not book knowledge. Intuition over intellect. Survival skills over book learning. A place that celebrates gentility, politeness, manners, and family. Obstinate and proud. Freedom, respect, dignity, and economic and social equality. Spiritual strength. You can kill the dreamer, but you cannot kill the dream.



Thanks to Christopher Buckley

The bigoted history of the Democrat Party