Democrats Have Long Perverted MLK's Legacy

At Pamamas, Stephen Kruiser's "Morning Briefing."

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross

At Amazon, David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

MLK Day 2021

A surprising headline at the Los Angeles Times, "Martin Luther King’s Promised Land may be closer than we think."

Plus, seen on Facebook earlier:

As MLK Foresaw, U.S. Racism's Been Largely Overcome

From the great Jeff Jacoby, at the Boston Globe:

.@Jeff_Jacoby: As MLK foresaw, racism in America has been largely overcome https://t.co/KJR7G4eO1S

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) January 18, 2019

“I have no despair about the future,” wrote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

He was right.

It is a commonplace that racism is America’s original sin. Hardly a day goes by without attention being focused on instances of the racial injustice, friction, and double standards that can still be found in this nation. Open the morning paper or watch cable news, and there will be something to remind you of the country’s racial tensions — from controversy over flying the Confederate flag to NFL players protesting police brutality, from accusations of voter suppression in Georgia to an Iowa congressman defending “white nationalism.” It isn’t surprising that when Americans are asked in opinion polls whether race relations are getting better, many of them — sometimes most of them — gloomily reply that racism is still a major problem.

But it isn’t. It is only a minor problem now, one that has grown steadily less toxic and less entrenched. King predicted confidently that America would surmount its benighted racial past, and his confidence was not misplaced. Though his own life was cut short by a racist assassin, he foresaw that racism would lose its grip on American life.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but . . . I’ve been to the mountaintop,” King said in his final speech. “I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” He knew that American racism would wither away. Fifty-one years later, it mostly has.

Consider some of the data on changing American values...

Keep reading.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait

At Amazon, Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (Signet Classics).

Where Have You Gone, Martin Luther King, Jr.?

A great video, featuring Jason Riley, at Prager University:

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BONUS: Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound

At Amazon, Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross

At Amazon, the best book on MLK, David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Racial Injustice Today

I saw this last week but neglected to post. Racial injustice just ain't what it used to be.

Behind the making of this weeks NYer cover. #NewYorker #Magazine #magaazines #illustration #gouache #MLKDay2018 #MLK https://t.co/3sOwENSMrd pic.twitter.com/pGLn6UoVci

— Mark Ulriksen (@MarkUlriksenArt) January 9, 2018

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

This has turned into racial virtue signalling day for the radical left. Here's the New York Times, attacking President Trump, at Memeorandum, "Donald Trump's Racism: The Definitive List."

And WaPo's taking the president to task for golfing, although President Obama golfed all the time, and it was never a problem. At Memorandum, "On MLK Day, President Trump visits Trump golf course."

So, with that, here's President Trump's M.L.K Day greeting. We're lucky we have this president:

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63.

Biloxi, Mississippi, Renames MLK Holiday ''Great Americans Day'

Oh boy, here we go.

A debate on racism and and national holidays the weekend before Donald Trump takes office.

At the Biloxi Sun Herald, "Biloxi called Monday ‘Great Americans Day’ and the internet exploded":

https://twitter.com/CityofBiloxi/status/820047337863151618?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The city of Biloxi, MS calls MLK Day "Great Americans Day"...when they also mark Robert E. Lee's birthday.

Twitter is not about that BS: 👏🏽 pic.twitter.com/WWNrhHNNYu

— Fusion (@Fusion) January 14, 2017

It only took a few minutes after the City of Biloxi posted a Facebook status and tweet — noting that offices would be closed Monday for “Great Americans Day” — for people to start responding.

For the record, Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday.

Great Americans Day doesn’t exist as a holiday in Google, Wikipedia or for the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office, which recognizes a joint celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert E. Lee’s birthdays. It also did not appear in a LexisNexis search of all Mississippi news sources for the past 20 years.

Two hours after it was posted, the Facebook post had 64 comments and 91 shares and the responses to the city’s tweet include words that can’t be repeated on this website or in this newspaper.

The kindest were some variation of “I beg your pardon,” or “Autocorrect seems to have accidentally misspelled MLK Day.”

The city, for it’s part, then issued a series of tweets defending the name and touting its Martin Luther King Jr. Day events.

Within two hours, the Facebook post also had been amended to add that Great Americans Day was a state-named holiday and to include a link to its MLK events.

Also at Complex, "A Mississippi City Called MLK Day 'Great Americans Day' and Twitter Went Nuts."

Vincent Harding Dies: Advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., Wrote Anti-American Speech Attacking the Vietnam War

At the Los Angeles Times, "Vincent Harding dies at 82; historian wrote controversial King speech":

Exactly a year before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, he delivered a speech that alienated ordinarily sympathetic politicians, liberal commentators and even some of his fellow leaders in the civil rights movement.

In a blistering address at Riverside Church in New York City, King denounced the Vietnam War, likened U.S. bombings to Nazi atrocities, and called for unilateral withdrawal. The problems eroding America, he said, were "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism," and as a Christian, he had to "speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation."

King advisor Vincent G. Harding, a historian and lay minister who wrote what is said to be the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's most controversial address, died Monday in a Philadelphia hospital from the effects of a heart aneurysm, according to the University of Denver's Iliff School of Theology, where Harding taught for many years. He was 82.

Years after King's April 4, 1967, speech, Harding recalled its explosive reverberations. Other black leaders, he said, were concerned about offending President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had pushed through landmark advances in civil rights.

"All the keepers of the conventional wisdom, especially in the New York Times and the Washington Post, simply vilified and condemned Martin," he said in a 2007 interview with Sojourners magazine. "They spoke about the fact that he had done ill service, not only to his country, but to 'his people'."

The Riverside speech — known as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" — was pilloried by 168 newspapers, said commentator Tavis Smiley, who produced an hourlong PBS special on it in 2010.

It "led to the demonization of King," Smiley told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that year. "The speech caused black leaders to turn against him. It got him disinvited by LBJ to the White House. He couldn't get a book deal. It's fascinating, given the adulation and adoration we have for MLK today." ...

In 1965, Harding, then chair of the history and sociology department at Atlanta's Spelman College, wrote an open letter about Vietnam to King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"I raised the question as to whether or not we could, in conscience, keep still about what was going on in Vietnam," Harding recalled in 2007, describing the war's origin as an "anti-colonial struggle."

King and other black leaders wrestled with the question for two years.

"Down deep within all of it," Harding said, "was America's racist attitude, which essentially said, 'It's all right, King, for you to talk about colored things but, when it comes to foreign policies, that's our business. We really don't want to hear anything from you about it because that's our business."

More.

Shoot, Noam Chomsky would have had nothing on MLK's anti-Americanism. Indeed, Life Magazine denounced King at the time, calling the Riverside speech "a demogogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi."

Frankly, I never liked MLK's views on Vietnam, and the record here tarnishes an otherwise noble legacy on civil rights. Clearly, those who then attacked MLK as a tool of global Communism were on firm ground when they referenced Dr. King's bankrupt anti-Americanism on Vietnam.

At the video, Vincent Harding is interviewed by Tavis Smiley, and notice how the far-left '60s radicalism bleeds through. These are the kind of people who have destroyed the moral firmament of America. They have created a cut-and-run ideology in which America is always questioning the rightness of its cause. Tavis Smiley himself has compared Vietnam to Afghanistan, a move besmirching American national security policy and the war on terror as a "racist imperialist paradigm." In short, what people thought was the extreme radicalism of MLK in the 1960s has become the mainstream of the Democrat Party left today. It's a shame that we're not honest enough as a nation to recognize the roots of treasonous national destruction in the coterie of advisers, speechmakers and friends who influenced the 20th century's greatest leader on civil rights.