I scanned the headlines in the New York Times and found “‘All Talk,’ Trump Says in Attack on Civil Rights Icon”. It worked as clickbait since the only civil rights icon that came to mind was Martin Luther King, Jr. This was a lot more shocking to me than anything Trump was accused of during the election!
It turned out that the civil rights “icon” being attacked was not, in fact, the person whose birthday we celebrate today, but rather a Democrat from Georgia who was publicly boycotting the coronation of King Donald I.
I recently finished a biography of Ulysses S. Grant (some blog entries about this book to follow), which describes the ineffectiveness of Northern/central efforts to dictate to Southerners how to think in the decades following the Civil War. This gave me even a little more respect for MLK and the challenge he faced. The framework of desegregation had been created during the Eisenhower Administration but dictating something from D.C. and what happens locally can be different. Like Grant, Eisenhower changed people’s behavior at gunpoint; MLK changed people’s minds (not everyone, of course, but even Jesus Christ and the Buddha weren’t able to convince everyone!).
Readers: share your MLK Day thoughts!
Related:
- What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do for us today?
- “A pattern of deeming Republican presidents ‘illegitimate'” (Washington Post; it seems that this Democrat from Georgia, who was attacked by Democrats in the South in the 1960s, is happy only when a Democrat occupies the White House)
The tactics of the big brother have not changed, but turned out to be totally ineffective against the King Donald.
FBI letter sent to Martin Luther King telling him to kill himself within 34 days or face sex smear: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/821050144732971010
and https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html?_r=0
What are they going to try next?
The world has moved on since 1965 — Bull Connor and George Wallace are long dead. Birmingham Alabama had a black mayor for twenty years. And the biggest challenges facing African Americans are the high crime rates and low quality schools in the inner city — not the right to sit at a desegregated lunch counter. But the elderly civil rights activists would rather live in the past and the liberal media pander to them and encourage the cult of victimhood — that leads nowhere.
A lot more of SOMA took today off than they did before The Donald was elected.
You’re rather seriously underdescribing Rep. John Lewis. In addition to almost 30 years as a Congressman, he was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders and one of the six primary organizers of the 1963 March on Washington that featured King’s I Have A Dream speech (where he also spoke). On Bloody Sunday when marching from Selma to Montgomery, his skull was fractured by state troopers. I considered it an honor when I got to meet and chat briefly with him last summer, thanking him for helping having made my black/white biracial nieces possible. He’s generally considered a very honorable man by folk on both sides of the aisle in Congress, regardless of his Democrat affiliation.
Tom: I’m glad that you got to meet this politician. And certainly I would not want to criticize what he did 52 years during the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches
However, I don’t think that Trump was criticizing what this guy did 52 years ago, so it doesn’t seem relevant to current events (Democrat politician loudly refuses to attend Republican (sort of?) politician’s inauguration).
[A lot of stuff happened in the 1960s that is inconceivable today. We lost 7,000 helicopters during the Vietnam War, for example. Imagine the bravery that it took to fly a second tour. Most of the grandchildren of those pilots are afraid to get into a light aircraft and fly around the pattern on a sunny day in peacetime.]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/john-lewiss-record-in-congress-is-less-than-heroic-1484697531?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=poptarget&cx_artPos=2#cxrecs_s