..and I”m taking a long weekend, myself.
With that in mind, I’ll urge you to listen, as I do this time every year, to Reverend King’s final, and in some ways most iconic, speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop”.
“I Have A Dream”, full of vigor and hope, gets all the headlines; “Mountaintop” is both more sober and more expansive; it focuses on the stump-pulling work of the battle for civil rights. It has lessons for those who fight for all civil rights.
As always, the whole thing is worth a listen.
Keep that in mind when you read some of the, uh, revision of King from the right these days – most notably Charlie Kirk:
Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to Augustine and Aquinas to justify resisting racist laws. He elevated character high above skin color and moral universalism above separatism of all kinds. His political claims were grounded in America’s founding promises, his message garbed in a high-minded, critical patriotism. He called the United States his “beloved nation,” even as he denounced Washington’s forever war in Vietnam. At a moment of profound polarization, King is one of the few figures who can still supply us with unifying themes.
So naturally, some in the more excitable corners of the right have been taking an ax to his legacy. The latest comer is Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who last week declared that “MLK was awful,” and vowed: “We’re gonna be hitting him next week. Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr.”
Civic pieties should be scrutinized in the light of later historiography, to be sure. But that isn’t what the MLK haters are up to. Their anti-MLK crusade is the mirror image of progressive efforts to discredit national icons and narratives. Ironically, MLK himself has also been the target of such attempts from the left, on the grounds that his moderation stunted more radical projects of racial liberation.
Now, Kirk is broadcast on Salem, so I urge you to listen for yourself.
Let’s just say I’d like a word with the guy.
Speaking of questions – I suspect George Orwell has some…
…for the FBI.
It’s sobering to read that speech and realize he was delivering it to a gathering of ordinary working-class Black people, confidently expecting them to understand what he’s talking about. I wonder how many people today – of any color – know who he’s talking about? Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes, are they even taught anymore? I don’t mean High School, I wonder if they’re even mentioned in college? Dead White men are hardly fashionable, they’re downright unmentionable. How much of our shared heritage and culture has the nation lost since his day?
Could King’s more famous “I have a dream” speech be given to a Black audience today? Judge a person by the content of his character? Sexist transphobic meritocracy. Ignore the color of his skin? Blatant racism. When we will be satisfied? Never, although $10 million apiece would be a good start. A Black man is saying it? He’s a traitor to his race, an Oreo, an Uncle Tom. Despise him.
King was partly right: he had been to the mountaintop. He saw the Promised Land of Equality. He never got a chance to enter. But his children threw it all away, turning instead to hatred, envy and bitterness, to reparations and affirmative action, to quotas and set-asides, to social promotion and worthless “studies” degrees, to “hands up” protests, burning precinct stations and made-for-Netflix-all-Black-all-the-time films.
Talk about selling your heritage for a mess of pottage.
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That was something PJ O’Rourke commented on thirty years ago – how the leaders of the civil rights movement were some of the last genuinely great orators in American politics.