MLK Day – More Than Just A Bank Holiday

It’s Martin Luther King day – actually and respectfully, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day – and it’s worth taking a moment to note how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

As I’ve noted a long time ago, I’m ethnically a mutt, and was raised in a fairly eclectic way (in no small part by men who worked for my father – black and white rural immigrants to California who had found a good measure of success working in the construction industry). I went to black churches as a child as well as Southern Baptist ones and Beverly Hills synagogues for my friend’s Bar Mitzvah’s.

I’ve also lived in France and seen firsthand what real racism looks like.

So I’ll suggest a few things; first and foremost that Dr. King and the black and white men and women who marched with him, the other leaders who pushed to end de facto and de jure segregation in the United States did us a colossal favor. The legacy of black slavery and oppression post-Civil War had ossified into a social and legal structure that shamed and hobbled our nation.

We’re two-and-a-half generations past a white governor standing in the schoolhouse door, and while we’re not done yet, I’ll say with some certainty the world my sons will inherit is a far better world than it would have been absent Dr. King and all the other civil rights leaders who we are honoring in his name today.

16 thoughts on “MLK Day – More Than Just A Bank Holiday”

  1. Please,
    MLK was a adulterous,plagerizing com-simp. read the truth,just google up words like the truth about MLK and you’ll see the real info not the PC’d polished crap-o-la about just another house boy…but you won’t look it up because you don’t want you world unravelled by the truth. better to remain PC so your friends will like you.

  2. King wasn’t perfect, by any means. There is a lot about him I don’t like.

    That said, I agree with Armed Liberal. King showed courage and leadership at a dangerous time. PC and the race-grievance industry notwithstanding, we ARE better off re: racism than e.g. France is today, in part due to him.

  3. These MLK Jr. quotes were emailed to me today:

    “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are all caught in a network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.”

    “A man who hasn’t found a cause that he will die for isn’t fit to live.”

    “We cannot legislate morality but we can regulate behavior. Judicial decrees may not change the heart but they can restrain the heartless.”

  4. Damn, Full House, I thought it’d be at least comment #5 before that lame trope showed up. Yes, the CPUSA was deeply involved in supporting civil rights in the 50’s and early 60’s. Yes MLKJr was way less than perfect as a human being. That diminishes his accomplishments not one whit.

    You, on the other hand, are predictable. The accusations you level are stale news and widely spread among a certain circle of folks. It’s fun to think outside the expected tracks – I recommend it highly.

    A.L.

  5. And J. Edgar Hoover was a white supremecist, an opponent of _Brown v. Board of Education_ long after it was decided, and the initiator of the campaign to discredit King in the name of national security — a campaign that Full House bravely continues in his anonymous state.

    I’m certainly not too politicaly correct to bring Bobby Kennedy into it. There, I just did.

  6. It’s worth contemplating Dr. King’s successful use of non-violence against overwhelming opposition, and comparing that with our unsuccessful use of violence against a small and distributed bunch of religious extremists.

    A consistent theme in these discussions at WoC has been that our country’s destruction by Islamic extremists can only be prevented by killing them first. We’ve tried, and all it’s done is to make things worse.

    Read Dr. King, and think carefully about how he would address this problem.

  7. Dr. King could use nonviolent protest because there was a majority of decent people who not only could be brought to see the wrongness of segregation, they could also via the federal government send in armed troops to stop the vigilantism and escort young black girls to new schools.

  8. Beard, there’s a long history of discussions about nonviolence and where/when it can be effective. There’s a pretty broad consensus that it won’t do much outside the context of a liberal democracy (not necessarily a Western liberal democracy). Otherwise they just kill or imprison all the protesters.

    Gandhi (the real one) pointed out that German Jews should have protested nonviolently, even if it meant they would all be killed, because it would establish their (postmortem) moral ascendency.

    I’d imagine that a nonviolent demonstration in a tyranny with controlled media would have one outcome; no one who particpated would survive, and no one who didn’t participate would know.

    Back atcha.

    A.L.

  9. Just as predicted. Liberals will go to any lenghts of denial to continue the following behavior.

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
    Joseph Goebbels

    As useful idiots you have done a wonderful job.
    SO what if he conspired with the Communists at the height of the Cold War.
    So what if he plagerized his degrees up through the doctoral level.
    So what if he cheated on his wife while preaching from the pulpit as a holy man.
    So what.
    Liberals, having no standards and could care less.
    So what if he gave aid and comfort to the enemy in Vietnam by speaking for them.
    So what if it only embolden them and cost more American lives.
    Yes, tell a lie often enough and loudly enough and soon it becomes truth.
    You libs loved Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton and what a paragon of virtue he was.
    BUT NOW WE HAVE THE INTERNET TO CHECK THINGS LIKE MLK’S TRUE RECORD…YOU LOSE..

  10. Sorry, Busted Flush, I missed your prediction.

    I’ll freely acknowledge every one of your criticisms of King. I’ll match them with criticisms of every other historical figure we have a meaningful amount of data about. All of them are flawed, imperfect – as are all of us, according to the Bible and most other religions.

    So what?

    He accomplished one very mportant thing in his life – and deserves to be honored for it.

    I’m sure there are people out there leading quiet lives of perfect honor – and they deserve to be honored as well.

    Just not for changing the country.

    And could you – just for one paragraph – write in something other than Freeper cliches?

    A.L.

  11. Did the Phillippines under Marcos count as a liberal democracy? That’s a case where nonviolent protest was the *only* way that a powerful dictator could be overthrown. If the “People Power” folks had turned violent, they would have been massacred.

    Of course, non-violence does depend on appealing to the humanity in the opponent. If you don’t believe that the opponent has any humanity, then you will certainly believe it’s doomed to fail. And believing the opponent is non-human is always a good excuse for any amount of horror.

    There’s a pretty strong thread here at WoC (thankfully, not everyone) that anyone Islamic can be considered non-human. That is, no appeal to their humanity is worth considering, and killing them bears little or no moral cost.

    Non-violence does not mean being a push-over, and it doesn’t mean that no one will get hurt. It means you don’t use violence to further your own cause. Quite a few people died during the civil rights struggle, obviously including Dr. King.

    It also doesn’t mean quietly submitting to being massacred in the dark. If you are going to do a protest, make sure the world knows about it! Even Jesus said, “Be wise as serpents, and gentle as doves.” The world’s media are an important tool in everyone’s struggle, including and especially a non-violent one.

  12. Yeah, King wasn’t perfect, and therefore we shouldn’t appreciate what he did and said, BUT YOU’RE FREAKIN’ QUOTING JOSEPH GOEBBELS AS AN AUTHORITY!?!

    You’re either (a) an idiot, (b) a racist tool, or (c) both. Feel free to put back on your tinfoil hat and think that you spoke truth to power, just please don’t reproduce.

  13. _There’s a pretty strong thread here at WoC (thankfully, not everyone) that anyone Islamic can be considered non-human._

    I don’t believe that. I think Muslims are the victims-in-chief of inhuman ideaolgies and craven warlords and criminals. The only question to me is what are we going to do about it, or are we?

    Some of those who disagree with me, don’t think its any of our business, our cultures are too diferent, the potential for harm too great. But as Dr. King said, we wear the same garment of destiny (#5). As what is called a Christianist these days, I believe that all men were created in God’s immage, whether Christian, Sammaritin or Muslim, and all find merit in God’s eyes, but particularly the oppressed. Today, there is nobody more oppressed than the Muslims.

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