Monday was a holiday dedicated to the memory of the greatest American civil rights leader of the 20th century: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But while the airwaves were covered with shallow tributes to the man, in 2024 it’s clear this country doesn’t honor his legacy.
Not anymore. Not for some time now.
This is likely to be something of an explosive column, and it will draw comments from all over the spectrum, so perhaps it’s most useful to begin by defining exactly what King’s legacy is.
And while the man was complex and his message multifaceted, the moment that made him great was a speech given at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963, as part of a mass demonstration of people from every race, creed, and walk of life.
What King said in that speech was one of the most pristine distillations of the American spirit ever brought to voice. Most particularly, there was this:
So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
The “I Have a Dream” speech was the embodiment of the ideal that elevated King above the mere activists and agitators of the day. King certainly had his failings as a man, but as a civil rights leader he succeeded not because he sought to tear down the America that was but because he wished to build up the America that was promised by its Founding Fathers.
Just as King’s predecessor Frederick Douglass, the most prominent civil rights figure of the 19th century, had demanded not a destruction of an unjust system but a perfection of a just design.
Douglass, and then King, made progress because their message transcended race. It cut through to the American spirit, the deep longing that, as King noted, we might be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. (RELATED: How Best to Fulfill King’s Aspirations)
The rest of the world sees America that way. This country has always been a magnet for people from all over the world of every pigmentation. Sometimes our own people are too close to the issue to recognize it, but at heart this is the least racist country on earth.
Martin Luther King could see that. Otherwise, he would have been wasting his time giving that “I Have a Dream” speech. If he didn’t believe in the inherent goodness and justice of the American people and the culture and values of the system left to us by those great men who met in Philadelphia in 1776 and again in 1787, King would have been more like Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X.
And he won.
It may have taken four decades or so, but, by the first decade of this century, King’s ideal of a colorblind America was the national consensus. Or, at least, that’s what we thought we had. By 2007, race relations as measured by Gallup in their annual survey of the subject saw an absolute zenith across racial lines in optimism and good feeling.
And then along came Barack Obama.
I should note, as I do in Racism, Revenge and Ruin, that the principal value proposition offered by Obama for attaining political power was the purported positive effect on race relations that he — or his persona as the first black president — would bring about. After all, how could America be a racist nation if it was willing to make a black man president?
Countless millions of Americans who had very little affinity for Obama’s ideological alignment counted themselves proud to see him taking the oath of office.
But did we get that racial healing? Did we get the universal values King so brilliantly enunciated on that warm August day in 1963?
Hell, no.
We got the New Black Panthers brandishing truncheons at old white ladies in Philadelphia in the worst case of voter intimidation since King’s time, and Obama and his horrendous Attorney General Eric Holder wouldn’t prosecute the case.
We got the Skip Gates incident at Harvard, when Obama deliberately inflamed race relations by slandering a cop who was doing his job and pushing a false narrative about police mistreatment of minorities when the occasion called for understanding and humanity, if not even perhaps humor.
And we got Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling. And, ultimately, Gavin Long.
Every time Barack Obama had an opportunity to speak the truth to America, he chose to do the opposite. He and Holder and others in his administration pushed and pushed on supposedly “racist” police in this country when statistical data clearly showed there was and is no pattern of deadly police racism.
Obama — had he actually believed in King’s dream — would have responded to at least one of these tragic, but not unforeseeable, incidents by noting that the real lesson is for young black men not to live their lives like Sterling, or Brown, or Garner or Trayvon Martin. That such a life is a dead end, and that a criminal life means the victimization of black people and a diminution of the quality of life in the black community.
And the necessity for more police to attempt to bring law and order to those places, which increases the possibility for an interaction to go badly.
In King’s time there were, to be sure, severe violations committed by southern racists (all of whom were Democrats, by the way, and virtually all of those stayed that way until they died; it’s a lie that those people “switched sides” and became Republicans, because they were mostly long dead by the time the GOP took the South). Nobody denies that. But half a century later, the most high-profile racial incidents mostly originated not in the old confederacy or out in the sticks among the hicks but, rather, in big blue cities.
In King’s time, the notion of a black president was fanciful, if not ridiculous.
But in Obama’s telling, that progress meant nothing.
Because, to Obama, there is no colorblind America — and no desire for one. A colorblind America means that society judges by other criteria — things he can’t profit from.
How would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. feel about Claudine Gay? How does she fit into the notion that we want to be judged by the content of our character and not by identity politics?
She’s the very opposite of his dream. And Obama, for nearly two decades the most prominent and successful racial saboteur on planet Earth, went to bat to save her job.
Of course he did.
Martin Luther King once said: “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
Meaning that competence is more important that title or credentials, because progress can only come one way. King argued for opportunities — not handouts.
All these years later, what’s left of that philosophy?
This is an America where the things King demanded of the black community on the way to equality and justice are now seen as racist. Showing up on time, speaking proper English, dressing appropriately, pursuing marketable skills — those are “acting white” and vestiges of a racist era.
And race relations might even be worse than they were in August of 1963, with the regime Obama set in place doing everything it can to sour them for crass political purposes.
King’s dream of a colorblind society lies in ruins, victim of the best of public intentions and the greatest bait-and-switch in American political history.
That’s all Obama. Shame on him.
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