An American Had a Dream
Happy Belated Martin Luther King, Jr Birthday!
I must have been reading an article about Martin Luther King, Jr. when I came across a few quotes out of his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? They’re timeless.
I think if MLK were with us today, he would be impressed by our nation’s progress and I think he would be horrified by the rhetoric, gas lighting and historical rewrites. Pleased with some of the ways society has matured, but disheartened with our inability to cross into the end zone. Having come a long way, we still have a long way to go.
I definitely think he would be appalled at the way his words have been hijacked and misconstrued. I am thinking — in particular — of the soaring passage in his I Have a Dream speech that conservative think tanks have managed to twist in defense of their own agenda. They want us to believe America is now all hunky-dory with skin color.
Here is that passage:
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.
At the end of my column I am linking to some commentary from Natasha Alford on CNN whose rejoinder to a conservative commentator is truly on the mark. Please give it a listen.
Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism. ― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Amen, Brother Martin! It’s funny how J. Edgar Hoover — America’s paranoid FBI director throughout most of the 20th century — could rejigger words such as these into Martin Luther King being a Communist and advocating Communism. Nonetheless, Hoover did. That’s how it goes in these not-so-United States when it comes to saying one good word about collectivism in the Big Picture. Trust me, Big C Capitalism will never not prevail in our country.
Representative democracy on the other hand…
Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance.
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Word. Some of us are doing the opposite. Words — which were written in the ‘60s — continue to never be more true. MAGA states nation wide ban, restrict or challenge books that are not gentle enough on white children’s ears. Books like Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb which was the poem read during President Biden’s inaugural.
Other books are:
"The ABCs of Black History" by Rio Cortez, "Cuban Kids" by George Ancona, "Love to Langston" by Tony Medina, and "Countries in the News: Cuba," by Kieran Walsh.
The ABCs of Book Banning is a 27 minute tutorial on the difference between bans, restrictions and challenges. The documentary short looks at one county in Florida. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, once again, procures a ban. Interestingly enough, there are scenes in Slaughterhouse Five of massive book burnings.
Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility.
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
These are the truths that need repeating. I’ve used this quote before, but it bears repeating in this context. It’s from LBJ — President Lyndon Baines Johnson for those of you born in the late 20th, early 21st century — and it has been confirmed as being his very words by Snopes.com
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The morbidly rich, who own practically all of the mainstream media, and much of the off stream media, like to whine about ‘class’ wars through their bought-and-paid-for bully pulpits. They count on the lower classes to behave just as LBJ assumed they would. They come up with euphemisms for all of the things they want the unwashed to ignore or support to the death — death taxes, trickle down economics, right-to-work laws, hiring Supreme Court justices to rule that money equals free speech, etc, ad nauseum.
I’ll guarantee you white collar morbidly rich criminals have taken far more of your money — as well as your freedoms — than the occasional rioter. And yet, we keep electing them to higher office. We keep voting in their favor.
You call your thousand material devices “labor-saving machinery,” yet you are forever “busy.” With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else … your devices are neither time-saving nor soul-saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Hear! Hear!
Marx warned organized religion was the opium of the people, but all of our modern devices do a pretty damned good job of anesthetizing us. King wasn’t even referring to cell phones, computers, smart watches or anything digital. He would have fit right into the Luddite uprising.
Last two. Read through them carefully.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness - justice.
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Wait. We weren’t great back in the good old days? Back in that time when we fought a war over state’s rights? Not the more obvious reason, eh Nikki? You know, the enslavement of another people? As most of the secessionist states admitted. On paper.
This quote also echoes the chant from two summers ago — “No justice! No peace!”
Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.
This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community
“Democracy is not worth having if it involves equality.”
The “quiet” part spoken out loud.
“Quiet” parts like Ronald Reagan launching his presidential bid from a Southern hotbed of Klan activity. The devastating Willie Horton ads from George Herbert Walker Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988. Are King’s “unregenerate segregationists”, Clinton’s “deplorables” of today?
Is America capable of judging the “content of someone’s character” rather than the color of their skin, or their gender, or their beliefs?
In 1981 Lee Atwater, one of the most reviled Republican operatives to have ever stalked the halls of American politics, was quoted as saying as a way of explaining how Republicans could gain the confidence of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.... “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” - Lee Atwater, 1981 interview with Alexander Lamis
Of course, this charade is no longer needed. Political lifetimes are infinite. Nothing is too outrageous. Everything has plausible deniability. Reality is what you want it to be. We have facts and ‘alternative’ facts. To win an election you sell them fear and loathing and keep them frothing at the mouth. Through an election. Past an election. Into an insurrection. If you can keep them frothy enough and you can get them to threaten enough public officials…
Then the autocrats can seize control by default.
When that happens, we’ll find out just how far we’ve actually come since Martin Luther King, Jr. made it to the mountaintop.
If you can stomach the audio of Lee Atwater’s quote (which is only a tiny portion of the 42 minute interview):
Lee Atwater — it is said — recanted on his deathbed. Recanted for choosing to be evil, spreading evil and doing the bidding of evil. This quote was never attributed to him while he was alive. He died in 1991 at the age of 40. The public learned Lee Atwater — who spawned many a dirty political operative — said those things 8 years after his death.
The insurrectionist who squatted in the White House from 2016 to 2020 made no effort to learn to dog whistle. Because he’s an equal opportunity trash talker his deranged followers somehow believe he doesn’t have a racist bone in this body — and neither do they. They have a Black friend. They have a Black member of the family. They know someone who is Black. They buy their insurance from someone who is Black. They don’t see color.
And yet…
They wouldn’t swap positions with a Black person if their lives depended on it. At least not some anonymous Black person. Maybe Michael Jordan.
Also…here’s Natasha Alford’s POV about where we are as a nation.
“…and that will be true again tomorrow…” says the conservative commentator who — apparently — does not see, and has not seen, any ‘backsliding’ happening over the past decade.
One more thing. Just watched the 2022 movie Babylon featuring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. If you can get past the debauchery and hedonism — it is 1920s Tinseltown, after all — you might, like me, enjoy the insight into Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to talkies.
Bon apetit!
Make yourself a pre-Prohibition cocktail to make the viewing all the more enjoyable.
Or, perhaps, an edible.
So glad to read such thought-provoking material. Thanks, James!
Terrific quotes from MLK. He knew us far better than we knew ourselves. And still so true.