The Legacy of Martin Luther King

Whither “civil rights” in the 21st Century?

The list of conservative “lost causes” still engenders plenty of passion. The designation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday is one that I, like most conservatives, argued vigorously against. The establishment of a national holiday around the persona of a singular citizen seemed unnecessary, politically cynical and almost smacked of a “cult of personality.” I would still argue today that this is bad policy and worse precedent.

But just because I am not a fan of MLK Day doesn’t mean that I am not deeply appreciative of what Rev. King stood for and accomplished. There can be no doubt that many saw Rev. King as a troublemaker and a radical during the tumultuous 1960s. To some degree he was. His personal political sympathies were more lefty than righty, and in order to facilitate necessary social change some disruption is required. But the farther away in time we get, the more conservative he looks.

There will always be arguments about the distinctions between Rev. King’s public message and his private views. There have been many and loud arguments about how those views would have evolved over time. Would he have favored the reverse discrimination known as “Affirmative Action”? How would he have felt about the theory of reparations for slavery? There are good arguments for the view that he could have evolved into another race industry hustler. But that doesn’t matter. Because what shaped the course of national policy and culture was his public persona. Both his style (dignity, class, non-violence) and his message (“I have a dream”) have had a profound effect on the course of our nation. For half a century they have set the template for thinking about civil rights that 90% of all Americans enthusiastically accept.

If one evaluates the roots of that message, it becomes clear that it is very much what today is considered “conservative,” if not downright reactionary.

Patriotism. There was not an ounce of fashionable anti-Americanism in Rev. King’s public pronouncements. To the contrary, is message was laced with visions of fulfilling a great nation’s purpose through the extension of full equality to all citizens. From his “I Have a Dream” speech:

This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

And, from his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

I would presume to say that that day arrived long ago. This message is one that resonates deeply with all Americans, except perhaps those on The Left who find no good in the founding of our nation.

Religion. Rev. King’s public messages simply oozed religion. In anchoring moral justice to religion he followed in the noble footsteps of the Founding Fathers, the Abolition movement, and Abraham Lincoln. In other words, Rev. King had no problems at all in invoking the Almighty and a bunch of dead white males to justify the nobility of his actions. Imagine what the reaction would be to a public figure making this sort of argument today:

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.

One can’t read two consecutive sentences of King’s without running into explicit references to God.

Color-Blindness. Rev. King saw group-identity-think as the problem, not as a solution. He saw the evolution as one of movement away form being defined as “the other” and towards being accepted as, simply, Americans. This is a very familiar quote, but it is profoundly important as a vision of the just society:

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.

This theme resonated very strongly in all rev. King’s public messages.

One of the reasons that Martin Luther King was so successful is that this message of fulfilling America’s destiny by bringing our laws and practices into synch with religiously based Just Law theory was almost impossible to defend against.

It worked. I would argue that not only has America completely absorbed the truth Rev. King’s vision, but that we have substantially achieved the reality of that vision. People can argue all they want about “institutional racism” this, and “reparations” that, and “legacy of slavery” the other. The truth is that every single child born in America is treated by the law and the nation as an equal citizen capable of participating in and shaping the destiny of our nation. The daughter of a sharecropper sits as Secretary of State.

The remnants of the original civil rights era have descended into parody and corruption. There is no heir to Martin Luther King. This is okay, because we don’t need another Rev. King, for his vision inspires and informs 21st Century America. There can be no doubt that a host of other problems exists that bedevil many black Americans. But those are different problems than the ones addressed by Martin Luther King 40+ years Ago. They are primarily questions of social cohesion and cultural practices and self-sabotage. What we need is someone to help inspire the black underclass to achieve the fruits that have been made possible by that vision.

I would propose that what “black America” needs for the 21st Century is a new Booker T. Washington. Washington was a man who was literally a century ahead of his time. He was proposing a solution for blacks based on personal responsibility, self-help, hard work and thrift at a time when the KKK rode at night and the mechanics of American life were hard-wired to prevent black equality. But now those messages are exactly what is needed. Just as Rev. King’s message was ultimately based on conservative principles, so too the solutions for the 21st Century must be if the are to succeed.

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