Can any political party claim Martin Luther King?
OPINION - Certainly, no party can claim Dr. King. But these days, some parties come much closer than others...
And in 1965, there was similar activity around the Voting Rights Act, with 78 percent of House Democrats supporting the legislation (221 in favor and 61 against) and 82 percent of Republicans backing it (112 yeas to 24 nays). In the Senate, with a 77-19 vote, 73 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans supported the bill. This was due to the strong opposition of Southern Democrats, which King noted had worked in coalition with “reactionary Northern Republicans” to betray the Negro.
“There goes the South for a generation,” President Johnson said of the Democrats’ prospects after he signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Actually, it has been two generations since white Southern Democrats, resentful over the civil rights gains of African-Americans, migrated to the GOP. Using a well-orchestrated Southern Strategy, the Republicans became the party of Dixie by exploiting the racial fears and animosities of disaffected whites. And a pro-states’ rights, anti-tax, anti-social program, anti-civil rights platform made it happen. No one needed to utter the n-word, because the policies spoke for themselves, as “a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites,” said the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater.
On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Colin Powell is a lone wolf in the wilderness as he laments his party’s “dark vein of intolerance,” and the GOP’s punishment and alienation of voters of color through restrictive voting laws—which he said in the presence of North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory. As Powell attempts to knock some sense into his Republican Party, it makes one realize that a large chasm separates the GOP from the principles of Dr. King.
And as today’s Republican governors and state lawmakers across the country eradicate labor rights, we must remember that when King was assassinated, he was organizing a “Poor Peoples March,” and standing with striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. An advocate for economic justice, Dr. King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”
“We must rapidly begin to shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-centered’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” Dr. King added.
Meanwhile, although Martin Luther King, Jr. did work with Johnson in the area of civil rights, he was a thorn in the side of the Democratic president on the war in Vietnam. Breaking his silence on Vietnam, Dr. King was able to link the civil rights struggle to the destruction of the war, and the escalation of war to the failed war on poverty. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom,” he warned.
Further, Dr. King articulated “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.” The leader’s radical antiwar stance—including his condemnation of the military as a “cruel manipulation of the poor” and critique of America as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” alienated King among the Democratic establishment, the media and other civil rights leaders. His targeting of Northern racism in Chicago and elsewhere helped to further sour his image among the establishment and the media.
Ultimately, while King is portrayed as an idealistic dreamer to the point of hyperbole, he was a pragmatist, voting for President Kennedy while not publicly endorsing him. Yet, criticizing both parties for using blacks as a “political football,” he kept a watchful eye on candidates and their civil rights stances. “I feel someone must remain in the position of non-alignment, so that he can look objectively at both parties and be the conscience of both—not the servant or master of either,” King said.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove
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