Can either of the major political parties claim Martin Luther King, Jr. as one of its own? And do they have the right?
Certainly, no party can claim Dr. King. But these days, some parties come much closer than others.
This week, as America commemorates the 50th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington, the spotlight is on Dr. King, whose message is as prophetic now as it was half a century ago. Republicans and Democrats alike are eager to adopt the slain civil rights icon as their standard bearer.
And yet, only past Democratic presidents are to attend this week’s march—all living Democratic commanders-in-chief, to be exact. So, President Obama will join his predecessors Carter and Clinton to commemorate the great march with the King family at the Let Freedom Ring Commemoration and Call to Action event at the Lincoln Memorial. Democrats point to Dr. King’s working relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson on civil rights as proof that he was in the Democratic column.
Meanwhile, Republicans have claimed for years that Dr. King was a Republican, despite the fact that it simply isn’t true. After all, King stayed away from party affiliation.
“I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses … And I’m not inextricably bound to either party,” he said.
And while black conservatives continue to engage in the ill-advised misappropriations of Dr. King’s “dream” for their party’s nightmare in progress, they would be better served to change their party, or better yet to leave it.
Today, conservatives are eager to quote the “I Have a Dream” speech as proof that King would have endorsed the GOP agenda against civil rights, affirmative action and equal opportunity, because he would want us to judge people by the content of their character and not by the color if their skin. Their version of King is rendered not merely colorblind, but blind to justice.
“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis,” King once said. That does not square with current Republican attempts to strip racial minorities of their voting rights—under the pretext of voter fraud— in states such as Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, through the use of voter ID, disenfranchisement and purges.
And in North Carolina, the Republicans are going after the voting rights of black students, in a blatant power grab that is reminiscent of Jim-Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests. Those Dixiecrats, like today’s Republicans, attempted to stem the tide of voters of color. They knew their game was over and their power supplanted once black people were able to exercise their right to vote.
And as U.S. Attorney Eric Holder fires the first shots against Republican-sponsored voter suppression in Texas, we are witnessing a Democratic-led battle that is tied to King’s struggle to secure voting rights. And the nascent civil rights movement against GOP-sponsored “Stand Your Ground” laws, formed after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, is reminiscent of the 1955 Emmet Till lynching and its role in galvanizing the civil rights movement.
To be sure, as some black conservatives argue, the Republicans, as the party of Lincoln, stood up for the oppressed. But the party that gave us the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau and some 2,000 black elected officials lost its way.
The Republican Party was once the party of civil rights, at a time when the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow segregation, the Confederate flag, and the most formidable political impediment to African-Americans.
As Michael Steele has noted, the GOP was at the forefront of civil rights. The civil rights legislation passed under President Johnson’s watch, but with a higher percentage of Republicans supporting the bills than did Democrats. For example, 80 percent of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in contrast to 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, 82 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats supported the measure.
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