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The Daily Signal
Martin Luther
King Jr. and the Struggle for Integration
Peter C. Myers
January 17, 2016
The third Monday of each January, we commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.
by a national holiday. Mindful of his concrete actions and
accomplishments and, still more, of his sublime words, his high hopes,
and his ultimate martyrdom, we have come not only to admire, but even
to revere King.
In the pantheon of American heroes, King, the “Great Integrator,” now
stands alongside Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator.”
In obvious and less obvious respects, this is to the good. As we learn
from James Madison and Lincoln as well as from King himself, a proper
sense of reverence is a good and even a necessary quality in a free,
self-governing people. Such a people must, however, cultivate
understanding no less than reverence. Surely we honor King properly by
paying him the respect of rational scrutiny.
Of our present circumstances, we can say that as a nation we are
sharply divided over the chronically divisive issue of race—perhaps
more dangerously divided over this issue than at any other point in the
post-1960s, post-King, post-civil rights era.
We are divided over the boundaries of permissible speech on college
campuses; over universities’ use of racial and ethnic classifications
in admissions; over states’ enactments of stricter voter-registration
laws; and, above all, over the deaths of various African Americans in
encounters with police officers and the consequent emergence of the
“Black Lives Matter” protest movement.
Beneath those concrete controversies are divisions touching the
republic’s first principles. At that deep level we divide regarding the
nature and grounds of rights, the requisites for the rule of law, the
proper mode and extent of racial integration, even over the grounds of
allegiance to America.
For assistance in adjudicating those controversies, we are
understandably inclined to look to King. To do so, however, is to find
that we divide about King no less than we divide about race itself.
Still worse, we find that we divide about King due not only to our own
partisanship but also to the heterogeneity, not to say the incoherence,
of King’s thinking.
Over the course of his career, King made arguments pointing in various
directions. He made arguments concordant with classical liberal
principles and arguments rooted in progressive-liberal principles;
arguments affirming a deep attachment to American principles and
arguments forwarding a radical critique of American and modern Western
principles.
On the question of his overall self-understanding, King’s partisans on
the progressive Left clearly have a stronger claim to him as one of
their own than do those on the classical-liberal Right. To say,
however, that the progressive King is more representative of the true
or real King is not to say that his left-leaning arguments are his best
or most cogent arguments.
What if King was mistaken, as subsequent experience suggests he was, in
expecting expanded federal antipoverty efforts to bring about the
changes in culture and morale that he thought were needed for the
elevation of the poor? If he was thus mistaken, then would not the
adoption of such remedies result in the perpetuation, perhaps even the
worsening, of the concentrations of poverty, with their attendant
social dysfunctions, that troubled him?
Moreover, so far as the incidence of poverty is correlated with
differences in race or color, as it was and is, would not the adoption
of misconceived remedies render race relations increasingly strained
over time? Would not such policies tend to promote disintegration
rather than the integration to which King dedicated his life?
In the final reckoning, we honor King best by honoring what is best in
King. We honor him best by honoring him as a profoundly courageous,
unforgettably eloquent advocate of color-blind justice—of equality in
natural, civil, and political rights irrespective of race or color.
That principle, complicated and embattled as it has been and remains,
is a precious part of America’s heritage and an indispensable pillar in
the moral architecture of free society.
Honor to King, then, as the most morally authoritative proponent of
color-blind justice in U.S. history. As for the tensions or
inconsistencies in his thinking about its proper means and modes, it is
for us the living to think for ourselves how to resolve them.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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