Martin Luther King's True Legacy

By Scott L. Glabe | Friday, January 20, 2006

At Dartmouth, Martin Luther King Day has been transformed into Diversity Month-or-So. From January 11 to February 6, the College is playing host to all manner of programming that professes solidarity with the late Rev. King, possessor of one of the most unsullied legacies in American history. While Dr. King’s own name is rightly immune from criticism, events misappropriating it should not be. And, as our coverage in this issue shows (pages eight to ten), the College’s “celebration”—officially titled “Between Heaven and Hell: Religion, Politics, and Civil Rights”—has used the ample cover provided by King’s name to proclaim fringe values rather than celebrate an historical movement.

These values are often only tangentially related to the Civil Rights Movement (or any civil rights movement, for that matter), but, here and elsewhere, propagandists have deftly substituted modern academia’s cherished “diversity” for King’s goal of “equality.” Lest we wonder which comes first around these parts, notice that the campus organizer of King festivities is the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity. And, when the former is placed ahead of the latter, all manner of leftist causes célèbre can be, well, celebrated in King’s name—unrelated though they may be to his actual work.

The events that have taken place at Dartmouth so far this year vividly illustrate this method in action. Before the keynote speech by Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York City, Jewish Studies professor Susannah Heschel predictably compared the struggle of Jews with those of African-Americans and, more surprisingly, asserted that prisons are “the American way of enslaving black people and the poor.”

Even more tangentially, choreographer Bill T. Jones used twin showings of his dance-theatre piece “Blind Date” (and an associated speech) to pontificate about politics and rail against capitalism. The only thing that could have possibly justified letting a choreographer give a blatantly political talk at College expense was King’s legacy, the same platform that was abused even more inexplicably to bring white lesbian Dorothy Allison to campus as the keynote speaker last year.

Not surprisingly, however, utterly failed presidential candidate Al Sharpton trounced the competition for the abuse of King’s name. The recently-uncovered NSA wiretapping of suspected terrorists evoked the FBI’s eavesdropping on Rev. King, Sharpton alleged. Even more fantastically (and even more far-removed from King), Sharpton rhetorically fumed: “Isn’t it a blatant disgrace that we have a president that can see weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that are not there but can’t see a hurricane in New Orleans that is there?”

Sharpton tied it all together with this doozy, as quoted in the Daily Dartmouth (1/13/06):

The irony for me is that George Bush, after spending the week lobbying for Alito, justifying wiretaps and explaining for the thousandth time why he did not respond to Katrina, will stand somewhere on Monday and piously act as though he remembers Dr. King, when in fact, he has stood against everything Dr. King represented and is probably the most renowned Dr. King dream-buster that we’ve seen in the last 20 years.

The irony, for me, is that Sharpton would reduce the legacy of Dr. King to partisan political squabbling—while accusing another of distorting King’s message.

To be fair, Sharpton was brought to campus by the Young Democrats, not the College, which contented itself with Jones, Forbes, and H. Carl McCall ’58, the Democratic nominee for governor of New York in 2002 who spoke at the vigil for King. But Sharpton has a point: imagine the uproar if the College Republicans invited Clarence Thomas or Ward Connerly to campus for MLK Day. They would suffer the same abuse Sharpton poured on Bush—and worse.

Thus exists the absurd scenario in which liberals can use King for whatever they want but conservatives cannot use him at all. The real irony here is that, in today’s political universe, the latter have an arguably better claim than the former. As Bill Bennett put it in a 1993 speech at the Heritage Foundation:

If you said in 1968 that you should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that you should be color-blind, you were a liberal. If you say it now, you are a conservative. It is in that sense that Martin Luther King today is a conservative.

There are other reasons. As Carolyn Garris writes in a more recent Heritage publication:

Dr. King believed in a fixed moral law, an anathema to moral relativists espousing subjective values…In today’s parlance, Dr. King’s movement would be called “faith-based.” Unlike the doggedly secular groups that now campaign for government action in the name of “social justice,” King’s coalition was explicitly religious, rooted in churches and Christian morality.

While many conservatives opposed the Civil Rights movement in King’s time, a fact to which Bennett alludes, today they are the best stewards of his legacy. We are all familiar with Dr. King’s dream that his “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,” but we often forget, as Garris reminds us, that King still wishes them to be judged—by their moral turpitude rather than race. “Today,” she writes, “this is the conservative message.” But, in order to proclaim it around this time of year, we must ourselves dream of a when those who are invoke King’s hallowed name are judged by their faithfulness to his message rather than their ideology.

Martin Luther King's True Legacy

Article Tools

Related Articles