On the eve of George W. Bush’s inauguration, the eldest son of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. took “an oath of protest.” Sixteen years later, he met with Donald Trump and declined to comment on the president-elect’s feud with one of his father’s last living colleagues, Rep. John Lewis.
Together the episodes provide interesting bookends to the Republican Party’s evolving relationship with the African-American community.
After the tumultuous presidential election in 2000, Martin Luther King III attended an “Emergency Summit” of civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C. Then the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King questioned how Al Gore could lose in the “Black Belt” and called for new voting rights protections.
Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson joined King, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported at the time, in pledging to defend equal voting rights in the Bush Era. “This issue created the climate for a rallying cry for us to come together,” King said. “The issue has caused us to have to come together.”
Fast forward 16 years and a much more bombastic Republican is about to take the Oath of Office. But Trump’s attacks on Lewis, perhaps the last living Civil Rights icon, haven’t persuaded King to retake his oath of protest.
Sidestepping the Trump-Lewis controversy as a “heat of emotion,” King noted instead an opportunity to make voting easier.
“This is America,” King wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “We want to make it easier for people to participate. Fortunately, President-elect Trump agrees. Throughout the campaign, he consistently reminded the electorate that the system is broken.”
It would seem that Trump’s bluster is more persuasive than the Bush administration’s poll-tested messaging.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
