As a Baptist minister, he considered the United States to be fundamentally off-course, so he organized a political movement to force a shift in the nation’s direction. He traveled millions of miles, wrote books and articles, and became a household name. Soon his “coalition of conscience” had such political strength that politicians couldn’t afford to ignore him. But although he was invited to the White House to confer with presidents, many Americans loathed him, and for the rest of his life, he was subjected to vicious personal attacks.
Yes, that describes Martin Luther King, Jr. — but it also describes Jerry Falwell. If you imagine establishing a national holiday commemorating Falwell’s birth, it’s easy to understand why so many people (including Sen. John McCain) were opposed to making King’s birthday a national holiday. Certainly, King’s cause was just; the inequities he addressed were despicable. Still, it was fair to question whether Congress should canonize politically active preachers.
Undoubtedly, King received special consideration because — athough the cause of equal opportunity that he championed is supported by all decent Americans — his legacy has been co-opted and contorted by the left. And as an icon of leftists, King is lionized for the same behavior for which a right-winger like Falwell is condemned.
Doubt that? Then name this individual: A Southern senator, he gained national prominence as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He galvanized public opinion, earning staunch friends and ardent foes. In the 1950s and ’60s he supported segregation and opposed civil rights legislation.
Go to the head of the class if you recognized the late Democratic Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, for whom the Fulbright program is named — or if you identified former Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Both men’s careers followed the same path; both were guided by the traditions of their times. The difference is that Helms later repented of his support for segregation. Nonetheless, he left the Senate vilified as a racist, while Fulbright remains a national hero.
Yet Fulbright was one of the main obstacles to civil rights legislation in the early 1960s. President John F. Kennedy did not propose such legislation until 1963, in part because he knew it would be opposed by the influential Fulbright. Even then Kennedy begged civil rights activists to fly under the radar screen. When they suggested to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the president publicly escort some black students through segregationist blockades, the attorney general guffawed. Yet the Kennedys — because they’re liberal icons — are forgiven anything.
Trent Lott is not so fortunate. The Republican senator from Mississippi retired quietly last month, never having recovered from the dumb remark he made at a 100th birthday party for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. “I want to say this about my state,” Lott said. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Lott almost certainly was trying to throw an old man a bone and say that Thurmond would have made a good president, but his remarks were interpreted as support for the segregationist position Thurmond held in 1948.
On the other hand, there is no ambiguity about what Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., meant when he said as a young man that he would “never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side” — that he “would rather see Old Glory trampled in the dirt, never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.” A former recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, Byrd filibustered civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Yet Byrd is not reviled; he is known as “the conscience of the Senate.”
Part of the reason Byrd, Fulbright, the Kennedys and others are not held accountable for their statements is because many of their supporters do not know what these individuals actually believed. Those who do know usually excuse the clay feet as a universal human condition. Fair enough. But then why don’t they extend the same tolerance to conservative leaders?
If Byrd deserves forgiveness, so does Lott. If Fulbright is a hero, Helms is too. Neither the right nor the left can stake a claim on heroism or, for that matter, stupidity.
Examiner Columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
