If Martin Luther King, Jr. were still alive, we wouldn’t have to speculate on how that great man, who rejected violence, would react to the palpable loathing coming from the mouths of today’s progressive Democrats. Even so, his own words offer clear evidence that he would reject their mindset wholeheartedly.
King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech” was a message of aspiration — a “sunlit path of racial justice.”
The overarching theme to King’s Speech was that subliminal stimulus to look ahead, to be forward looking. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he said. He looked forward to the full grant to blacks of their God-given rights, and predicted that “men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”
King’s powerful words almost seem quaint and irrelevant to today’s hysterical Democrat culture warriors, who thirst for bitterness and hatred above all else.
The transcript of a recent New York Times staff meeting illustrates the point. The infamous front-page headline by the paper about President Trump’s speech on the recent mass shootings read, “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism.”
“Horrors!” said their faithful readers. Who wrote this? Every thinking American knows that Trump’s a racist. The hapless editor was demoted, which led to a meeting in which the executive editor posed the question: “How do you write about race in a thoughtful way?” The answer: The 1619 Project, the story of slavery in America in order to, as the editor put it, “understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.”
Really? Is this a joke? Explain Trump by revisiting slavery in Jamestown in A.D. 1619?
For the first two years of the Trump presidency, the New York Times cheered on Mueller, whom its editors presumably expected would set Trump up for impeachment. That failed. So now, for what they surely pray are the last two years of his presidency, they will revisit the history of slavery, starting with the colonies.
I presume they will include the Spanish, English, Dutch, French, in order to “discuss race in a thoughtful way.” They will not only demonstrate that “racism and white supremacy” were the “foundations of all the systems in our country,” but that Trump is perpetuating that legacy for African Americans, and while they’re at it, for Latinos and immigrants too.
John F. Kennedy was president when King gave his speech. Would the New York Times have embarked upon the 1619 project in 1963 in order to “understand the forces that lead up to his election?”
In his speech, King did not dwell on slavery as America’s original sin. He had written earlier on about the colonists’ treatment of Native Americans, which preceded the practice of slavery. You can logically argue that colonization was the seminal moment for the origin of our country — as it was with all European countries which were exploring and colonizing the entire planet.
King did not decry the presence of the nearby Thomas Jefferson Memorial, nor even complain about Confederate monuments. He was, after all, a man on a mission, a visionary with the dream of racial justice, determined to achieve civil rights for African Americans. Monuments and slavery are the stuff of history lessons which should be taught but can no longer be experienced. King’s goal was current and achievable.
The New York Times editors have waxed eloquently over the years about how the lasting power of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech would capture the minds of Americans across generations. If so, why abandon King’s forward-looking and aspirational dream to drink from the cup of bitterness?
We all know the answer.
John Reiniers is a retired attorney.
