45 years ago on this day, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, ending his brief but eventful life at the age of 39.
Since his death, the vicious attacks on his nonviolent disobedience tactic in the civil rights movement has been rejected, except by the extreme right wing, which still contends that King and his followers were “communists”, the automatic accusation used whenever anyone challenges the establishment in any form.
King is now memorialized by the national holiday, and the King Memorial in Washington DC makes him also a national figure of massive proportions, as he was in life.
One has to wonder what King would have been like, had he survived until today at the age of 84.
Would his contributions have been greater, and would civil rights have advanced further than it has since his death?
Would he have become a factor in future elections in a way that might have changed the course of history?
What would have been his effect on the prosecution of the Vietnam War under Richard Nixon?
How would he have reacted to Jimmy Carter as the first Southern President since Zachary Taylor in 1848?
How would the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II Presidencies have interacted with him, assuming everything politically would have been the same?
And finally, how would King have reacted to Barack Obama and his leadership in the Presidency?
Would American foreign policy and domestic policy have been influenced much by a live Martin Luther King, Jr?
All of this is speculative, but it is clear the nation lost a great deal with King’s untimely death in 1968!
As I read this I pause to think about Nelson Mandela who I believe is 94.
It would have been wonderful if our country had been blessed with the same long life in Dr. King.
I wonder what Dr. King might think about how all those Boulevards in our cities named for him are such unsafe places to be thanks to decades of progressive social meddling.
” We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans: My country ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, Land of the Pilgrims’ pride From every mountainside Let freedom ring!
That’s exactly what we mean – from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia–let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for the disinherited of all the earth–may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!” – Archibald J. Carey, Jr. at the 1952 Republican Convention
The reason the King Boulevards are so depressed is because of conservatives working to undermine minority advancement and keep them “in their place”, rather than advance them as Progressives do.
And Archibald Carey Jr was an “Uncle Tom’, caving in to whites, and the GOP which had done NOTHING for blacks since the late 1870s–abandoned them to the white racist South–and what has changed, except party identification?
By the way, Juan, I am aware that this is similar to what King said in later years, but it is a fact that black Republicans accepted their inferior status in the GOP for the years after Reconstruction until the 1950s! King changed that mentality, and saw that the GOP, with exception of a few, was not going to promote black advancement!
Living in a progressive dreamland ” they never understand what they are doing is detrimental, only that they have not been allowed to do enough of it”.
@Ron: I posted what Carey said not to undermine King but to honor King and all blacks that fought for civil rights. In any event I want to thank your for your insults, it just proves what I have always known about the left. Here I am posting something to honor King and blacks but your blind hatred towards conservatives/Republicans makes you instantly spew venom and bigotry towards us. Calling Carey and “Uncle Tom” is so racist and hateful. Then again, you must be used to doing it, after all you are from the left and the left in this country can get away with practically everything. Once again you proved it. Doesn’t surprise me, after all you are a Democrat, the party that was founded one racism and continues its racism today, but on a more sophisticated level as you clearly demonstrated with your post. Which by the way I am sure you believe is not racist but merely the truth. Just to think you constantly accuse conservatives/classic liberals and therefore me of racism, when I have never ever made a racist remark and conservatives/classic liberals have never ever proposed a racist legislation (except in the lefts feverish mind). And you want to know why? Because we believe as MLK said ” I have a dream that my 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.”And that is something the progressive left cannot do without undermining a central part of their agenda. It just proves Dr. Carson right, there is nothing more racist than a white liberal.
You can go ahead and call me racist, when I never said you were racist. It is clear to me that you are simply on here to attack all of the good that Progressives have done, while conservatives have done everything to prevent minorities from advancing, and use a few minorities to make it seem as if they are open minded, when they are not. I do not have blind hatred toward anyone, but you apparently do. I do not spew venom or hatred, except in your mind. And Dr Carson should be ashamed of himself with his comparison of gays to molesters and bestiality. It all comes down to being wealthy, and forgetting one’s past and people, as with Herman Cain as well.
And the fact that SOUTHERN Democrats were racist overlooks that NORTHERN Democrats led the Civil Rights Movement, and now the South, having never changed by much, is suddenly Republican, after years of a majority of Republicans refusing to concern themselves about civil rights from 1877 to the early 1960s, when some of them “woke up”, and joined Northern Democrats in getting civil rights through into law!
Since you are supposedly a busy, successful lawyer, why waste your time harassing progressives when you can work at gaining more income, as the be all and end all of your life?
Ron: When you call conservatives/classic liberals racist, well you are accusing me of racist, since I am a conservative/classic liberal. Furthermore, you are the one accusing people of being “Uncle Toms” not me. And that unless I am mistaken is a hateful insult. As for Dr. Carson, well just last week Justice Sotomayor during oral argument asked, “Mr. Olson, the bottom line that you’re being asked — and — and it is one that I’m interested in the answer: If you say that marriage is a fundamental right, what State restrictions could ever exist? Meaning, what State restrictions with respect to the number of people, with respect to — that could get married — the incest laws, the mother and the child, assuming they are of age — I can — I can accept that the State has probably an overbearing interest on — on protecting the a child until they’re of age to marry, but what’s left?”
To be clear, I do not believe Sotomayor compared homosexuality to anything. What she did is what Dr. Carson did: she played devil’s advocate about the slippery-slope of what might come next if we open the Pandora’s box of changing the definition of marriage. And to make that argument, like Dr. Carson, she used illegal and immoral relationships (not homosexuality) as slippery slope concerns should the definition of marriage be held to include gay marriage.
But no one on the left or in the media cared that Sotomayor used the horror of incest to make a point about same-sex marriage, because Sotomayor is a leftist and they know which way she is going to rule. Moreover, the point she was making was obvious.
The point Carson was making was just as obvious. But because the right-leaning Carson is both black and conservative, which makes him a threat to the left-leaning mainstream media’s attempted stranglehold on the Narrative, doesn’t “know his place,” Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell and NBC News and CNN played “gotcha” with him to “put him back in his place.”
One final note on NAMBLA. The homosexual movement has a very strong aversion to any mention of other sexual deviations in the same breath as homosexuality, abhorring any comparison of the undefined range of behavior encompassed in the acronym LGBT to bestiality in particular, and for some pedophilia. But it must be noted that NAMBLA formerly marched in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, until its presence there became a public embarrassment, as the parade’s visibility grew. So at one point the homosexual movement big tent sheltered adult-child sexual relations.