ROGER SIMON: How Would Dr. King Have Felt about ‘Black Lives Matter’?

Martin Luther King Day is a national holiday for all of us to celebrate, so I am going to go for it — and, not just because, once upon a time, I was a civil rights worker. That was 1966, fifty years ago now, when I  was living in a Sumter, South Carolina, house belonging to the very MLK’s cousin, the mortician for that small city’s black population who was extremely gracious to my then-wife and me.  We were young Northern grad students there registering voters, teaching black history to African-American children, directing those kids in what was undoubtedly the first local production of A Raisin in the Sun and helping to integrate public facilities that were still Jim Crow.

So it should come as no surprise that Dr. King has meant a lot to me — emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Of all the ghastly political assassinations of my youth — JFK, RFK and MLK — King’s was the one that affected me most deeply by far.  I remember dropping to my knees and sobbing the moment I heard about it.

You may already suspect I believe Dr. King would not have taken so kindly to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, that he more likely would have avowed, unlike the cowardly Martin O’Malley, that “All Lives Matter.”  If you don’t agree with that, consider these words from King’s most famous speech — in fact the most famous American speech since the “Gettysburg Address”:

Read the whole thing.

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