January 15, 2024

SOHRAB AHMARI: The Right’s Foolish Drive to Cancel MLK.

Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to Augustine and Aquinas to justify resisting racist laws. He elevated character high above skin color and moral universalism above separatism of all kinds. His political claims were grounded in America’s founding promises, his message garbed in a high-minded, critical patriotism. He called the United States his “beloved nation,” even as he denounced Washington’s forever war in Vietnam. At a moment of profound polarization, King is one of the few figures who can still supply us with unifying themes.

So naturally, some in the more excitable corners of the right have been taking an ax to his legacy. The latest comer is Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who last week declared that “MLK was awful,” and vowed: “We’re gonna be hitting him next week. Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr.”

Civic pieties should be scrutinized in the light of later historiography, to be sure. But that isn’t what the MLK haters are up to. Their anti-MLK crusade is the mirror image of progressive efforts to discredit national icons and narratives. Ironically, MLK himself has also been the target of such attempts from the left, on the grounds that his moderation stunted more radical projects of racial liberation.

“The United States, like every other nation, boasts plenty of flawed heroes.”

The anti-MLK turn on the right is an about-face* of sorts. Until recently, conservatives of even the Kirk variety tried to claim MLK as one of their own; indeed, Kirk himself in years past hailed him as a moral “hero.” But if these earlier attempts to appropriate King as a crypto-conservative were naively ahistorical, they nevertheless flowed from good intentions: a desire on the right to come to terms with the secular canonization of a figure who spoke from within a radical strain in American Protestantism and the prophetic voice of the black church.

Earlier: The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.—A Proud Unapologetic Zionist.

* And speaking of about-faces!

Flashback: The FBI and Martin Luther King.

On October 10, 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy committed what is widely viewed as one of the most ignominious acts in modern American history: he authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin wiretapping the telephones of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy believed that one of King’s closest advisers was a top-level member of the American Communist Party, and that King had repeatedly misled Administration officials about his ongoing close ties with the man. Kennedy acted reluctantly, and his order remained secret until May of 1968, just a few weeks after King’s assassination and a few days before Kennedy’s own. But the FBI onslaught against King that followed Kennedy’s authorization remains notorious, and the stains on the reputations of everyone involved are indelible.

And on MLK day in 2024, the song remains the same from the Kennedy family: RFK Jr: Kennedy Admin Had ‘Good Reason’ to Wiretap MLK.

UPDATE:

(Updated and bumped.)

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll