Martin Luther King Jr. is a personal hero of mine, and Taylor Branch‘s Parting the Waters is one of my favorite books.
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m sharing a column from Boston Globe writer Jeff Jacoby I read last week that I found interesting.
TITLE: Black patriotism and Martin Luther King Jr.
by Jeff Jacoby
IT IS often forgotten that Martin Luther King Jr. was a deeply patriotic American.
In King’s day, as in ours, there were influential Black Americans — men like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and H. Rap Brown — who claimed that the American ideal was always a hypocritical lie. That was the opposite of King’s view. Based on everything we know about him, MLK would have recoiled from someone like Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor in Chicago for 20 years, who preached “God damn America” and gloated after 9/11 that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” Never would MLK have endorsed the Black Lives Matter activists who called the American flag “a symbol of hatred,” still less approved of those who trampled on the flag to show their contempt for it.
Far from reviling America, its Founding Fathers, and the symbols of its high ideals, King revered them. The civil rights movement, he always said, was “standing up for the best in the American dream.”
Whether writing behind bars from a Birmingham jail, preaching to 250,000 civil rights marchers at the Lincoln Memorial, or accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of Norway’s royal family, King always grounded his calling within the American tradition. On the last full day of his life, in the last speech he ever gave, this great American reiterated that those who struggled for Black civil rights “were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers.”
To listen to that final speech, knowing that King was just 39 and would be killed the next day, is to marvel that America could have produced so outstanding a liberator. He evoked the shame of his nation’s grievous racial injustices with devastating force, yet never broke faith with that nation nor doubted that if its conscience were aroused it would eventually take to heart its creed of liberty and justice for all.
“All we say to America is: Be true to what you said on paper,” King told his audience at the Mason Temple that day. “If I lived in China or Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand … the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there.” But America had committed itself to uphold freedom of speech and assembly and conscience. “The greatness of America is the right to protest for right.” Far from writing off that commitment as a dead letter, King never stopped insisting that it be lived up to.
It would have been unthinkable to King to treat the flag with disrespect. In some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement, the Stars and Stripes are borne with pride and reverence by the throngs of Americans, Black and white alike, who rallied to King’s cause.
Click HERE to read the rest of Jeff Jacoby’s post.
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