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Radical as conservative

History is up to its old tricks again. The radical agitator of one generation becomes the conservative icon of another. With each year that passes, it becomes clearer that, despite his dramatic impact, Martin Luther King Jr. was a familiar type: the American conservative. That is, someone dedicated to preserving and expanding the gains of a liberal revolution.

Even when he was leading the civil rights movement, what appeal could have been more conservative or more American than Dr. King's now classic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963?

"I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. 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.''

Is any passage more frequently cited against the quota system called Affirmative Action? Is any passage so clear a call for what conservatives always seem to be calling for--a renewed faith in the American Dream? A renewed respect for character? A color-blind society in which we are judged on our individual merits, not group identity?

When the dragon's teeth were being sown for what Walker Percy would describe as an "awfully interesting century," with the emphasis on awfully, a Russian anarchist by the name of Kropotkin was told that American Negroes had a conservative leader--one Booker T. Washington. "And what," Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin asked with a bitter laugh, "do they have to conserve?"

It was a good question, a biting question with an ironic thrust. But as it turned out, black Americans had quite a lot to conserve. So do we all: The words of the Declaration of Independence, with their universal promise. The rule of law. The Bill of Rights, including the rights of free speech and peaceable assembly. All of which Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized to fulfill his, his people's, and the American dream.

When the revolution that Prince and later Citizen Kropotkin had welcomed came to his homeland, Russia was cast into the darkest of darknesses. All rights would be lost, and they would not be seen again for most of the next century. Kropotkin's jeer still echoes with irony, but now it is an unintended irony. Pyotr Alekseyvich turns out to have been the naive one, for black Americans, like Americans in general, had and have much to conserve.

Even when he was leading protest marches, Martin Luther King's words sounded conservative to those with ears to hear and minds to comprehend, for his message was rooted in traditional values. No wonder the young black radicals of the Sixties used to deride him as De Lawd. It was a tossup whether his politics or his religion offended them more; the two were inseparable in his case.

To watch this black Baptist preacher out of Atlanta on the old black-and-white television tapes as he describes his very American dream is to realize how easily his ideas could have come from a conservative political tract--if only conservative political tracts were better written.

Nothing was clearer about Dr. King's dream than the transformation of political struggle into morality tale. Which explains his effectiveness. He appealed to a common moral ground. He understood that victory would consist not in vanquishing the enemy, but converting him--making a follower of an adversary. He wasn't just addressing a nation, he was uniting it in the process of chastising it. Which is what prophets do.

There are still those who think of Dr. King's sermons as just window dressing for his social aims. They have it backwards. It was his religious ideas that compelled him to make the case for social and political change.

The revolution that Martin Luther King Jr. led could not have succeeded if he had not managed to unite so many Americans--of every race, religion and political persuasion. His was an appeal not to ideology but to conscience. He searched for common ground in a common morality.

"Black and white together," the demonstrators used to sing. You don't hear that much any more. Which may explain why the civil rights movement stopped moving. It became infected with much the same racial myopia it had fought, only with the colors reversed. (Black Power!)

After he was gone, a new black intelligentsia arose that knew not Martin. His would not be the name embroidered on the baseball caps of another generation. The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. would give way to the frustrations of a Malcolm X, the demagoguery of a Louis Farrakhan, and the general hucksterism of the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons.

What ever happened to Dr. King's dream? It is scarcely recognizable these days. Why? For one thing, the character of the adversary changed. Martin Luther King Jr. did battle with "a darkness that could be touched," to borrow a phrase from the Book of Exodus. The darkness he fought was tangible, palpable, obvious to those with eyes to see. It was as undeniable as the Jim Crow laws, the separate water fountains, the back of the bus . . . . In those days, the enemy was as loud and vicious as Bull Connor's police dogs, as unmistakable as the violence of the mob, as transparent as Southern governors playing the race card.

Today's darkness eludes touch. It goes to and fro in the land, walks freely up and down in it, and recognizes no racial or political boundaries. Another barrier to equality has been overcome: today anybody can be a bigot.

Call it equal-opportunity racism. It puts group entitlements before individual rights. Just as in the bad old days--even if the colors are reversed now. This is the new racism, and it needs to be called such.

Some leaders are dismissed as "not black enough" because they reach out to all of us. Today any black leaders who don't adhere to the party line--Ward Connerly or Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell--are called traitors to their race. I remember the phrase well. I was only a kid in the public schools of Shreveport, La., the first time I heard it. I'd dared wonder out loud what was wrong with colored kids attending the same schools we did. Uh oh. A classmate told me I was being a traitor to my race.

I hadn't even realized one could be a traitor to a race as opposed to a country or cause. Besides, looking at my classmate's angry, contorted face, I didn't want to belong to any race he did. Only later would the idea that the idea of race itself, at least the way some folks use it, is a swindle--a social construct disguised as a pseudo-scientific category.

A new intolerance now seeks to divide us by Race or Gender or Class. It corrupts thought by first corrupting language. Justice is no longer the goal but Social Justice, which means any government program the speaker currently favors. Just as Jim Crow used to be called separate-but-equal when anyone with eyes could see the inequality of it. The new intolerance strives to make many out of one, branding and limiting us as members of a group rather than citizens first, reversing that most American of mottos: E Pluribus Unum.

But the light can be blinked only so long. John Marshall Harlan's old ideal of a color-blind Constitution still shines. It will surely brighten, or fade, depending on the spirit, or spiritlessness, of the time.

You can tell a lot about where a country is headed by the heroes it chooses to honor. While the Malcolms and Farrakhans and Jesse Jacksons rise and fall in favor, Martin Luther King Jr. remains the standard by which other leaders are measured, and not just black leaders. That's a hopeful sign.

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Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. This column originally appeared on January 17, 2010.

Editorial on 01/15/2015

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