Martin Luther King, white people’s preferred black leader

A thought came to me when listening to Mika B on Morning Joe as I drove to work today, talking about MLK's "I have a dream" speech and the recent commemoration of it.

It was from the beginning, and still remains, only too evident that many whites who opposed some or all of his methods or agenda nevertheless praised MLK on every suitable public occasion because they deplored the likes of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and all their epigones, and only too rightly feared their influence on the black people of America.

Cleaver was a leader of a terrorist group built on hatred of white people and dedicated to violence against them and what was called in those days "the white power structure," The Black Panther Party.

Malcolm X, an uneducated criminal and ex-con, was a leader of the hate-based, wholly fraudulent black nationalist religious movement, The Nation of Islam, which he had first learned of while in prison, now led by the equally hateful, but less frightful to whites, Louis Farrakhan.

(Reputedly, Malcolm, as he was known, despised MLK and spoke with contempt of the civil rights movement he led and, in particular, derided the mass meeting at which the "I have a dream" speech was given as well as the content of the speech.)

To this day, Malcolm is a hero among the black people of America and, like Che among silly, fellow-traveling, or communist whites, appears on walls and T-shirts of black college students.

This goes far to explain the enthusiasm for King's "I have a dream" speech – and an extraordinarily fine speech it is, of course – displayed by white people opposed to everything in it not achieved by the collapse of legally mandated segregation and universal compliance with the 15^th Amendment.

The fundamental truth is that nobody in America of any race supports the whole agenda advanced in that speech but the most orthodox of liberals and others to their left.

As for Dr. King's opponents, to this day, there are no conservatives of any race known to me who do not deplore all forms of affirmative action and, since they oppose the whole of American social democracy, every social democratic measure urged by King then or his followers since.

And there may even be conservatives (or others!) now alive who oppose the rest of King's agenda, not only legally compulsory integration of employment and public accommodations but also voting for Negroes everywhere in the country and the end of legally mandated segregation.

There certainly were on the day he made that speech, and by no means all of them were of the South.

It is notorious, for example, that during the civil rights struggle William F. Buckley, Jr. insisted upon the right of the whites of the South to maintain their political dominance, even where they were a minority, so long as blacks were "culturally inferior" to the point of being insufficiently competent to participate in the minimal responsibilities of democracy, such as voting.

But he and many others like him never climbed on the King bandwagon, no matter how much they deplored Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver or feared their influence.

His magazine even very late into the 20th Century, at least, opposed making MLK's birthday a national holiday and continued to deplore his life and career, as well as those aspects of his agenda unlovable to fiscal conservatism.

In the new 21st Century, invited to recant, Buckley instead insisted he had been right.

All the same, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and both were passed in response to King's powerful influence.

The winds of change were blowing very strong, indeed, in those days.