Where Are You, Martin Luther King?
A half-century after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. is as revered as ever. But have we been following his example, or merely paying lip service to his ideas? Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, weighs in.
- MLK’s message that individuals should be judged on “the content of their character” not “the color of their skin” helped change the world.
In his famous speech delivered in front of 250,000 people, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “I have a dream that my four 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.”
View sourceKing pushed tirelessly for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
View sourceOn April 4th, 1968, the civil rights leader was shot on a hotel balcony in Memphis Tennessee. He died an hour later in the hospital.
View sourceRelated: The moment Americans heard Martin Luther King Jr had died - BBC News
View sourceWATCH: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Up Close | National Geographic
View source- MLK left a legacy of personal responsibility in addition to social action. Many radical activists have since rejected that legacy.
“I have a dream that my four 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,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous speech on Aug. 28, 1963.
View source“Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day,” writes Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason Riley.
View sourceKing told a black congregation in St. Louis that “we’ve got to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”
View sourceWATCH: Martin Luther King “I Have A Dream” Speech
View source- Many leaders of the Civil Rights movement since MLK have turned it into a racket, accomplishing little for those it claims to help.
Liberal policies toward African Americans have fostered a victim culture that clashes with Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on personal responsibility.
View sourceBlack unemployment and imprisonment were lower before the Democrat-pushed government welfare programs established in the 1960s.
View sourceActivists play up instances of white on black violence, but ignore the systemic trends of black on black violence.
View sourceAccording to William Stuntz, a Harvard Law Professor, black violence “trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”
View sourceWATCH: Jason Riley: The Liberal State Against Blacks
View sourceRelated reading: “False Black Power?” – Jason Riley
View source- The Democratic Party continues to get a majority of the black vote by claiming credit for African Americans’ advancement in society.
“The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and ‘the system,’ but blacks have long been part of running that system,” writes Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason Riley.
View sourceAccording to economist Thomas Sowell, “Democrats receive the overwhelming bulk of the black vote by rhetoric and by presenting what they have done as the big reason that blacks have advanced.”
View sourceBy the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, the wealth gap between blacks and whites rose to 19 to 1.
View sourceWATCH: “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks” – Jason Riley
View sourceRelated Reading: “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” – Jason Riley
View source- Black culture plays a larger role in black advancement than Democrats want to acknowledge.
The Democratic Party attempts to take credit for the advancement of African Americans and blame Republicans for their struggles, which ultimately disempowers the black community and ignores important problems that need to be addressed.
View sourceIn 2012, 57 percent of all black children lived without their father.
View sourceChildren from fatherless homes are far more likely to drop out of school and commit crimes.
View sourceDue to incarceration and early death, for every 100 black women there are only 83 black men, a gap nearly non-existent in white populations.
View sourceWATCH: Fox News' Jason Riley: Obama, Holder, Sharpton Push False Racial Narrative
View sourceRelated reading: “The Black Families: 40 Years of Lies” – Kay Hymowitz
View source
It’s been 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, and over the decades he has become one of the most revered figures in American history. There is an impressive memorial to him in Washington, DC, and a museum celebrating his life in Atlanta, Georgia. Countless schools and boulevards have been named after him, and a national holiday is dedicated to his memory.
How is it, then, that so much of his legacy -- what he hoped to pass on to the future -- has been lost?
King wanted equality under the law and said, famously, that people ought to judge one another based on character, not skin color. But he also believed that blacks had an important role to play in their own advancement.
The black civil rights battles in America are now over, and King’s side won. The best indication of that may be that King has had no real successor. If black Americans were still faced with legitimate threats to civil rights—such as legal discrimination or voter disenfranchisement—it’s likely that leaders of King’s caliber would have emerged to carry on the fight. Instead, what we have today are pretenders who have turned the civil rights movement into an industry, if not a racket.
And what have these racketeers accomplished? A lot for themselves and very little for their constituents. Racial gaps in income, education and home ownership were narrowing in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but after King was replaced as the spokesman for black America by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others, these gaps began to widen in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
This suggests that the racial disparities that continue today aren’t driven by whatever racism that still exists, despite all the claims to the contrary from progressives and their allies in the media. It also suggests that black culture — attitudes toward marriage, education, work and the rule of law — plays a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge.
More marches won’t address out-of-wedlock childbearing. More sit-ins won’t lower black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.
Electing more black politicians and appointing more black government officials can’t compensate for these cultural deficiencies, either. Black mayors, congressmen, senators, police chiefs and school superintendents have become commonplace since the 1970s.
Even the election of a black president—twice—failed to close the racial divide in many key measures. Black-white differences in poverty, homeownership and incomes all grew wider under President Obama.
Discussion of antisocial behavior in poor black communities, let alone the possibility that it plays a significant role in racial inequality, has become another casualty of the post-’60s era.
King and other black leaders at the time spoke openly about the need for more-responsible behavior. After remarking on disproportionately high inner-city crime rates, King told a black congregation in St. Louis that “we’ve got to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world,” he said, “but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”
The pretenders to King’s legacy mostly ignore this advice, preferring instead to keep the onus on whites. Where King tried to instill the importance of personal responsibility and self-determination, his counterparts today spend more time making excuses for counterproductive behavior and dismissing any criticism of it as racist.
Activists who long ago abandoned King’s colorblind standard, which was the basis for the landmark civil-rights laws enacted in the 1960s, tell young black Americans today that they are victims, first and foremost. White society is against you, they say, even if you have no clear examples of discrimination to point to. They are told that fire hoses and poll taxes have been replaced by unconscious racism, white privilege and microaggressions.
A generation of blacks who have more opportunity than any previous generation are being taught that America offers them little more than bigoted teachers, biased employers and trigger-happy cops. It’s not only a lie, but as King understood, it’s also self-destructive.
Black activists and white progressives stress racism because it serves their own interests, not because it actually improves the station of blacks. But this neglect of the role that blacks must themselves play in righting their own lives can only make things worse. A half-century after King’s death, plenty of people are paying him lip service. Far too few are following his example.
I’m Jason Riley for Prager University.
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