In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. called Birmingham, Ala., “by far the worst city for race relations in America.” Also known as “Bombingham,” the city had become infamous for at least 50 bombings of black homes and churches in the years since World War II, along with Sheriff Bull Connor’s fire hoses and snarling police dogs during Freedom Summer in 1961. And all of that was before the awful slaughter at the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963, when white supremacists blew up the spiritual home of the local civil rights movement during crowded Sunday services, killing the “Four Little Girls” memorialized by Spike Lee’s devastating film of the same name and wounding 23 people.
So it’s hard to imagine that when King wrote his famed “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” he was facing national criticism for bringing the wrath of the civil rights movement down upon a hapless city that, despite its ugly past, was supposedly doing its best to change. But that’s exactly what provoked King’s great work. On the eve of the minister’s April 1963 direct action campaign against Birmingham, its citizens had just held an election that repudiated the administration that backed Bull Connor (though Connor’s allies were challenging it in the courts). A covert alliance between conservative blacks and white businessmen concerned about the city’s brutal image was trying to find ways to dismantle local segregation gradually. And many Birmingham black people were skeptical of King’s crusade. The civil rights leader went to jail that Good Friday, April 12, 1963 — on the trumped-up charge of parading without a permit — at least partly because almost nobody else would. Three-quarters of the city’s black ministers, for instance, at first withheld support from King’s campaign.
But the rebuke that prompted King’s letter was a statement by eight white Birmingham religious leaders denouncing his moves against the city. The eight men praised the emergence of “a new constructive and realistic approach to racial problems” in Birmingham; they attacked King, though not by name, as an “outsider”; and they urged “our local Negro community” to protest its grievances in the courts, not in the streets. Thanks to King’s letter, the eight went down in history as having been on the wrong side of the fight for justice, but in fact, all of them had at least weakly denounced segregation and the white-supremacist violence that bolstered it, and at least a couple had faced white Birmingham’s wrath by welcoming blacks to their churches.
And the clergymen weren’t alone in their condemnation of King: As Taylor Branch details in “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963,” Time magazine called his Birmingham campaign “a poorly timed protest” and the Washington Post insisted it was “prompted more by leadership rivalry than the real need of the situation.” The New York Times praised the new administration of Mayor Albert Boutwell and editorialized that it didn’t expect change in Birmingham “overnight” — and cautioned that King “ought not to expect it either.” President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, meanwhile, were fed up with the Atlanta minister’s jail-going ways and resisted his wife Coretta’s pleas to intervene.
Even coming to King’s “Letter” without that context, an astute reader can sense something eating away at the soul of the great leader. It’s painful to read. King’s suffering is more than the fact that he’s in jail — “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he told supporters once. And it’s not just that he’s in “the hole,” confined in solitary even though his celebrity status had forced his jailers in other cities to treat him with kid gloves. No, the man is miserable because his critics have forced a lonely confrontation with the possibility that he’s wrong: wrong about the pace of change in Birmingham, wrong about the need for direct action, wrong about leaving Coretta for Birmingham and jail only days after the birth of their second daughter, Bernice.
It’s the intimacy and vulnerability of King’s “Letter” that gives it power. He speaks to us as a leader, as a father, as a scholar, as a sinner. It’s at turns prophetic (critics might say pompous):
“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.”
And personal:
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”
It’s bitterly angry:
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection …
“Let me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership … I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen …. I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause, and with deep moral concern, serve as the channel through which our just grievances would get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.’”
And it’s occasionally apologetic:
“If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”
King’s feverish work on the “Letter” from his solitary jail cell convinced some of his worried followers that their leader was finally losing his mind, succumbing to the plagues of doubt and persecution and constant overwork he’d already endured for more than a decade. The Birmingham movement was stalled; they were waiting for directions from King about its future, and meanwhile he was pressing his visitors for more paper to continue writing a rejoinder to some religious colleagues nobody else cared about. He began it in the margins of the local newspaper story about the eight clergymen’s appeal. His followers smuggled drafts in and out of the jail, finally helping finish the “Letter” and get it out to supporters, because they saw it as therapy for their poor stressed-out leader.
And when it was published, his supporters’ skepticism about its power seemed justified. Nobody outside the movement paid attention to it, and the Birmingham campaign continued to sputter. Ultimately, the campaign, along with King’s “Letter,” became ringing historical success stories only because of a combination of tragedy, serendipity and courage in the weeks after King’s jailing. The day King was released, a white postal worker with a history of mental illness commenced a “Freedom Walk” from Washington, D.C., to Mississippi to protest segregation. William Moore made his way into Alabama and told a reporter he was going to give Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett a letter asking him to “be gracious” and grant blacks their civil rights. Hours later he was found dead by the side of a highway, shot in the head. Moore’s quixotic crusade and martyrdom moved blacks and whites and even President Kennedy, who’d been unimpressed by King’s 10 days in solitary in the Birmingham jail. It helped reignite what Branch called “the sacrificial energies” of the civil rights movement, and volunteers began streaming to Birmingham to strengthen King’s crusade.
The ultimate victory of the campaign, though, was guaranteed when hundreds of Birmingham’s young people, some as young as 6, began volunteering to violate the order against demonstrating and go to jail if necessary. This was no small test for King, to risk the school careers, the safety, even the lives of young black children in Birmingham’s awful jail. Again the city and the movement divided over whether to let the young people march. Again King backed the high-stakes strategy, and the children’s crusade began. It’s one of the most awe-inspiring stories of the entire civil rights movement: Hundreds of black children, teens and college students peacefully took to Birmingham’s streets, facing not only jail but Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses. (Fuddy-duddy moment: Branch’s account of Birmingham youth taking over downtown, in a disciplined riot of rebellion and joy, made me think of the new “mob” craze — where young folks use cellphones and e-mail to converge on public spaces to play pranks — and wish they were thinking up ways to change the world with that energy, not merely entertain it.)
Photos of their bravery and persecution (a tiny girl upended by the cannons of water from the fire hoses; a teenage boy standing impassive while a snarling German shepherd tears into the flesh of his stomach) captured the world’s sympathy. Thousands followed them into the streets, until the jail and a spillover outdoor holding area were too full to arrest anyone else. Birmingham’s conservative black leaders flocked to King’s cause, and its white leaders knew they had to give in. They reached an accord to dismantle segregation in Birmingham — beginning with downtown stores’ dressing rooms, ending with lunch counters — barely three weeks after King left jail. King’s gambles had paid off (although the deadly September church bombing would prove that all civil rights victories of the era were only partial).
How did King know both times that the high-stakes strategy was the right one? He didn’t. He talked, he argued, he prayed, he meditated; each time, he took a solitary leap. His example shouldn’t encourage grandiosity in his admirers. As King reminded his readers in the “Letter,” to many blacks he was a sellout moderate, always taking the conservative, low-stakes choice. “I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community,” he wrote. On one side were the masses of black people too tired and “drained of self-respect” by racism to protest; on the other were the angry forces of black nationalism, especially Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, “made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable ‘devil.’” So King’s decision-making can never simply be used to justify the most extreme or radical choice.
In the end, though, his Birmingham success made his “Letter” from jail big news. The New York Times agreed to publish an abridged version in its Sunday magazine, but the New York Post got a copy and printed much of it, so the Times bailed. Other magazines picked it up, including the Atlantic, and it went down in history as a defining document of the civil rights movement. Today you can find it all over the Web, used to defend a lefty’s civil disobedience in response to the war in Iraq and a Libertarian’s direct action against the war on drugs, even the Green Party’s 2000 insurrection against the Democrats. Last week National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice invoked “Birmingham in 1963,” though not King’s letter specifically, to defend the administration’s move to topple Saddam Hussein.
Some of King’s admirers may be appropriating his cri de coeur a little too easily. I didn’t think, for instance, that the Iraq war rose to the level of an injustice that demanded civil disobedience, let alone violence, in protests last March, when war opponents shut down city streets in San Francisco and New York. (Although I think Rice’s appropriating the symbolism of the civil rights movement was far more brazen, given that her boss sold the war based on Saddam’s threat to the rest of the world, not to his oppressed citizens.) Unlike much of the anti-war direct-action faction, King was always mindful of the need to change his critics’ hearts and minds, not repel them, and he used civil disobedience only as a last resort. The world wasn’t there yet on Iraq, and maybe never would be, given the hard-to-defend nature of Saddam’s regime and the complexity (despite the dissembling) of the U.S. rationale for war. And yet, King’s “Letter” made me ask myself if I’ve grown too cautious — would I be someone counseling “Wait!” to the Birmingham activists?
That’s the power of this amazing document, made stronger by King’s willingness to share his own doubt and pain: It makes you think about your own. I’m glad it’s out there so King can still speak with anyone who’s searching his or her heart, and American history, for guidance about when and how to act against injustice.
I’ve found myself fascinated by the controversy over the “fake” quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that went viral Monday, in the wake of the news about Osama bin Laden’s killing. It’s been the rage on Facebook and Twitter, broadcast to millions of social media users. It’s already been debunked; and then the debunking was debunked. Beyond the messy details, I’m fascinated by the desire of all sides — there aren’t merely two sides to the debate over bin Laden’s killing — to claim King as their moral ally (or to at least make sure he’s not on the other side!).
First, the messy details, quickly. Sometime Monday parts or all of the following “quote” flew around Twitter and Facebook, attributed to King:
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
Then someone Googled the first sentence, and found King never said it. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle went up with a “gotcha” post, accusing folks with reservations about both bin Laden’s killing and its celebration with fabricating evidence that King would have agreed with them. But then it came out that, while King didn’t say the first sentence, he had in fact made the other two statements, on Page 53 of his book “Strength to Love.” And it turned out nobody “fabricated” anything: A 24-year-old teacher named Jessica Dovey wrote her own thoughts, sans quote marks, before the King quote, and posted it on Facebook, but as the post was cut and pasted and abbreviated in countless ways, King’s words and Dovey’s got jumbled. No fabrication; no harm, no foul.
But the frenzy over the King quote came along with a disturbing wave of thought-policing, from all over the political spectrum, and they seem to be related. Battles raged Monday not so much over whether the U.S. killing Osama was morally or legally justified, but over the right way to feel about it, and the right way to express those feelings (which seemed to be the core issue the King “quote” was addressing). Has social media made us a nation of biddies, chiding everyone over the “appropriate” way to feel about public events? David Sirota’s Salon piece, “‘USA! USA!’ is the wrong response,” was widely attacked. Maybe I should count Sirota among the feelings-police, but he made a valid political argument, and he came in for an avalanche of criticism merely for suggesting sobriety, not celebration, was the right response to bin Laden’s death. It was somehow read as Sirota criticizing Obama’s decision, which he did not. (It was also posted more than 100,000 times on Facebook, so a lot of people also agreed with Sirota.) Can one both believe that the killing was the right thing to do, and also be sober, even sad about it? Yes, you can, but in some quarters, anything less than high-fiving the president’s “victory” was suspect.
I witnessed a similar Facebook and Twitter frenzy last week when President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. I wrote on Twitter, Facebook and my blog that I was “sad” the idiotic birther controversy had come to that. Within moments tweets were flying — I’m beginning to conflate Twitter with Angry Birds, given all my Twitter trouble lately — accusing me of finding fault with Obama’s decision to release the long-form document. I expressly wrestled with the good-or-bad move question in my blog post; and I came down ambivalent. But I was not ambivalent about my sadness the president had been forced to prove his legitimacy to the likes of Donald Trump. People can feel otherwise, but why attack me for a heartfelt response to an insult to the president?
As I wrote on Sunday night, I personally had a hard time seeing bin Laden’s death as something to celebrate, but I didn’t judge those who did. The 9/11 attacks were of such enormity, rippling out to reach so many people in such different ways, we’re all entitled to our subjective reactions; it was everyone’s tragedy, and everyone grieves differently. Ultimately, I’m with Mona Eltahawy, in feeling like I could have done without the drunken “frat-boy” air of some of the partying; but for all I know, someone I see as a drunken frat boy might have lost his mother in the towers, or on one of the doomed planes.
I think we’re seeing the rise of the Feeling Police because in a time of profound social dislocation, a lot of people aren’t sure what they believe about right or wrong, justice or injustice, and they’re not sure whom they trust to give them information and guidance about it. It might be the New York Times; it might also be some witty guy on Twitter; it might be Penn Jillette on Facebook; at its best it’s a moral and political figure like Martin Luther King Jr.
But we can’t outsource our own moral or political values to Dr. King. We also can’t ask President Obama to be Dr. King. I realized years ago that was part of my own problem with Obama being a mere mortal politician, making compromises whether on healthcare reform or government spying. He’s a gifted politician who seems to have a strong moral core, but he’s a politician; and now he’s commander in chief. I can’t expect him to be the prophetic, perfect visionary we white liberals have needed our black leaders to be. Also: You can believe fervently in the power of King’s words about love, and hate, and violence — as I do — and still accept that President Obama did the right thing, based on the knowledge he had before him.
And for now, I do. That doesn’t mean I won’t avidly consume every new account of the operation that led to bin Laden’s killing. If some of the information behind it was acquired through torture or other “extra-legal” means, I want to know that. I may come to believe the president made the wrong decision, but I don’t think that, given what I know.
Back to feelings for a bit: We can’t help focusing on feelings, in the absence of hard information. We’re social animals; we trust our “feelings” to tell us something real. So I had very intense feelings looking at the now iconic picture White House photographer Pete Souza snapped of the president and his team as they “watched” the bin Laden operation in the Situation Room Sunday night. (There’s no hard information about what they were actually watching.) You’ve seen it. It’s riveting. Hillary Clinton is beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed. The only person looking as grim is the president himself; he’s slumped in his chair, looking hard at the screen. Vice President Joe Biden looked stricken; the New York Times reported that he was fingering rosary beads. The military leaders in the room were more granite-faced, but I was reassured to see our civilian leaders grimacing at the reality of killing bin Laden and his family members – even if they’d make the same decision tomorrow. Their “feelings” — at least what appear to be their feelings — reassure me they approached the decision with the moral gravity it deserved.
If Hillary Clinton had been pumping her fist and yelling “USA, USA!” after the killing I’d have been aghast, and said so. The range of “appropriate” feelings — and the way you telegraph them — is more clear-cut when you’re talking about our leaders. Being reassured by seeing their feelings, while we wait for information, makes sense. But ultimately we need, as citizens, to decide if we believe this was a just decision, a moral decision and a decision that made the U.S. safer (which may add up to three different things.) We can’t simply outsource that judgment, whether to King, Obama or our favorite pundits. Wasting time adjudicating whether people are expressing the right reaction in the right way is a silly distraction.
Updates below.
Yesterday, around 3 p.m., a trend started emerging on Twitter. People began reciting a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that seemed strangely apt for this occasion:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
The first person to cite it on Twitter was the famous magician/Libertarian Penn Jillette, but the words quickly went viral, and the source got lost in the shuffle. The only problem? As Megan McArdle pointed out in the Atlantic, Martin Luther King never said that. Actually, the quote from MLK about enemies is:
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
How did this other quote get misattributed to King? As McArdle says in her piece, “It’s a bit too a propos. What ‘thousands’ would King have been talking about? In which enemy’s death was he supposed to be rejoicing?” She also wonders, “Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?”
Penn admits to being the originator of the quote on Twitter, though he claims it got messed up when he cut and pasted from a longer piece by King. I’m not sure if I believe him; I have a strong suspicion Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking on the sources. [Jillette has since explained the quote further to Salon (see below), stating that it was an honest mistake.] After all, this is the guy who created the documentary “Penn and Teller: Bullshit!” and the subsequent Showtime series about how easy it was to dupe people.
Update: The source of the quote is a Facebook message by Jessica Dovey, where she goes on to quote Martin Luther King Jr. In this context, it’s easy to see how a cut-and-paste job could have accidentally attributed the source to King. Congrats to Jessica, whose Facebook wall post is one of the more famous sayings on the Internet today. Salon has reached out to Penn Jillette for comment, but has yet to receive a response. (See update below.)
Update 2: On Tuesday afternoon, Penn replied to Salon by email, detailing how he made an “honest mistake,” and conveying his dismay over the suggestion that he would purposefully fabricate a quote from Martin Luther King.
“I made a mistake,” Penn wrote, “I read the quote, thought it was too perfect, checked part of it from the MLK book and then cut and pasted it. The part I checked was not the part that was wrong, and I posted it. A stupid, but honest mistake. When someone pointed out the mistake, I apologized as best I could in the limited number of characters. And then I apologized and explained a few more times.”
Penn also stressed his sadness that the mistake on Twitter apparently led some people to think he was disrespecting Dr. King. “It hurts me to have people think I disrespected Martin Luther King,” he wrote.
Did Haley Barbour misremember an episode in which he claimed to have seen Martin Luther King speak in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1962? A growing body of evidence is pointing in that direction.
The controversy centers on comments made by Barbour, the Mississippi governor and likely presidential candidate, to a Weekly Standard writer last year. The resulting profile already landed Barbour in trouble because he lauded the racist White Citizens Council of his hometown as a force for good.
Now, the Clarion-Ledger is spotlighting a separate part of the profile, in which Barbour claims he saw Martin Luther King speak in town in 1962, with both whites and blacks in attendance. The newspaper has done searches of various archives and found no evidence that King came to Yazoo City in 1962.
Here’s what Barbour told the Standard:
“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
…
I asked what King had said that day.
“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
King did appear in Yazoo City in 1966 — in the wake of the killing shooting* of civil rights activist James Meredith — but that was a year after Barbour graduated high school, and four years after Barbour said he saw King.
Here’s the Clarion-Ledger’s fact-check:
A search of the King Papers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the papers of David Garrow, author of the definitive biography on King, Bearing the Cross, failed to find evidence King spoke in Yazoo City in 1962.
The paper couldn’t find anyone who remembered a King visit in ’62.
I also spoke with Garrow, who is the author of the definitive King biography, “Bearing the Cross.” Garrow pointed out that King was in the Mississippi Delta region in February 1962, and he stopped at several towns. However, Garrow’s papers do not indicate that Yazoo City was one of the stops.
This is hardly the first time the governor has been accused of getting his civil rights history wrong. One of his childhood friends, for example, told me last year that Yazoo City was riven by racial tensions in the 1950s and 60s, despite Barbour’s rosy memories of that era. Meanwhile, Barbour managed to get his name next to “KKK” in newspaper headlines around the country this month after he refused to condemn a proposed Mississippi license plate honoring a founder of the Klan.
The overriding question remains: Will Barbour’s series of missteps on matters of race hurt him in a GOP primary?
* CORRECTION: Meredith was shot but not killed in 1966
All of the old white guys pictured above voted against the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. (John McCain did, in 2008, apologize for his vote.) 28 years later, it’s hard to imagine even a deeply Republican Congress opposing a holiday dedicated to Dr. King — in part because some contemporary conservatives like to pretend the civil rights activist was or would be a Republican, but mostly because conservatives have spent years pretending to be a persecuted minority group.
That’s why something like Sarah Palin claiming to be a victim of “blood libel” doesn’t raise an eyebrow among the true believers. It’s the myth that keeps the checks rolling in for most right-wingers. The liberals are all-powerful and they oppress us.
It’s especially rich coming from Palin, obviously. The only thing the former governor seems to enjoy more than attacking her political opponents is acting like the entire world is aligned against her and her poor family. A tasteless joke from a late night comedian isn’t simply part of the cost of living a public life, it’s more proof that a cabal of liberal elites is devoted to the relentless persecution of innocent conservative Americans. (Part of the game involves purposefully conflating criticism from media figures with organized political attacks. What, after all, is the true difference between David Letterman and the DNC? They’re all liberals.)
The longtime opponents of what they mockingly termed “the culture of victimhood” now revel in every perceived slight. Republicans accused of unethical behavior make great martyrs.
How bad is the delusion? When they aren’t actually treated like oppressed minorities, they pretend they were. Have you seen the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s exhaustive and remarkable “Insurrectionism Timeline”? Allow me to make the much less exhaustive Timeline of incidents in which young right-wingers pretended to have been the victims of political violence, or even “hate crimes.”
Every so often, some young Republican will pretend to have been the victim of a violent hate crime. In 2006, there was Justin Jatkoff, who was supposedly beaten senseless by either black people or “a homosexual rights group” who’d sent him an “odd/threatening” e-mail. (He was actually just beaten up by his friends.)
Later that year, a conservative Mormon college student named Francisco Nava claimed to have received hundreds of death threats for a column attacking Princeton University’s “hookup culture.” He said he feared for his safety. Then he claimed he was brutally attacked by men in stocking caps who beat him with a bottle of Orangina. After he became a conservative cause celebre, the cops got him to admit that he’d invented the threats and the attack.
And then there’s Ashley Todd, College Republican National Committee field representative, who claimed to have been brutally attacked by some liberal black person during the 2008 campaign, because she had a McCain sticker on her car. A “B” — for “Barack” — was even carved into her cheek. As we all remember, the B was backwards, because Todd has “carved” it herself.
When Democrats were complaining of death threats as the healthcare debate raged, then-minority whip Eric Cantor claimed someone shot up his office. Police determined that the bullet that landed inside a window at his campaign office had been fired randomly into the air.
The Tea Partiers, of course, are frequent self-declared victims of brutally unfair media coverage, and in their more feverish fantasies, they are even intimidated by “union thugs.” (Violent, “thuggish” union members are the enforcers of the modern Apartheid-like regime that conservatives are forced to live under.)
Even when Republicans occupied the White House, controlled both houses of Congress, and maintained a working majority on the Supreme Court, they imagined themselves victims of all-powerful liberals.
So on this Martin Luther King Day, please, spare a thought for America’s forgotten minority: Comfortable white conservatives. Especially the ones in academia, Hollywood, and the media.
The national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King that we celebrate today comes with a bitter irony: Its creation nearly three decades ago was instrumental in rescuing and extending the career of one of the most notorious race-baiters in modern American politics.
It was the fall of 1983 and Jesse Helms seemed destined for political extinction. The staunchly conservative senator was due to stand for reelection the following year, and polls in North Carolina showed him running far, far behind the Democrat who was gearing up to oppose him, Jim Hunt.
That Helms was even in the Senate was something of a fluke; the coattails of Richard Nixon, who carried North Carolina by 40 points over George McGovern in 1972, had been the main reason for his eight-point victory in his first campaign. And even in the early ’80s, North Carolina was still filled with culturally conservative white voters who had been trained from birth to support Democrats. One survey showed Hunt, a moderate who was finishing his second term as governor, 22 points ahead of Helms. Another put the margin at 19. Incumbent senators just aren’t supposed to overcome those kinds of deficits.
But those polls were taken before the first week of October ’83, when the bill to create a federal holiday honoring King — which had easily cleared the House over the summer — landed in the Senate. Two of the chamber’s top Republicans, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, embraced it and urged their colleagues to do the same. The GOP had once been the party of civil rights, and they hoped to attract black voters back into the fold — both for the ’84 Senate elections and for the long-term future of their party.
Helms, though, saw a much different opportunity: to give those conservative white voters in his state a reason to buck their partisan heritage and side with their Republican senator in ’84. Thus it was that he declared his intent to filibuster the King holiday, claiming the slain civil rights hero had been a devotee of “action-oriented Marxism” and that the movement he’d led had actually been a haven for Communists.
It didn’t matter that he stood little chance of prevailing in the legislative fight. By the fall of 1983, even Ronald Reagan, like Helms a hero of the New Right (whose political career was probably saved by Helms’ assistance in North Carolina’s 1976 presidential primary), had come around to supporting the idea of a King holiday — or at least to saying that he’d sign the bill if it reached his desk. Previously, Reagan had offered the standard line of King holiday opponents that giving federal workers a new day off would be too expensive. As J. Bennett Johnston, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, explained to the New York Times, “If you took a secret poll, the Senate would not want additional holidays. But the symbolism of it is so strong, that sweeps aside those arguments very quickly.”
But Helms wasn’t interested in the outcome; he was interested in the show. Undoubtedly, then, he was tickled when one of the first Democrats to lash out at his filibuster was Ted Kennedy — precisely the kind of unabashedly liberal, integrationist Northern liberal who reminded those white Southern Democrats why they’d been abandoning their party in recent presidential elections. “Everybody who disagrees with Mr. Kennedy is a racist and right-winger,” Helms sneered. With a massive push underway to register black North Carolinians to vote, Helms was asked if his stand might hurt him in 1984. But he knew better: “I’m not getting any black votes, period.”
Within days, Helms struck a deal with Baker, then the chamber’s majority leader, to give up his filibuster. In exchange, the final vote would be put off for two weeks, which would give Helms time to pursue a legal bid to force the Justice Department to release the files that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had compiled on King. This, too, was a doomed mission, not that Helms cared. What it really meant was two more weeks at the center of a national media firestorm, making one more stand for old Dixie against Kennedy and the rest of the liberals.
The Senate debate kicked off on Oct. 18, a Tuesday, with Helms — his legal effort squelched by a federal judge the day before — offering a motion to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee so that King’s ties to “elements of the Communist Party USA” could be fully explored. What he was really trying to do, though, was bait Kennedy into a face-to-face showdown. The Massachusetts Democrat, fully aware of what Helms was looking for, had already indicated that he wouldn’t respond personally to any of Helms’ claims. But his thinking changed when Helms brought up Kennedy’s two slain brothers, John and Robert, who had approved a temporary wiretap of King in the fall of 1963.
“His argument is not with the senator from North Carolina,” Helms said of Kennedy. “His argument is with his own dead brother who was president and with his dead brother who was the attorney general.”
That brought Kennedy to the floor to declare that “I am appalled at the attempt of some to misappropriate the memory of my brother Robert Kennedy and misuse it as part of this smear campaign. Those who never cared for him in life now invoke his name when he can no longer speak for himself.” Kennedy also accused Helms of making a “false” statement — that the King bill never received committee hearings. Helms immediately objected to Kennedy’s language, claiming that it was a violation of rules that prohibit senators from questioning each other’s honor. Baker convinced Kennedy to substitute the word “inaccurate,” though Kennedy did manage another swipe: “The senator,” he said of Helms, “needs to learn the rules.”
On and on it went, with one outraged liberal after another rising to defend King’s name and to take exception to Helms’ words. In a particularly memorable scene, New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan held up a binder of documents about King that Helms was promoting, pronounced it a “packet of filth,” and dropped it on the ground. Even Dole, who served as the bill’s floor manager, took on Helms, saying of his claim that the holiday would waste money, “Since when did a dollar sign take its place atop our moral code?”
Eventually, Helms’ motion was rejected, 76-12. So were a series of other motions designed to derail or alter the proposed holiday. The next day, the vote on the main bill was finally called, and it passed with ease, 78 to 22. “It’s a tyranny of the minority!” Helms roared.
Very quickly, it became clear that Helms’ grandstanding hadn’t been in vain. By the time the King fight was over, polls showed Hunt’s lead vanishing — down to single digits, less than half of what it had been months earlier. As the campaign unfolded, racial resentment became Helms’ prime weapon. Helms fliers and mailers featured large photos of Hunt and Jesse Jackson and cast the black voter registration drive as a sinister effort to disenfranchise whites. Helms himself told audiences that Hunt was a racist because he was relying on black voters, and in the closing stretch, he reminded voters that Hunt needed “the bloc vote” to win. Asked what he meant by that, Helms didn’t mince words: “the black vote.”
On Election Day 1984, Helms did what had looked impossible just over a year earlier: He beat Hunt. Divide and conquer had worked brilliantly. Whites went for Helms by a 63-37 percent ratio (the spreads were much bigger in rural areas). Blacks went for Hunt 99 to 1 percent. Overall, the ratio was 52 to 48 percent for the incumbent. On that same day, Reagan was reelected in a resounding landslide, while Republicans held on to their Senate majority. When it came to 1984, the King fight, clearly, hadn’t hurt the GOP.
And yet it was a momentous occasion in the rise of the modern Republican Party. For a century after the Civil War, the GOP had been the progressive party when it came to race and civil rights. But it all changed, virtually overnight, when the burgeoning conservative movement succeeded in nominating Barry Goldwater — who had joined the Southern filibuster of the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed in 1964 — to run against LBJ. This was the moment that white Southern conservatives like Helms, who had been Democrats their whole lives, began a steady, decades-long migration to the GOP. The King vote in ’83 demonstrated how far along that process was. Of the 22 “no” votes, 18 came from Republicans. Just two decades earlier, all but six of the 29 votes to filibuster Civil Rights had come from Democrats.
When the King holiday cleared the Senate, Dole called a press conference and heralded the fact that 37 Republicans had voted for it. It reflected, he claimed, his party’s inclusive spirit. But the scandal was that 18 of them hadn’t. And the message that most African Americans seemed to take from this was simple: The party that makes a home for Jesse Helms doesn’t deserve to be my home.
Osama bin Laden, Martin Luther King, Jr., President Barack Obama 
MLK Jr.'s words, taken out of context by a magician. 
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)(Credit: AP) 
Clockwise from lower left: Orrin Hatch, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms and John McCain 
Jesse Helms and Martin Luther King, Jr. 
