If You Come at the King

For decades now, conservatives have insisted that Martin Luther King Jr. had Only One True Quote and argued that “color-blind” conservatives were therefore the true defenders of his legacy.

But it looks like they might be starting to give up the charade, with Charlie Kirk announcing today his sudden discovery that ACTUALLY the civil rights leader didn’t really mean that one quote and ACTUALLY he did a lot of really horrible no-good bad things like … help bring about the Civil Rights Act.

While I’m impressed that Charlie Kirk has finally discovered “books” and learned at least a little about King’s real legacy, this “new” stance is really just a reversion to an earlier norm.

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During King’s life and for decades after, conservatives knew he stood on the other side of the political struggle. King’s father had been a Republican until the presidential race of 1960, when the intervention of the Kennedy campaign in his son’s arrest in Georgia swung him to the Democrats, but King himself long played coy with his political preferences, hoping to appeal to liberal elements in both parties.

But the 1964 race clarified things, and as movement conservatives found their champion in the archconservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, King couldn’t stay silent any more. He denounced Goldwater, in no uncertain terms, asserting that he represented “a political philosophy that could lead America down a Fascist path more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany.”

Conservatives agreed that there was an immense gulf between their movement and the civil rights struggle, and where King called them fascists, they called him a socialist or a communist.

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For just one famous example from thousands — this photo, of King at a nonviolence seminar at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, was widely reprinted across the South on leaflets and billboards as “proof” that MLK was a communist.

And the Civil Rights Act?

At the time, the right called it “the Socialists Omnibus Bill” which represented a dangerous power-grab by the federal government and a threat to private enterprise.

Again, there are countless examples of the long-running fight between modern conservatism and the civil rights movement — here’s a thread I did on National Review’s embrace of segregationists, and I’ll shamelessly plug my chapter on the “southern strategy” in Myth America too — so we don’t really need to belabor it.

While the right’s attacks on King were, and are, reprehensible, at least they’re honest. Hopefully, other conservatives will follow Charlie Kirk’s lead and rediscover how much they truly hate Martin Luther King Jr. — and remember how much he hated them.