Friday, April 4, 2008
Politics MLK, Probably Not a Real Party Guy
Posted by Roger Abramson on Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 4:47 PM
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Roger, good reminder that the Dems have an imperfect claim to MLK's mantle.
On civil rights in the early 60s and late 50s, I think it's probably fair to see that the biggest obstacle came from southern Democrats (who later morphed into Republicans). It took LBJ to steamroll those in his own party. But it was Eisenhower who enforced integration of Little Rock Central HS, and many Northern and Midwestern Republicans -- the economic conservatives but social moderates who are no longer the GOP's base -- were more supportive of civil rights than southerners of either party.
By his death, MLK opposed a war that was being conducted by a Democratic administration (though, in fairness to the Dems, opposed by a significant minority among them in 1968, including the man who probably would have won the presidency, Robert Kennedy).
Really, it was only on the war on poverty that MLK and the Democrats of the mid-60s were largely in sync.
For all the ways LBJ's War on Poverty is maligned today as some stupid liberal experiment, I remember reading that real poverty in this country shrank significantly between 1964-69. But the US couldn't afford to wage a simultaneous war on poverty and another in Vietnam.
One other point: In the wake of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" comment, I was interested to read that, at the time of his death, MLK was working on a sermon entitled "Why America Is Going to Hell," addressing the gap between our society's materialism and relative indifference to suffering and the "beloved community" King upheld as a Bible-based ideal. I wouldn't take any comparison between King and Wright very far, but the sentiments in the sermon title and Wright's comment aren't too far apart, when you stop to think about it.
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