Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” fifty years ago today.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading about Sen. Rand Paul’s speech to students at Howard University last week. The context is the GOP’s efforts to develop support beyond the angry white guy demographic. Ta-Nehisi Coates sums up the problem with Paul’s speech and, more generally, his approach:
Rand Paul went to Howard University, lied, and then got his ass kicked. That’s not so bad. I got my ass kicked regularly at Howard. That was the reason my parents sent me there. But having gotten his ass kicked, his answer is to not to reflect but to make an allegation of racial discrimination.
And until there’s some reflection I don’t see the GOP’s rebranding efforts having any effect. Coates also commented on the “lack of reflection” problem a few weeks earlier in the wake of Dr. Ben Carson’s speech at CPAC (emphasis mine):
Not all black conservatives see it as their job to tell white racists that they embody the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. It is certainly possible to oppose Obamacare in good conscience. No one knows this more than Ben Carson. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore. Carson responded to that adulation by regularly giving his time to talk to young people, who needed to know that there was so much more beyond the streets.
I was one of those young people. I don’t doubt that Carson was a conservative even then. I knew plenty of black people who loved their community and hated welfare. But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask.
Also relevant is David Frum’s commentary/review of David Crespino’s “Strom Thurmond’s America”. Frum’s argument – which makes sense to me – is that the same political calculus which caused the Democratic party to move to the left on civil rights issues post-WWII is the flip side of what motivated the Republican party to move to the right on the same issues:
In 1948, Truman desegregated the armed forces and created a new commission to enforce FDR’s toothless order against discrimination by federal contractors. Truman’s turn to civil rights jolted pro-segregation Southerners. Once upon a time, they might have attempted to deny him renomination. In 1936, however, the Democrats had dropped their ancient rule requiring two-thirds of convention delegates to nominate, putting an end to the de facto Southern veto.
Unable to punish Truman from inside the party, pro-segregation Democrats determined to punish him from outside. They nominated their own presidential candidate to run as a “States Right” Democrat: Strom Thurmond.
Pro-segregation Democrats did not expect to win, obviously. They hoped (at a minimum) to cost Truman re-election, punishing their party for turning its back on them – and (at a maximum) to cast the election into the House of Representatives where Southern state delegations voting as a block could choose a president more to their liking.
The plan spectacularly backfired. Yes, Thurmond’s challenge cost Truman Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. But instead of reminding national Democrats of the South’s power, the plan underscored the much greater importance of the industrial North. Thurmond’s four deep south states accounted for 39 electoral votes. Meanwhile, the from-the-left insurgency of former Vice President Henry Wallace tipped New York to Dewey and the Republicans. That one northern state was worth 47 electoral votes. Thanks to an unexpectedly strong showing in the West and the farm belt, Truman managed to eke out re-election.
Nevertheless, the lesson of 1948 was unmistakeable: The post-Roosevelt party needed to worry much more about placating northern liberals than Southern segregationists. Strom Thurmond drew the same conclusion. He would never support a national Democrat again.
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1954, Thurmond would over the next 10 years build South Carolina into the strongest redoubt of the draft Goldwater movement. When pro-civil rights Republicans complained that Goldwater was transforming the “party of Lincoln” into the “party of Thurmond,” Goldwater brusquely answered that conservatives “must go hunting where the ducks are.”
There’s a lot of other interesting history in Frum’s piece too. It’s very much worth the read.
Returning to the subject of King’s letter, in looking back on its significance Jonathan Rieder quotes Dr. King from a speech he gave shortly before his was murdered:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. That’s a beautiful creed,” King told his crowd. It is easy to read such sentences in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and other works by King and leave it at that. But it is vital to read what he said next: “America has never lived up to it.”
Both assertions are true and we should neither be satisfied by the beauty of our creed nor become cynical from our inability to live up to it. When we fall short of our aspirations then we should reflect on why and how we did and endeavor to do better in the future.