… the unifying vision of Martin Luther King has been betrayed by BLM and their fellow Leftist Zealots
During one of the most famous and admired orations of all time, Dr Martin Luther King spoke of ‘the fierce urgency of now‘ that compelled him to call for social justice.
Re-reading his whole ‘I Have a Dream‘ speech, delivered at Washington DC’s Lincoln Memorial 60 years ago this month, it still shimmers with beauty and brilliance.
The ‘urgency’ King invoked in his plea to right the racial wrongs of America’s past did, indeed, lead to some rapid results.
The dream he laid out, that his ‘four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character‘ was followed quickly by the great legislative accomplishments of the civil rights movement.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed the discriminatory practices adopted by many southern states after the Civil War.
But it wasn’t just desegregation and voting rights that King demanded on August 28, 1963.
During one of the most famous and admired orations of all time, Dr Martin Luther King spoke of ‘the fierce urgency of now’ that compelled him to call for social justice
As he described the ‘great beacon light of hope’ that the abolition of slavery represented 100 years earlier, he also pointed out that not only were black people in America ‘still not free‘, but ‘100 years later, the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity‘. He was absolutely right.
Tragically, however, despite the civil rights laws prompted by his speech, along with all the campaigns launched in its wake and the trillions of dollars spent in pursuit of racial justice since then – I fear none of it fundamentally altered the landscape he described so vividly.
That island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity is still with us.
Of course, black people in America are no longer systematically refused service at lunch counters. They participate in elections on equal terms with everyone else.
But over the past six decades, when it comes to wealth, opportunity, social and economic progress, King’s ‘fierce urgency’ not only failed to spur the kind of transformational improvement that was achieved on civil rights, in many ways things have got worse.
A survey of the historical data on racial inequality, summarised recently by two leading American social scientists, concluded shockingly: ‘In terms of material well-being, black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era. What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.’
In today’s America, black people are shamefully over-represented in the ranks of the poor, the sick and the incarcerated. On everything from life-expectancy to home- ownership, educational attainment to income, things have moved in the wrong direction since ‘I have a dream’ electrified the world.
So what went wrong?
Some black conservative scholars claim the main culprit is too much government intervention – specifically the welfare state and failing schools. According to this analysis, the expansion of welfare schemes initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in his War on Poverty in the 1960s incentivised behaviour that hurt black Americans’ chances of climbing the ladder of opportunity.
They point to the huge rise in family breakdown and absent fathers, from around 25 per cent in the 1960s to more than 75 per cent now. More than three quarters of black children are born without a stable family. Study after study shows that strong family structures are one of the most important building blocks of a successful life.
Years ago, when such things were still sayable by politicians on the Left, even Barack Obama admitted: ‘We all know the statistics. That children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.’
Education was supposed to rescue impoverished children from these grim outcomes. Instead, the American school system, dominated by militant Left-wing teacher unions, has multiplied the disaster. In my home state of California, in vital subjects such as maths, test scores have shown the average black pupil is four years behind white pupils.
You might think that with the devastating evidence, accumulated over so many years, of the failure of Left-wing policies to lift black Americans into King’s ‘promised land’, campaigners for racial justice – or ‘equity’ as we are now told to call it – would change course.
Perhaps they could use their evident cultural power to help black faith leaders in their quest to change attitudes on family, marriage and parenting? Maybe join the black community leaders pushing for educational choice, enabling parents and pupils to escape the calamitous dysfunction of many inner city government-run schools?
Not a chance.
People celebrate at the ‘#BLM Turns 10 People’s Justice Festival’ on July 15 in Los Angeles
The recent successors to King’s civil rights movement, starting with the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2014, have drifted further and further away from positive, practical problem-solving into the fringe obsessions of a clique of Marxist academics, under the banner of Critical Race Theory.
According to this extremist dogma, society is structurally racist, and any difference in economic or social outcomes is by definition the result of racism.
In place of King’s unifying mission to ‘transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood’, today’s race campaigners seek to divide.
Following the despicable case of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, instead of channelling righteous public outrage into constructive reforms, they mounted a vicious assault on the institution of policing, demanding the defunding and dismantling of police departments.
Black Lives Matter stirring unrest in Oakland, California
The resulting explosion in urban crime has made life even worse for black communities, prompting this stunning rebuke from the Oakland branch of the leading advocacy group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: ‘Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins and highway shoot-outs have become a pervasive fixture of life. Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric, have created a heyday for criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime, crime will continue to soar.’
Exactly. As Margaret Thatcher once said, the facts of life are conservative.
But the most extraordinary example of the racial justice movement’s departure from King’s approach is the push for ‘reparations’.
Instead of addressing the causes of the racial wealth gap by boosting black home-ownership and entrepreneurship, strengthening families or reforming education, the recommendations of reparations task forces include scarcely believable lunacy. For example, guaranteeing black residents annual payments of $93,060.33 for 250 years, the forgiveness of all debt, and the legalisation of public urination.
The British Government’s compensation scheme for the Windrush generation seems modest and reasonable in comparison.
Here’s a sobering question, though: do we see any sign that in 60 years’ time, Dr Martin Luther King’s vision of true equality and racial harmony will be realised? I fear not, unless we wrest control of the racial justice agenda away from the far-Left ideologues who have run it into the ground.
Written by Steve Hilton for The Daily Mail ~ August 5, 2023