King was a virtual socialist and probable sex offender, but that’s obviously not why we (rightly) honor him with a national holiday.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday illustrates how federal holidays are properly used for civic purposes—and how they are politically misused for partisan and ideological purposes.
For civic purposes, we recall why, exactly, our nation honors King with a federal holiday. For partisan and ideological purposes, we recall other, more unsavory things about King that have nothing to do with the reasons we honor him and his legacy.
King’s universally lauded legacy involves completing the second American revolution that began during the Civil War, but which was stunted and reversed by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the disaster that was Reconstruction. A century of state-sanctioned and -enforced legal discrimination against blacks followed.
King ended this discrimination through his leadership of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
In so doing, he harkened back to the promise of the American founding as articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the notion that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
Thus, by championing equal rights under the law, King was leading a thoroughly American movement fully in concert with the (classically liberal) American political tradition. This is the man and the legacy that we honor with a federal holiday; and that is why, as Dan McLaughlin observes:
The collapse of legal and political defenses of segregation and disenfranchisement between 1965 and 1969 was, in retrospect, staggering in its speed and scope.
A nation that had legal discrimination in many states in the mid-1960s had a national system of affirmative action, endorsed by both political parties at the time, by the decade’s end.
Legal discrimination against blacks was swept away so quickly because it was so obviously discordant with the American promise of equality under the law. King was summoning America to “live out the true meaning of its creed,” and his summoning resonated with a nation conceived in the classical liberal tradition.
Problematic Aspects. But of course, King was a flawed human being, not a plaster saint. And so, there are other aspects of the man and his legacy that political partisans, both left and right, seize upon for their own rank purposes.
In the last few years of his life—after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution outlawing poll taxes as a requirement for voting—King moved radically left. He pushed for the redistribution of wealth and a guaranteed income, while denouncing America’s defense of South Vietnam as morally unconscionable.
This is the King that modern-day socialists and leftists in the Democratic Party embrace and champion; and from their political perspective, of course, that is understandable. But that is not the King whom we honor with a federal holiday; and that King is inconsonant with the American founding.
King also was a notorious womanizer and sex offender whose reputation never would have survived the modern-day “Me Too” movement. Partisans on the far right use this aspect of King to try and discredit him; but again: we honor King for a very specific reason, and that reason has nothing to do with his personal moral failings.
The bottom line: Martin Luther King, Jr., like many American political heroes, was a great but flawed human being. Not everything that he said or did warrants praise and commendation.
But the pivotal role that he played in ending state-sanctioned and -enforced discrimination against African Americans absolutely puts him in the pantheon of our country’s greatest political leaders.
We rightly honor this aspect of King’s legacy with a national holiday; but we ought to summarily reject the attempt by political partisans, both left and right, to hijack the King holiday for their own noxious purposes.
Feature photo credit: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memorable words delivered during his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Aug. 28, 1963, courtesy of KPLC Action News, southwest Louisiana.