by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
Should Martin Luther King’s birthday be a national holiday? If you ask those who say that it should be, they would probably say something like this. “King was the most important figure in the civil rights movement, and his great speech ‘I Have a Dream,’ delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, is the finest expression of the ideal of racial equality. Tragically, he was assassinated in 1968. Making his birthday a holiday shows our commitment to the sort of society he favored.”
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I would argue that, on the contrary, these very “justifications” for the holiday are precisely why it should not be recognized. King’s “civil rights” activities aimed at destroying a free society. In fact, he was closely allied with the Communist Party and a number of his closest advisers were Communist Party members. Moreover, King was a disreputable character; he was a serial adulterer and plagiarist. Let’s look at the record.
The great literary critic and historian Richard M. Weaver, who wrote Ideas Have Consequences, pointed out in 1957 that the civil rights movement was Communist inspired. Instead of class warfare, the usual Communist tactic, it tried to incite racial warfare to promote revolution. Here is what Weaver said:
“The common people often perceive elemental things which the over-educated cannot see. That they have been right in identifying this as the opening tactic of Communism in this country now seems beyond question. We can observe in a number of areas how “racial collectivism” is being used as a crowbar to pry loose rights over private property. There was a time when ownership of property gave the owner the right to say to whom he would and would not sell and rent.
[Various Supreme Court decisions show] a steady and indeed now far advanced eroding of rights over private property following a Communist racial theory. In most of the process the Supreme Court has been the “running dog” of the Kremlin.
“Integration” and “Communization” are, after all, pretty closely synonymous. In the light of what is happening today, the first may be little more than a euphemism for the second. It does not take many steps to get from the “integrating” of the facilities to the “communizing” of the facilities, if the impulse is there.”
King wanted to destroy the free enterprise system and replace it with socialism. He favored racial quotas, reparations, “set-asides”, and socialism. Marcus Epstein elaborates on these points:
“King openly advocated quotas and racial set-asides. He wrote that the “Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete improvement in his way of life.” When equal opportunity laws failed to achieve this, King looked for other ways. In his book Where Do We Go From Here, he suggested that “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” To do this he expressed support for quotas. In a 1968 Playboy interview, he said, “If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.” King was more than just talk in this regard. Working through his Operation Breadbasket, King threatened boycotts of businesses that did not hire blacks in proportion to their population.
King was even an early proponent of reparations. In his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait, he wrote, ‘No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries…Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of a the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.’ Predicting that critics would note that many whites were equally disadvantaged, King claimed that his program, which he called the “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” would help poor whites as well. This is because once the blacks received reparations, the poor whites would realize that their real enemy was rich whites.
King of course was a great opponent of the free economy. In a speech in front of his staff in 1966 he said,
