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With
the passage of the civil rights bill in 1964 King realized
that ending legal segregation wasn't enough. Integrating
a motel or lunch counter did not provide jobs, improved
housing, and better schools for the black poor. These
were stubborn and intractable problems that required
massive spending on new social programs by government
and business.
King felt that the bigger problem for blacks and whites
was the disappearance of thousands of industry jobs
to automation. He sensed that jobs were a volatile issue
that could inflame blacks and whites. He claimed that
black and white workers suffered equally when jobs were
lost and tactfully called on labor to fight for jobs
for all. But in those days affirmative action was seen
as a tool to prod employers not simply to hire and promote
the disadvantaged of all races, as King insisted, but
blacks. If that happened, King almost certainly knew
that this would leave many whites out in the economic
cold.
King’s debatable ambiguity on affirmative action was
only one issue that Republicans manufacture common cause
with him on. Starting with Reagan, Republican presidents
slowly and grudgingly have realized that they can wring
maximum political mileage out of King’s legacy. They
have recast him in their image on civil rights, and
bent and twisted his oft times public religious Puritanism
on morals issues to justify GOP positions in the values
wars that they wage with blacks, Democrats and liberals.
But that wouldn’t be possible if some of King’s pronouncements
did not parallel the GOP’s positions on crime, marriage,
the family and personal responsibility. Republicans
have carefully cobbled bits and pieces from King’s speeches
and writings during the 1950s and early 1960s together
on values issues to paint a King that is anti-big government,
welfare, black crime, and an advocate of thrift, hard
work, and temperance. This is not a completely politically
skewered picture of King. In those speeches and writings
he took the moral high ground and lectured blacks on
the value of hard work, the importance of setting personal
goals, and striving to develop good character.
In countless speeches in the 1950s, he mingled the demand
for civil rights, voting rights, and the government
clampdown on racial violence, with a forceful call for
blacks to practice thrift, self-help, King realized
that government programs meant little if fathers weren’t
in the home, and he railed against the peril of family
breakdown. This was a major social problem that civil
rights leaders either ignored or downplayed. King again
strongly emphasized values training, discipline, hard
work, and the reduction of family violence as the key
to resolve the family crisis. That crisis increasingly
caught the policy attention of liberal and conservative
academics and government officials.
In numerous speeches, even into the early 1960s, King
continued to stress personal responsibility, economic
self-help, strong families, and religious values as
goals that blacks should strive to attain.
While King can never be considered a political conservative,
the snippets of conservative thinking in his musings
on the black family, economic uplift, and religious
values blend easily with the social conservatism of
many blacks. In the decades after his murder, it has
blended just as easily into the GOP’s prescription for
black ills. And that evidently is more than enough for
black Republicans to say he’d be a big player on the
GOP team.
BlackNews.com
columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst
and social issues commentator, and the author of The
Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September
2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and The GOP’s court
of black voters. For order information, see www.blackgopbook.com
For media interviews, contact:
Mr. Hutchinson at 323-296-6331 or hutchinsonreport@aol.com
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