“America places its best men on pedestals so that others can throw stones at them.”
– Tom Clancy
Back in January of 2024, conservative influencer Charlie Kirk loosed a “hot take” about Martin Luther King, Jr. that I haven’t heard much: “MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”
Coming on the heels of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday (a national holiday) the soundbite was a bad look for Kirk. However, Kirk isn’t the first to levy accusations claiming that America has a misguided reverence for King; he was just echoing others.
An interesting series of discussions have been circling recently about the civil rights icon in light of more recent domestic strife. Those who secretly fund and encourage Black Lives Matter groups, urban riots, and the current pro-Palestine rallies seem reminiscent of the big money moguls of King’s day: Joseph Kennedy and JD Rockefeller stirring the pot then, George Soros doing it now.
Maybe Kirk has been listening to the arguments of Vince Everett Ellison, a prominent black writer questioning the entire history of the Civil Rights Movement and what it means for black America, then and now.
The anti-MLK argument put forth by Ellison, Kirk, and others goes like this:
In the 1950s and ‘60s the black middle class was thriving. Income and private business ownership was growing, the family unit and churches were strong, and overall things were pretty good for the vast majority of black Americans. Then at some point the communists decided to enter the picture and stirred the pot, using MLK and other dynamic speakers. They instigated racial confrontations, convinced parents to sacrifice their children on the altar of desegregation, and destroyed the black nuclear family by raising a generation of entitlement-seeking and victimization-touting radicals.
The argument contends that…
Segregation was working quite well in favor of black Americans with respect to education and economic mobility, and that by stoking a firestorm of racial disunity, the Soviet communists gained a foothold into American culture and institutions.
That’s what some think. What do you think of that argument?
I think it’s simplistic, and suffers from the bane of all historical revisionism: the tendency to ascribe ivory tower analysis to an issue that can only be understood by seeing matters through the eyes of those who lived it on both sides. If you think history is cut and dry, imagine the hubris 24th century scribes will have to sift through when trying to write an accurate history of the 2020’s. The misinformation aggregators in the government and media were even more powerful in King’s day than in ours, and we can’t even get yesterday’s news reported accurately.
This disparity between the classic MLK story and the trendy new one is just another example of a truth that must be repeated, and often: History is messy. It’s also under assault.
The things we’ve been led to believe as historical facts are fast deteriorating, and in their wake we see institutions and people revealed for what they may have always been: actors playing a part.
Daily we’re discovering that what we thought we knew about a particular issue may be completely off the mark when re-evaluated with sobriety.
But there is also a tendency to overcorrect, and in doing so become a cynical grump who throws up his hands uttering “bah humbug” at all history, no matter what it is, for fear of being taken in. Or worse, someone who tears down a monument because he thinks he knows better than the battle-scarred troops who knew the man carved in bronze and erected it in reverence.
Martin Luther King: Awful?
At face value, attacking King as a communist pawn (or operative) is just another intentionally provocative dart — a hallmark of elitist contrarians like Charlie Kirk or Bill Maher. It’s also not true, as Hoover’s best efforts continually proved.
That said, there is a hint of rationale for the claim on moral grounds. MLK was awful in the same manner that everyone not named Jesus Christ is awful; that is to say, flawed.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was largely an absent father. He spent the majority of his time on the road, away from his family and rubbing elbows with high society types in positions of power while his young wife struggled to make ends meet. He is also reported to have had several mistresses.
I make no defense against those claims. When a man fails to make his marriage a priority, and especially when you throw in an element of fame, many men disgrace themselves with sexual sin; examples of Christian ministers abound. Pray for your pastors, particularly if they travel a lot.
But even if we take reports about MLK at face value — and I have reservations about any evidence levied against dynamic threats to entrenched Deep State power brokers such as J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, or Lyndon Johnson (see JFK, Trump) — does it detract from the reality of the things MLK was fighting for and against?
Do King’s affairs detract from the reality that simply registering black men to vote in certain counties could get you murdered? Does the fact that MLK employed speech writers to assist him change the ugly truth about segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, economic warfare, and outright racism in general?
Coming up to modern times, do the accused sins of the late apologist Ravi Zacharias undercut his brilliant defense of Christ as Lord? Does Lonnie Frisbee’s bi-sexuality diminish the fact that he led thousands of people to salvation in Jesus Christ?
And do the mean tweets of Donald J. Trump really register in contrast with the tenacity with which he waged war on human trafficking?
No, they don’t.
God uses imperfect people to achieve spectacular victories. History has to deal with that, and so do we.
Two Jacksons
When I was a young college pup I almost delivered a speech about how we should take Andrew Jackson off of the $20 bill. I wasn’t a Jackson historian or anything, I was just upset about the whole Trail Of Tears thing. I’d watched or read something about it and in my misplaced zeal, fancied myself righteous enough to hinge seventy years of a man’s history on a single issue.
For those who don’t know, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act (1830), resulting in the forced removal of Native American tribes, despite a couple of Supreme Court rulings granting them protections. As our current President (the real one, not the usurper) might say if it happened today: It was very very bad. A very terrible thing. Awful.
And yet, as the years went by I’ve become more and more of a Jackson fanboy. Yes, he was pretty awful when it came to rights of native Americans, but Andrew Jackson was a firebrand on a host of other issues – demanding government accountability, confronting powerful banking influences, rejecting fiat currency, and blasting unconstitutional federal systems and institutions that are still abusing ordinary Americans today.
“…when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratitudes and executive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like factors to themselves, have a right to complain of the unjustice of government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.”
– President Andrew Jackson, message to Congress after vetoing the National Bank charter renewal, 1832
As a historian, one needs to take it all in and judge accordingly. We must take context into consideration when evaluating the full scope of an individual’s accomplishments, and not hang a person’s legacy on a few details — maybe true, maybe not — that modern sensibilities have deemed lynchworthy.
Another Jackson I used to scoff at was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, just another guy fighting to keep slavery, I’d assumed. I was a good Federalist, unschooled in the supremacy of states’ rights and ignorant of Jackson’s devotion to Jesus. I didn’t know that he (and many other Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee) argued for emancipation.
Many if not most Union soldiers had zero interest in defending slaves. Even Abraham Lincoln wasn’t willing to free the slaves until three years into the war, and he arguably did more to encroach on individual liberty and freedom of the press than any President in history (until now). The average Confederate soldier had no interest in defending slavery, either. Hundreds of thousands of those men on both sides fought and died for other reasons.
As we tiptoe along the edges of a second civil war, it might be important to keep that in mind. Many of us are already squaring off against our brothers and sisters on a host of issues, from freedom of speech to government-sponsored child mutilation, and everything in between. When the dust settles on this current battle, who will write the Wikipedia entry on those issues, and what will future historians have to say about figures like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Barbara O’Neill?
Put Down The Stones
The other night I was pulling security over our church’s children’s ministry as they ran through the playground. The man who cuts the lawn asked if the kids could maybe help toss all of the loose rocks out of the grass and back into the gravel parking lot so he wouldn’t have to worry about hitting rocks with the lawn mower in a few days.
“Sure,” we said, and gave that group of kids the assignment of a lifetime: to throw rocks. It didn’t take long before the more ambitious of the kids went too far and started hurling the rocks as high and as far as they could.
“Cease fire,” I quickly said. Those who can’t see the big picture or control their impulses have no business picking up stones.
That little experiment can serve as a metaphor for all of us.
As soon as we start throwing stones, someone will take it too far. Others will refuse to cease fire when directed. And still others will seek out additional targets to throw bigger and sharper stones at.
Assassinations
In June of 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had a private conversation with Martin Luther King, Jr. around the White House Rose Garden. It was one of the only times they spoke privately. Through careful verbiage Kennedy, like his brother Robert before him, implored King to be wary of the associations he kept, and warned him that powerful people believed King was caught in the orbit of communist infiltrators.
Five years later all three men were dead, murdered by assassins, with state and federal authorities working overtime in all three cases to destroy heaps of evidence from the conspirators who killed them.
Powerful people were threatened by the proclamations these dynamic leaders made, the feats they accomplished, and the support they marshaled from ordinary men and women fed up with the institutions pent on their subjugation. Other leaders were silenced by bullets as well: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and Medgar Evers, to name a few. Still more leaders survived the attempts against their lives, perhaps owing to supernatural protection: Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
Imperfect men, all of them, fighting their era’s battles as best they could with the weapons afforded them, and in the process reinforcing transcendent truths we rightly quote today as talking heads attempt to re-assassinate them by other means, diminishing their accomplishments and revising the history. You might ask yourself whose agenda that serves. I have a hint:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”
– George Orwell, 1984
If you subscribe to the revisionist history that guys like Charlie Kirk are suggesting, you might have inadvertently crossed into that dastardly Orwellian territory. And by ascribing a moniker of “awful” to one of our nation’s most important (albeit flawed) historical figures, you almost certainly neuter yourself of foundational principles they espoused.
“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
I wonder what part of that message modern influencers consider awful, and why.
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