I Have a Nightmare
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in August, 1963, at DC’s Lincoln Memorial established color blindness as the foundation of civil rights. What would he say today?
Less than half our population today was alive when Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down April 4, 1968, on the balcony of a Memphis hotel by James Earl Ray. Even fewer remember.
I do. King was 39. I was 11. It was one of those memories, along with the Kennedy assassinations, that stick with you. I also remember the riots that broke out in places like Washington, DC’s H Street, NE, corridor and Camden, NJ, that still wear scars of the violence that is only recently beginning to disappear, but isn’t forgotten.
If King had survived, he would celebrating his 95th birthday today. Some of the people who were around him the day he was killed are still around, including Rev. Jesse Jackson.
While many people will admirably share important and memorable insights and quotes from his famous speeches, sermons and writings, including Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “I Have a Dream,” “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” (his last) and others, I wonder what he would say today? More on that later.
In the years prior to King’s assassination he witnessed two great achievements from his “non violent” activism, including enactments of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, with the Everett Dirksen-led Senate Republicans helping Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson overcome a southern Democrat filibuster, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, just 100 years later than when our first Republican President (Abraham Lincoln) with help from a future Republican President (US Grant) ended a rebellion that was, in part, based on preserving slavery.
In the past six years, since working for a company like so many others at the time that was introducing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, Americans are waking up to its insidious Marxist and deeply racist, vendetta-driven, even genocidal orientation. It is manifesting itself today in ignorant if not malevolent support for genocide of Jews, fitting Israelis into their “oppressor” box while anointing Palestinians as the “oppressed.”
No way modern DEI programs were inspired by MLK. Just the opposite.
King was a controversial figure in his day. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI persuaded then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (who would also be assassinated in 1968 two months after King when RFK won California’s Democratic presidential primary) to wiretap King. Hoover, during those Cold War days, was concerned with King’s connections to supporters of the Communist Party USA, especially one Stanley Levinson.
Hoover infamously called King a “notorious liar.” The FBI is believed to be the source of a letter to King threatening to expose his extramarital affairs, telling him that “there is but one way out for you,” which some believe was a call for King to commit suicide. Many of the FBI’s records and surveillance of King won’t be available until 2027.
Some things about the FBI never change. It’s malevolence has a new look these days. It’s why I’m sympathetic to calls for its elimination and replacement, and it certainly does not need a new headquarters in Virginia or Maryland, despite its otherwise sterling law enforcement reputation. The FBI’s seventh floor has always been its problem. It still is, and needs both cleaning house and fumigation.
King was no communist. He gave a famous sermon in 1953 asserting that Communism was not only incompatible with Christianity but its biggest competitor. But his associations and some of his anti-poverty rhetoric exhibited a pinkish hue to some, along with his longstanding opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1968, he led a campaign for “economic justice,” calling for a guaranteed basic income. The FBI’s efforts to publicly discredit King had its effect.
But King’s “I have a dream” speech is the one that draws the most attention these days, more frequently quoted by Republicans than Democrats, who accuse GOPers of ignoring King’s other speeches, quotes, and activism. It’s no surprise why - today’s DEI programs and woke “anti racism” rants from the liked of Kimberly Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and many progressive Democrats call for “antiracist” discrimination as a vendetta to erase centuries of “systemic racism.” It aggressively seeks to rewrite history and smear historical figures, from Christopher Columbus to George Washington.
It’s leads me to wonder: if a 95-year old Martin Luther King Jr. were still with us and functioning better than Joe Biden, what might he say to the scourge of Critical Theory nonsense that began to emerge just a few years after his assassination?
We don’t have to wonder, because King’s 93-year-old speechwriter, Clarence Jones, is still among us. His interview with Substack’s The Free Press yesterday is a must-read. Some excerpts:
Jones makes it clear he doesn’t want to live in a society that doesn’t see race. “You don’t want to be blind to color. You want to see color. I want to be very aware of color.”
But, he emphasizes: “I just don’t want to attach any conditions to equality to color.”
He adds that it’s possible to read Kendi’s prize-winning book, Stamped from the Beginning, and “come away believing that America is irredeemably racist, beyond redemption.”
It’s a theory he vehemently disagrees with. “That would violate everything that Martin King and I worked for,” he said. It would mean “it’s not possible for white racist people to change.”
“Well, I am telling you something,” Jones adds. “We have empirical evidence that we changed the country.”
It leads me, a former speechwriter, to think that MLK Jr. might give a very different speech on the holiday that commemorates his birth. It might go something like this:
I have a nightmare.
I have a nightmare that my four children live today in a nation where the content of their character is judged by the color of skin.
I have a nightmare that one day the sons and daughters of former slaves will be taught to hate their Jewish and white brothers and sisters as privileged oppressors, to be hated, scorned, and rejected. . . or worse.
I have a nightmare that one day, the sons and daughters of former slaves will seek not justice, but retribution, pain, and punishment for crimes and punishment they, themselves, have never experienced. They will seek to extort money they didn’t earn from those who did for crimes they didn’t cause.
It is a nightmare deeply rooted in the American nightmare, that one day this nation will turn its back and reject the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
It is a nightmare deeply rooted in what George Orwell warned us, that some are more equal than others. In their quest for “social justice,” they will impose the same crimes, the same hate, the same discrimination, that they, themselves, have never experienced, but been indoctrinated to believe it has.
It is nightmare I fear that I when I wake up, I discover that it was no nightmare, but a cancer that has fatally consumed this once great nation. . .
Let’s commit ourselves on this day to remember King’s dream, and make sure the DEI nightmare ends once and for all.
This is a masterpiece of what needs to be said!
William Penn
Great research