Matthew Yglesias points out that people at The National Review, a magazine that not only staunchly supported racial segregation in the South, but whose founder believed at the time that whites were "the advanced race" should probably avoid taking license with the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr.
William F. Buckley, dissembling mightily in his famous 1957 editorial "The South Must Prevail," wrote that segregation was fine as long as it was "merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races," something MLK would have called an "excuse rather for Ado-nothingism and escapism which ends up in Astand-stillism." And he would have been right. Yet, here is Kyle-Ann Shriver, showing that she clearly has no idea who King actually was:
The positions and values of Senator Obama stand mightily against those espoused, and what’s more, practiced, by Martin Luther King Jr. Based on all these considerations, I think it is quite probable that King, were he alive today, would not vote for Barack Obama.
What I find consistently odd is that conservatives who try to claim Martin Luther King Jr. are blatantly ignorant of his views. They've seen excerpts from the "I Have A Dream" speech but can't be bothered to read a single piece of the man's work beyond what's been featured in old Cingular commercials. King was a liberal--he was a firm believer not just in the power of the Church but in the power of government to help the disaffected. Not only that, he was a radical liberal, who said that "the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice," who compared American conduct in Vietnam to the Holocaust, and who chided America for having "taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes."
In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that if King were alive today, it would be Barack Obama who would be giving hand-wringing speeches distancing himself from King, making excuses for his past statements, and calling on white Americans to put themselves in his shoes. Oh, and the GOP noise machine would be in full smear mode, just like they were back in the day when King was still alive.
People who have no idea what King stood for, let alone people who work at a magazine that stood against him in his time, should probably refrain from uninformed speculation about what he believed, or what he would do.
-- A. Serwer
