There was a time when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero to the American Left and a villain to the reactionary Right. How times have changed. If you spend time on college campuses today, you will witness a surprising shift: Young conservatives quote Dr. King and derive inspiration from his words. Young progressives often roll their eyes at the very mention of his name.
Dr. King, it seems, was insufficiently woke.
On the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, we must rehabilitate Dr. King from his quasi-cancellation. We must remind our fellow citizens that his holiday is not an act of affirmative action, nor was his statue put on the National Mall to fulfill a diversity quota. Dr. King is a figure of national significance in the same pantheon as Washington and Lincoln.
In particular, Dr. King is the central character in the final act in a three-part drama that constitutes a sort of national passion play. It's a story of original sin and ultimate redemption. It is the exceptional tale of national promise fulfilled.
This drama began with the Declaration of Independence. This document made a radical promise that "all men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator" with the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." We fought a seven-year revolution, won our independence, and vindicated these rights.
But as every American knows, we failed to live up to the promise of the Declaration. We were guilty of a damning original sin. American slavery was allowed to continue as part of the compromises that made our union possible. Slavery was even accepted and (indirectly) recognized in the text of our Constitution.
The second act in our drama centers on the Civil War. As Lincoln viewed it, this war and it's devastating human toll was a form of divine punishment for this original sin of slavery. After the War, Lincoln was determined to forever end the sin that had spawned it. He and his successors secured the ratification of three amendments to our Constitution—the 13th, 14th and 15th—that abolished slavery, granted citizenship and equal protection of the law to the former slaves, and guaranteed their voting rights.
For the first time in American history, the equality promised at our founding was explicitly extended to Black Americans.
But as every American knows, we were not yet saved. Segregation, discrimination and terror prevented the rights granted in law from being realized in practice. For a century, Black Americans were brutally denied equal protection and voting rights.
Jim Crow continued for a full century until the third act on our story: the Civil Rights movement. This was a new and ultimately successful effort to make good on the promise of the Declaration and the victory of the Civil War. The movement, culminating in Dr. King speech at the March on Washington, led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the federal government put its muscle behind enforcing these laws.
King himself clearly placed his movement within the context of this great American drama. He chose to address the March on Washington from the Lincoln Memorial and began his speech by echoing Lincoln's Gettysburg Address ("Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.") King spoke of the words of the Declaration of Independence as "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir." He summed up the Civil Rights movement as an effort to "cash this check." And he famously dreamed "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
Those who spurn King typically ignore the majesty of the founding and the horrible price of the Civil War. They fail to appreciate the too human drama of a nation born in original sin that slowly but steadily—and imperfectly—redeemed itself from that sin. They focus on the problems that remain while ignoring the long arc of progress.
Five years after the March on Washington, Dr. King was assassinated. His blood did not wash away our national sin. But his actions and words empowered us to overcome it.
As we commemorate the March on Washington this weekend, we should humbly reread the speech he gave about our Founding in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln that day. This speech, even more than Gettysburg, marked a new birth of freedom. Rather than reject this legacy, let us seek to fulfill it. There is much work left to be done.
David Brog is the executive director of the Maccabee Task Force and the author of Reclaiming Israel's History: Roots, Rights and the Struggle for Peace (Regnery, 2017).
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
