I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
These words are deeply ingrained in our cultural religion. We are supposed to believe that this is what the “civil rights” movement, which has morphed into a more generic “justice” focus, has always been concerned with. Growing up we were taught that we should treat people with respect and give them the benefit of the doubt regardless of their race. In this dream of Martin Luther King Jr., the ideal would be a “color blind” society. Two years removed from a black man serving two terms as President of the United States, one would think we were rapidly approaching that day. If you think this you are sadly wrong. I was born 7 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and at no time in my life have race relations been worse in this country. More than a half century after the Civil Rights Act, the “War on Poverty”, school integration, affirmative action, etc., all designed to even the playing field and still we are not only no closer to what King purported to believe, we are actually much further apart. Now we are talking about reparations being paid by people that never owned slaves to people that were never enslaved in the first place, in spite of the $22,000,000,000,000 spent on fighting poverty.
King’s legacy is supposed to be bulletproof and unquestioned. Not only are you not allowed to question what King really stood for, anything less than total fawning is considered a sign of low moral character. His legacy has been a carefully crafted narrative to the point that the real legacy of the real man who was Martin Luther King is very nearly lost.
This weekend a pretty stunning revelation of who MLK really was came to light. It has been common knowledge for a long time that King was an adulterer. It is even hinted at in some recent biopics like Selma but we aren’t supposed to talk about it. We get a lot of “all men are flawed” talk, usually from the same people that scream and yell about Trump and his infamous “grab them by the pussy” comments. I guess a billionaire playboy who never purported to be anything else is held to a higher standard than a man who claimed to be a Christian minister. The revelations this weekend put a number to King’s behavior and added some spicy details that are hard to believe. Here is the headline from the Daily Mail:
The story is incredible. A man who is held up to near demi-god status in America, someone many would consider the greatest American to ever live, had affairs with more than 40 different women, called himself “…the founder of the ‘International Association for the Advancement of P***y-Eaters'” and is alleged to have been present while a woman was raped, and not only didn’t intervene but is heard to be laughing. Not only is he alleged to have had several dozen affairs, it is reported that he was involved in “threesomes” and orgies, including at least one prostitute, and that he told one reluctant participant “…that performing the act ‘would help your soul’.”.
It is hard to confirm any of this. The man reporting this information, Pulitzer prize winner David Garrow, has extensively studied the FBI records but the actual recordings are being held under seal by the government until 2027 so we have to take his word for it but the old saying still stands that where there is smoke, there is usually fire. I wouldn’t be shocked if in 2027 a Democrat president orders the tapes destroyed or sealed for another 50 years, or that is they are released we find that the tapes were “accidentally” damaged and are unplayable. There is too much money riding on the legacy of MLK. He has spawned countless grifters who have banked on their relationship to him, from family members who get speaking gigs based on being a third cousin twice removed to professional race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson.
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| Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy with MLK. Jesse is smiling because he knows he will never have to get a real job. |
This news is getting some play overseas but very little in America. It was never trending on Twitter as far as I can tell and Google is showing mostly results from overseas news outlets.
Little wonder, most American news outlets are terrified of saying anything that casts MLK in a bad light. Even “conservative” outlets like Breitbart and Fox News don’t mention this new, specific information based on searching for “Martin Luther King” on their websites.
I am not in a position to cast stones when it comes to being a good husband but I am also not held up as a deity in our civic religion. Many people will still fawn over King based on his deification and refuse to consider who he really is. Many people can give a stirring speech. I can bring the thunder when speaking, not like King but still no slouch. I can talk convincingly about all sorts of stuff that I don’t know anything about or don’t even believe. It isn’t that hard. Where you find the true measure of a man is not his soaring rhetoric but in his life away from the cameras and microphones. King dreamed of a nation where a man is judged by the content of his character. By that measure King is no hero. At a minimum he was a scoundrel who cheated on his wife with impunity and seemingly without remorse. A remorseful, repentant man doesn’t keep cheating on his wife over and over. He was a hypocrite who talked about his faith openly and then ignored his faith behind closed doors, calling himself “Reverend” while using his position to convince women to perform sex acts to help their souls. He reportedly plagiarized others while a student, held borderline Marxist beliefs and was a heretic by any measure. There are no doubt hundreds and thousands of civil rights activists that were decent people but they get little notice, instead the adoration all goes to King and his cronies that have banked on his legend for decades.
Perhaps someday we will hear for ourselves what sort of man Martin Luther King Jr. was away from the microphones and cameras. I think when we do it will shatter a lot of people’s visions of who he was but many will stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to see him for who he was. The civil rights movement today, whatever it started out as, is little more than a cash grab for minorities who have figured out how to monetize white guilt. As long as the money is flowing, there will be plenty of people eager to exploit King’s fake legacy.