Charlie Kirk, speaking before students and teachers at AmericaFest, a political convention organized by Turning Point, insisted, “MLK [Martin Luther King Jr.] was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”
Mr. Kirk has never risked that last full measure of devotion for any principle higher than himself. He epitomizes cynical opportunism on steroids.
Has he ever read Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” or “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin?
The 1960s ushered in three landmark federal civil rights statutes, not simply one as he insinuates: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which ended a century of unconstitutional black disenfranchisement by white racists, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibited the real estate advertisements, “No blacks need apply.”
Mr. Kirk apparently yearns for the day to return to segregated education, racist grandfather clauses for voting, and Satchel Paige pitching exclusively in Negro Leagues baseball.
Does Mr. Kirk know anything of marquee figures in black history: Crispus Attucks, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, Ralph Bunche, Charles Hamilton Houston, Rosa Parks, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, William Coleman and Edward Brooke, among others?
Has Mr. Kirk denounced D.W. Griffith’s racist film “Birth of a Nation,” which premiered at President Woodrow Wilson’s White House?
Has Mr. Kirk assailed the United States for conscripting black soldiers in World War I and World War II to fight in segregated units?
Has Mr. Kirk criticized the separate-but-equal racism of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) or the declaration of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that blacks have no rights that whites are bound to respect?
What has Mr. Kirk said about the thousands of black lynchings with impunity during a century of Jim Crow? What has he said about the Scottsboro Boys? What has he said about Alabama Gov. George Corley Wallace’s saying, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
His planned assault on Dr. King is as farcical as would be a student’s critique of Albert Einstein and as ludicrous as would be Pontius Pilate’s declaiming against Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Mr. Kirk is asleep at the wheel. The United States Supreme Court threw a dagger in the heart of the “diversity, equity, inclusion” mania in schools and workplaces in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (June 29, 2023). There, the Court cast a constitutional cloud over race as a legitimate proxy for educational or other diversity in invalidating racial preferences in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. It vindicated Dr. King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” address at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963.
Despite that landmark, widely publicized precedent, Mr. Kirk, six months later, bugled to the AmericaFest crowd, “The courts have been really weak on this. Federal courts must yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it’s the actual American Constitution.” It may be reasonably conjectured that Mr. Kirk has never read and digested the Students for Fair Admissions precedent. Intellectual sloth. The decision is online and does not require an archeological expedition.
Mr. Kirk stumbles badly in seeking to find a smoking gun. He points to a student’s complaint that Title IX of the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1972 exposed him to a gender discrimination investigation for posting an Instagram story mocking transgender people. Sorry, Charlie! Title IX is not part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act you are hoping to repeal.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a saint. But he gave that last full measure of devotion to lift blacks from de facto or de jure servitude to white masters. His devotion to nonviolence was worthy of Mahatma Gandhi. He was fearless in the face of Bull Connor’s fire hoses and Jim Clark’s cattle prods. His Nobel Peace Prize speaks for itself.
Mr. Kirk should continue his education. He has no standing to give Dr. King a report card until he writes something as eloquent, electrifying and convincing as Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
You Might Like
