By Stan Gudmundson
Peterson, MN
The 1964 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., was tremendously important in the crusade to end racial discrimination was it not? There have been many rough spots since, but that march was imperative. Furthermore, a special day should be set aside to memorialize that struggle. Martin Luther King deserves the honor of being named for it. That is conventional “wisdom.”
But it is wrong. Many black leaders did not want MLK to make that march. They thought it would exacerbate and create racial problems. It certainly did.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act had just been passed. They wanted to give it time to work. Moreover, the proposed Voting Rights Act was sure to become law. It passed, in 1965. Read Tom Sowell’s analyses, among many others, to understand what we have been through.
The day set aside to honor those who struggled to improve the lives of black people and to help end racial discrimination should not have been named after Martin Luther King. Commentary magazine, once an influential journal, printed a very long essay comparing original sources with MLK’s disgraceful plagiarism of those sources in his PhD dissertation. I read the whole article. A “clergyman,” he was a flagrant womanizer. Before he was killed, he had surrounded himself with far-left “advisors” to include communist sympathizers.
There are at least three other black leaders the day should be named after. George Washington Carver, Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Call it the Carver/Douglass/Washington day. Read their biographies. They were all towering moral figures and extraordinary men who more deserve the honor of having a special day named for them.
Our biggest misfortune, however, is that we attempted to solve race problems through group rights.
Obviously, there was much that needed correction. We tried to, with all sorts of schemes to include reverse discrimination, through programs like affirmative action, i.e., “black privilege.” But what dead people did to other dead people could not and cannot be fixed by discriminating against living innocents. Individual freedom should not have been sacrificed for tribal collectivism.
I once toyed with the idea of becoming an FBI agent but I was advised not to apply. I was the wrong color and gender.
The problem with the group rights “solutions” is that there is no fair way to determine who is entitled to what. Moreover, that approach transmutes constitutional guarantees of individual liberty into mere tribalism. It created, and still creates the impetus to further divide and subdivide us into more individual gangs, a consequence not clearly foreseen at the time.
We are now split into many more tribes who now even have legally defined special rights. Gender, sexual preference, racial minorities to include black, Hispanic, Indian, illegal immigrants and on and on.
Standing is based on power, therefore tribes must compete for attention, favors, resources, and legal status. That promotes unease and even provokes fear and hate of other gangs who are not part of the tribe.
It also created a race-baiting industry whose advocates cannot allow racial problems to be solved. They would have to find other employment.
The smallest minority is the individual. Our founders understood that and established a constitution based on individual liberty. When individual rights are protected, group rights are protected.
A system based on group rights, rather than individual rights, completely obliterates the nature and character of America and the constitution our system is based on. That is why, despite the racial problems we had, group rights collectivization has been and is so dangerous.
In the long run, giving tribes/gangs/mobs/hordes/packs legal group rights was never justified. The long-term damage and problems caused by wrecking the constitution, by far outweigh the civil rights issues of those days, despite being as bad as they might have been. Again, the imperative of individual liberty should never have been abandoned.
Unless we eliminate the tribal system and unless we return to the system of individual constitutional liberty, the divide in America will become worse. Unfortunately, we will not get rid of tribalism and society/politics will become still nastier. Count on it.
Finally, if you are a “liberal” Christian, you should read Romans 1:32. And some preceding verses.
Read them. And weep.
America. RIP.
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