By
Jason L. Riley | The Wall Street Journal
Fifty
years after his death, many pay lip service to his ideals, but far too few are
following his example.
Rev.
Jesse Jackson visits the balcony outside room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, where
he was when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, on April 3, 2018 in
Memphis, Tenn. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
After Martin Luther King Jr. was shot
dead 50 years ago as he stood on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn.,
riots broke out in more than 100 cities.
There were also reports of violence on
college campuses and even on military bases overseas, where some black soldiers
refused to report for duty.
Federal troops were sent to
Baltimore. In Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered police to “shoot to kill”
arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters.
In Washington, so many fires were set
that you couldn’t see the U.S. Capitol because of all the smoke. Gen. William
Westmoreland, who commanded the U.S. forces in Vietnam and happened to be in
Washington at the time, said the unrest had left the nation’s capital looking
“worse than Saigon did at the height of the Tet offensive.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson
responded by convening a meeting of the nation’s most prominent black
activists, and the invite list is instructive.
It included A. Philip Randolph,
who led the fight to desegregate the military; Whitney Young, head of the
National Urban League; Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP; and Bayard Rustin, a
top adviser to King who had helped organize the seminal 1955 bus boycott in
Montgomery, Ala., and the 1963 March on Washington.
It almost goes without saying that
the leading civil-rights organizations today can no longer count people of that
caliber in their ranks.
Which may be the clearest indication yet that the
movement is over and that the right side prevailed.
If black Americans were
still faced with legitimate threats to civil rights—such as legal discrimination
or voter disenfranchisement—we would see true successors to the King-era
luminaries step forward, not the pretenders in place today who have turned a
movement into an industry, if not a racket.
Racial gaps that were steadily
narrowing in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s would expand in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s,
which suggests that the disparities that continue today aren’t being driven by
racism, notwithstanding claims to the contrary from liberals and their allies
in the media.
It also suggests that attitudes toward marriage, education, work
and the rule of law play a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge.
More marches won’t address out-of-wedlock childbearing.
More sit-ins won’t
lower black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.
Even electing and appointing more
black officials, which has been a major priority for civil-rights leaders over
the past half-century, can’t compensate for these cultural deficiencies.
Black
mayors, police chiefs and school superintendents have been commonplace since
the 1970s, including in major cities with large black populations.
Racially
gerrymandered voting districts have ensured the election of blacks to Congress.
Even the election of a black president—twice—failed to close the divide in many
key measures. Black-white differences in poverty, home ownership and incomes all
grew wider under President Obama.
Discussion of antisocial behavior in
poor black communities, let alone the possibility that it plays a significant
role in racial inequality, has become another casualty of the post-’60s era.
King and other black leaders at the time spoke openly about the need for
more-responsible behavior in poor black communities.
After remarking on
disproportionately high inner-city crime rates, King told a black congregation
in St. Louis that “we’ve got to do something about our moral standards.” He
added: “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there
are many things wrong in the black world too. We can’t keep on blaming the
white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”
King’s successors mostly ignore this
advice, preferring instead to keep the onus on whites.
Where King tried to
instill in young people the importance of personal responsibility and
self-determination notwithstanding racial barriers, his counterparts today
spend more time making excuses for counterproductive behavior and dismissing
criticism of it as racist.
Activists who long ago abandoned King’s colorblind
standard, which was the basis for the landmark civil-rights laws enacted in the
1960s, tell black youths today that they are victims, first and foremost.
A generation of blacks who have more
opportunity that any previous generation are being taught that America offers
them little more than trigger-happy cops, bigoted teachers and biased
employers. It’s not only incorrect, but as King and a previous generation of
black leaders understood, it’s also unhelpful.
Black activists and liberal
politicians stress racism because it serves their own interests, not because it
serves the interests of the black underclass.
But neglecting or playing down
the role that blacks must play in addressing racial disparities can only
exacerbate them.
Fifty years after King’s death, plenty of people are paying
him lip service. Far too few are following his example.
