That “content of their character” quote — taken from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech — has proved to be one of the most dangerous weapons in the effort to airbrush his legacy. It is used widely to suggest that King wished for a color-blind society — that he would have opposed affirmative action, for example — and that all he ever stood for was peace, harmony and coalition-building.

In 2017, when I interviewed entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte, he wondered aloud whether the holiday had done more harm than good to King’s legacy, making us forget the man’s radicalism, even erasing talk of racism.

King never wanted White Americans to get comfortable with discrimination. He never remotely suggested that his dream of a society free of racial discrimination should make us blind to the persistence of racism and inequality.

In an essay published after his assassination, King criticized White America for its “ingrained and tenacious racism.” Even in his “Dream” speech, before he mentioned “content of their character,” he talked about racial segregation, the lasting social and economic impact of slavery, and the Black victims of police brutality. To come away from that speech thinking King called for a color-blind society requires willful distortion, which is exactly what we have seen.

🎤

Follow Opinions on the news

If the King holiday has become a “contested site of memory,” as historian John Kirk put it, we can fight back by celebrating more honestly. We can begin by remembering that, until his death in 1968, King had never gained the approval of most White Americans. In 1966, even after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, a Gallup survey showedthat 63 percent of Americans viewed him negatively. Just prior to his assassination, 3 out of every 4 White Americans disapproved of him. After the assassination, a shocking 31 percent of Americans, according to one survey, believed that King “brought it on himself.”

At the time, some members of the Black community turned on King, criticizing him for being too accommodating to White people. He further alienated key allies (most notably President Lyndon B. Johnson) by his high-profile opposition to the Vietnam War.

-Jonathan Eig in the WaPost

On Liberalism that Endures

 

Defeat is a great teacher. It taught me that liberalism endures because it’s a way of being and a set of values that tell us who we should try to be. This is what gives liberalism its hidden resilience, its capacity to rebuild after political reversals. If we want to rebuild, we’ll need to recover what the word used to mean. It once was a synonym for generosity. In the old days, a liberal gentleman was a generous man. We’ll want to discard these male, elitist associations by marrying generosity to the egalitarian individualism at the core of the liberal creed. The creed tells us we’re no better than anybody else but also no worse. What liberals value should be within everyone’s reach. A liberal person wants to be generous, open, alive to new possibility, willing to learn from anyone. We want to share whatever wealth and fortune we have, to welcome strangers to our table, to stand up for people when they’re in trouble. We know we have to change our minds when someone’s idea is better than ours. We have faith that history rewards those willing to fight for what they believe. Now, none of us is ever as generous as we’d like to be, and no liberal has a monopoly on generosity, but the largeness of spirit it calls us to does define our horizon of hope. Such values are embattled today, and they need defending because our societies so desperately need largeness of spirit, together with a revived liberal ideal of solidarity. We need to be filling out this vision and bringing our citizens to believe in it. Defeat has taught me we can’t afford to jettison our values when the tides of politics turn against us. Liberalism’s incorrigible vitality comes from the fact that it tells us who we most deeply want to be, provided that we are willing to fight for it and never surrender to the passing fashions of despair.

-Canadian Michael Ignatief in the WaPost

 Next Monday, Donald Trump will become president of the United States for a second time. He has promised and threatened to be a dictator on "day one."

None of this was fated or preordained. An alternate version of this reality and timeline could easily exist if two million Americans made a different choice on Election Day. This is especially true if Kamala Harris received the same number of votes as President Joe Biden had in 2020 (Biden received approximately 81 million votes in that election. Harris received only 74 million votes in the 2024 election).

Trump will return to power on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day. This is a horrible coincidence of dates; Trump and King are two men whose lives and missions are antithetical. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King emphasized how we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Trump rejects such principles and values of social democracy and human dignity and rights. Trump’s life philosophy is based on selfishness, self-interest and corrupt power

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

 I could start walking like an Egyptian and bellowing like a cow, but I doubt either one would do any good.

Brian Krassenstein © K

@krassenstein

Adolf Hitler, a CONVICTED FELON, rose to power as Chancellor of

Germany in 1933. He cleverly positioned himself as the voice of the

"common man," railing against the elites and the establishment.

To solidify his base, Hitler masterfully scapegoated minorities for the

nation's problems, exploiting societal divisions with an "us vs. them"

narrative. It's almost as if dividing people and stoking anger can serve a

political agenda--who would've guessed?

Once in power, he wasted no time dismantling democratic institutions.

Loyalty wasn't just encouraged; it was demanded. Opponents? Silenced.

Media that dared to question him? Vilified as "the enemy," naturally.

But hey, history is just history, right? It's not like anyone would fall for

something like that again. 

 Next Monday, Donald Trump will become president of the United States for a second time. He has promised and threatened to be a dictator on "day one."

None of this was fated or preordained. An alternate version of this reality and timeline could easily exist if two million Americans made a different choice on Election Day. This is especially true if Kamala Harris received the same number of votes as President Joe Biden had in 2020 (Biden received approximately 81 million votes in that election. Harris received only 74 million votes in the 2024 election).

Trump will return to power on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day. This is a horrible coincidence of dates; Trump and King are two men whose lives and missions are antithetical. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King emphasized how we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Trump rejects such principles and values of social democracy and human dignity and rights. Trump’s life philosophy is based on selfishness, self-interest and corrupt power.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

Joan Didion: South and West (From a Notebook)

 Joan Didion writes from an excerpt from her famous notebook of a trip across the South in June of 1970.  Called South and West.  A confirmed Californian in the Heart of the South during the George Wallace Days when the South was still distinctive.  A trip she took with her husband John Gregory Dunne through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.  A capsule of Southern observations in 1970.  Observations, brief, cursory, but not W.J. Cash type of analysis.  A collection of very short essays.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks---of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles.  South and North gives us two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s, read together they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.  (Back cover)

Joan Didion is at the pool at the Howard Johnson in Meridian at the intersection of I-20 and I-59.    In this collection of short writings she seems to visited at  every pool at every motel where she stayed.

P. IX

The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan. 

Tennessee Williams thought he was made for New Orleans.

William Faulkner moved there when he was fired as the postmaster in Oxford.

Nobody remembers anything anymore especially our country's history even in the South which is supposed to always be looking backwards. William Faulkner famously said the past isn't over. It isn't even past. Not anymore. It is past now. (Added here)

1-16-25

P. XVIII

An unquestioned premise among those who live in cities with international airports is that Enlightenment values will come to all of America just as Thomas Jefferson thought that Unitarian values were the future, but they were wrong. But the South has become the future now instead.

WINFIELD 

P. 73-74

Maybe the rural South is the last place in America where one is still aware of trains and what they can mean, their awesome possibilities.

I put my clothes in the laundromat and walk on down the dirt at the side of the road to the beauty shop.  A girl with long straight blonde hair gave me a manicure.  Her name was Debby.

"I got one more year at Winfield High," Debby said, "then I'm getting out."

I asked where she would get out to.

"Birmingham," she said.

I asked what she would do in Birmingham.

"Well, if I keep on working while I'm in school, I'll have enough hours for my cosmetologist's license.  You need three thousand, I got twelve hundred already.  Then I'll go to modeling school.  Debby reflected for a moment.  "I hope I will."

GUIN

P. 77-80

At a motel in Gu-Win.  Can you believe that the Pulitzer Prize writer Joan Didion was at a motel in Gu-Win, Alabama, in June of 1970?  I did not know there was a motel in Gu-Win unless it's the one I would say is in Guin itself on the highway.

Her description doesn't sound like Guin.  She speaks of a drive-in in Hamilton.  No, that's Gu-Win.  Her details take liberties.

P. 101

In Greenville, a different kind of town.

P. 105

We stopped at Walker Percy's in Covington, Louisiana.  We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist,  Walker never paid any min but just kept talking an walking up to the house to get fresh drinks.  It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water.  "The South," he said, "owes a debt to the North. . . tore the Union apart once. . . and now only the South can save the North."  

So in the summer of 1970 fledgling West Coast writer Joan Didion felt like she had to visit the South.  She felt this urge which I don't really understand, but maybe she was on to something.  To understand this country maybe you have to come to terms with the South especially now in what will unfortunately be knowns as  the Age of Trump.  (Added)