Yesterday, Vice President Mike Pence, who looks like a man trying to piss in front of other men but is so flustered by seeing strange dicks that he can't even squeeze out a drop, dared to compare Donald Trump to Martin Luther King, Jr. King, Pence said, "inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do."
The fact that King's zombie corpse didn't rise up and skullfuck Pence immediately is a tribute to the civil rights leader's dedication to non-violence, even from beyond the grave.
Every MLK Day we have to endure conservatives trying to shove a round King peg into their square hole. Every year, it's the same bullshit that completely ignores that King would have been an enemy to both Democrats and Republicans because, see, by the end of his life, he had shifted his attention to rights for the poor and working class of all colors, and he alienated a whole lot of his political allies by outright opposing the Vietnam War and, of course, Lyndon Johnson's complicity in waging it. King would fuck everybody's shit up when it comes to the eternal war we are fighting now.
His dedication to the poverty-stricken in this country came about, in part, because of his relationship with Highlander Folk School in east Tennessee and its founder, Myles Horton. Highlander was started as a school for rural workers and worked with civil rights groups starting in the 1950s, training black and white protesters to become leaders in the movement. It was one of the first integrated schools in the region.
King spoke at the 25th anniversary of the school in 1957 at Horton's invitation. His topic was "A Look to the Future," and he began by looking back at the nation's past. King placed the country in 1957 in what he saw as a third period in the history of race relations, after the age of slavery and the age of Jim Crow. He dated this third period as having begun just a three years earlier, with the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated schools and undid the separate-but-equal doctrine.
In the road to progress, King saw those groups that wanted to block the path: "The past three years have witnessed the birth in the South of the U.S. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Almost dead for more than two decades, the Klan has staged a new revival. This organization is determined to preserve segregation at any cost; its methods are crude and criminal. Unlike the Klan of twenty years ago, this new Klan does not list among its members the so-called respectable people. It draws its members from the undereducated and underprivileged groups who see in the Negro's rising status a political and economic threat. And although the Klan will never regain the power that it once possessed, we must not take it lightly. Beneath the surface of all of its actions is the ugly theme of unleashed, unchallenged racial and religious bigotry. There is always the implied threat of violence."
White Citizens Councils were also asserting racist power to defy the Supreme Court and keep segregation. King said of them, "Since they operate on a higher political and economic level than the Klan, a halo of respectability hovers over them." They used "legal maneuvers" to nullify the Court, and also "their methods range from threats and intimidation to economic reprisals against Negro men and women. These methods also extend to white persons who will dare to take a stand for justice. They demand absolute conformity from whites and abject submission from Negroes."
While the KKK and White Citizens Councils were oppressing those who fought for freedom, King also talked about the great mass of people who were working to foster desegregation. "While the reactionary guardians of the status quo are busy crying 'Never,'" King asserted, "the system of segregation is crumbling all around them."
As for the future, King was cautiously optimistic. In a line that could describe the MAGA hordes, King said, "Many of the southerners who oppose integration believe with utter devoutness that what they do is best for themselves, their families, and their nation. This quality of sincerity makes the job of desegregation infinitely more difficult." That last sentence has stuck with me ever since I read it a few years ago.
However, in a complete rebuke of those sincere racists, King declared, "But in spite of all of this, the opponents of desegregation are fighting a losing battle. The Old South is gone, never to return again. Many of the problems that we are confronting in the South today grow out of the futile attempt of the white South to perpetuate a system of human values that came into being under a feudalistic plantation system which cannot survive in a day of democratic equalitarianism. Yes, the Old South is a lost cause."
Martin Luther King would fuck Trump's shit up because he knew that you can never make America great again. The very implication of that phrase is to justify and validate all the hatred and bigotry and violence that was part of that time they wish to return to. It's nonsense, anyway, because you can only progress. You might try to slow it down. You might even block it for a little while. But progress will happen, whether you like it or not.
The future was dependent on labor unions, the growing economic power of African Americans, as well as their determination to end segregations, and the federal courts, King said. Yeah, another reason that conservatives need to shut the fuck up about King is that he wanted the courts to make laws. "Federal court decrees have altered transportation patterns, educational mores, use of golf courses, and a myriad of other matters," he explained. "These major social changes have a cumulative force conditioning other segments of life."
By the way, in the audience at Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education) was Rosa Parks. King had come from Montgomery, Alabama, where he was leading the bus boycott that Parks had helped instigate. They just wanted to make America America. Greatness to be determined.
