In one of the most famous and admired orations of all time, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of “the fierce urgency of the now” that compelled him to call for social justice.
When I reread his entire “I have a dream” speech, delivered 60 years ago this month at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, it still shimmers with beauty and brilliance.
Indeed, the “urgency” King invoked in his advocacy of righting America’s past racial wrongs led to some quick results.
The dream he set forth, that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” was swiftly followed by the great legislative achievements of the Civil Registry . rights movement.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed the discriminatory practices adopted by many Southern states after the Civil War.
But it wasn’t just desegregation and voting rights that King demanded on August 28, 1963.
STEVE HILTON: In one of the most famous and admired speeches of all time, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of “the fierce urgency of now” that compelled him to call for social justice
While describing the “great beacon of hope” that the abolition of slavery represented 100 years earlier, he also pointed out that black people in America were not only “still not free,” but “100 years later, the Negro is alive a lonely island of poverty in the middle of a vast ocean of material prosperity’. He was absolutely right.
Unfortunately, despite the civil rights laws prompted by his speech, along with all the campaigns launched in his wake and the trillions of dollars that have since been spent pursuing racial justice, I fear none of it fundamentally changes the landscape he so vividly described. has changed. .
That island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity is still with us.
Of course, black people in America are no longer systematically refused entry at lunch counters. They participate in elections on an equal footing with everyone else.
But over the past six decades, when it comes to wealth, opportunity, social and economic progress, King’s “fierce urgency” has not only failed to deliver the kind of transformational improvement achieved in civil rights, in many ways it has it got worse.
A review of the historical data on racial inequality, recently summarized by two leading American social scientists, concluded shockingly: “In terms of material well-being, black Americans moved toward equality with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era. In fact, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial equality have slowed, stopped, and even reversed.”
In America today, black people are embarrassingly over-represented in the ranks of the poor, the sick, and the prisoners. Everything from life expectancy to homeownership, education level to income, has gone downhill since “I have a dream” electrified the world.
So what went wrong?
Some black conservative scholars argue that the main culprit is too much government intervention—particularly the welfare state and failing schools. According to this analysis, the expansion of Social Security systems initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in his War on Poverty in the 1960s encouraged behaviors that harmed Black Americans’ chances of climbing the ladder of opportunity.
They point to the huge increase in family breakups and absent fathers, from about 25 percent in the 1960s to more than 75 percent today. More than three quarters of black children are born without a stable family. Study after study shows that strong family structures are one of the most important building blocks of a successful life.
Years ago, when such things could still be said by leftist politicians, even Barack Obama admitted, “We all know the statistics. That children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”
Education was supposed to save impoverished children from these grim consequences. Instead, the American school system, dominated by militant leftist teachers’ unions, has multiplied the disaster. In my home state of California, test scores have shown that the average black student is four years behind white students in vital subjects like math.
You might think that with the damning evidence accumulated over so many years about the failure of leftist policies to bring black Americans to King’s “promised land,” campaigners for racial justice—or “equity” as we’re now told. it – would change course.
Perhaps they could use their apparent cultural power to help black faith leaders in their quest to change attitudes about family, marriage, and parenting? Perhaps you’ll join the black community leaders pushing for educational choice that will allow parents and students to escape the disastrous dysfunction of many inner-city government-run schools?
No chance.
People celebrate at the ‘#BLM Turns 10 People’s Justice Festival’ on July 15 in Los Angeles
The recent successors to King’s civil rights movement, beginning with the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2014, have drifted further and further away from positive, practical problem-solving toward the fringe obsessions of a cabal of Marxist academics under the banner of Critical Race Theory.
According to this extremist dogma, society is structurally racist and any difference in economic or social outcome is, by definition, the result of racism.
Instead of King’s unifying mission to “transform our nation’s ringing discords into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood,” today’s campaigners seek to divide.
After the despicable case of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, instead of turning justified public outcry into constructive reform, they waged a vicious attack on the police force and demanded the dismantling and dismantling of the police. departments.
The resulting urban crime explosion has made the lives of black communities even worse, leading to this stunning rebuke from the Oakland chapter of the leading advocacy group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: “Oakland residents are sick and tired of our unbearable public security crisis that is overwhelmingly impacting minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home burglaries, car burglaries, and highway shootings have become a pervasive part of life. Failed leadership, including the movement to discourage the police and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric, has created a heyday for criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime, crime will continue to rise.’
Precisely. As Margaret Thatcher once said, the facts of life are conservative.
But the most extraordinary example of the racial justice movement’s departure from King’s approach is the push for “reparations.”
Rather than addressing the root causes of the racial wealth gap by encouraging black home ownership and entrepreneurship, strengthening families, or reforming education, the recommendations of the repair work groups barely amount to credible madness. For example, guaranteeing annual payments of £73,000 to black residents for 250 years, the cancellation of all debts and the legalization of public urination.
The UK government’s compensation scheme for the Windrush generation seems modest and reasonable by comparison.
Here’s a sobering question, though: Do we see any sign that 60 years from now, Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of true equality and racial harmony will be realized? I’m afraid not, unless we take control of the racial justice agenda away from the far-left ideologues who drove it into the ground.