(ThyBlackMan.com) Charlie Kirk, speaking to students and teachers at American Fest, a political convention organized by Turning Point, insisted, “MLK [Martin Luther King] was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”
Kirk has never risked that last full measure of devotion for any principle higher than himself. He epitomizes cynical opportunism on steroids.
Has he ever read Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” or “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin?
The 1960s ushered in three landmark federal civil rights statutes, not simply one as he insinuates: the 1964 Civil Rights Act; 1965 Voting Rights Act, which ended a century of unconstitutional Black disenfranchisement by white racists; and 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibited real estate advertisements saying “No Blacks need apply.”
Charlie Kirk apparently yearns for the day to return to segregated education, racist grandfather clauses for voting, and Satchel Paige pitching exclusively in Negro League Baseball.
Does Kirk know anything about marquee figures in Black history: Crispus Attucks, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. Dubois, William Monroe Trotter, Paul Robeson, Marion Anderson, James Baldwin, Ralph Bunche, Charles Hamilton Houston, Rosa Parks, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, William Coleman, and Edward Brooke, among others?
Has Kirk denounced D.W. Griffith’s racist film “Birth of a Nation,” which premiered at President Woodrow Wilson’s White House?
Has Kirk assailed the United States for conscripting Black soldiers in World War I and World War II to fight in segregated units?
Has Kirk criticized the separate-but-equal racism of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) or the declaration by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Tawney in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) that Blacks had no rights that whites are bound to respect?
What has Charlie Kirk said about the thousands of lynchings of Black people with impunity during a century of Jim Crow? What has he said about the Scottsboro Boys? What has he said about Alabama Governor George Curley Wallace’s, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”?
Kirk’s planned assault on Dr. King is as farcical as would be a student’s critique of Einstein and as ludicrous as would be Pontius Pilate’s declaiming against Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.
Kirk is asleep at the wheel. The United States Supreme Court threw a dagger in the heart of the “diversity-equity-inclusion” mania in schools and workplaces in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (June 29, 2023). There, the court cast a constitutional cloud over race as a legitimate proxy for educational or other diversity in invalidating racial preferences in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. It vindicated Dr. King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” address at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.
Despite that landmark, widely publicized precedent, Kirk, five months later, bugled to the American Fest crowd, “The courts have been really weak on this. Federal courts must yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it’s the actual American Constitution.” It may be reasonably conjectured that Kirk has never read and digested the Students for Fair Admissions precedent. Intellectual sloth. The decision is online and does not require an archeological expedition to be found.
Charlie Kirk stumbles badly in seeking to find a smoking gun. He points to a student’s complaint that Title IX of the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1972 exposed him to a gender discrimination investigation for posting an Instagram story mocking transgender people. Sorry, Charlie! Title IX is not part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act you are hoping to repeal.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a saint. But he gave that last full measure of devotion to lift Blacks from de facto or de jure servitude to white masters. His devotion to nonviolence was worthy of Mahatma Gandhi. He was fearless in the face of Bull Connor’s fire hoses and Jim Clark’s cattle prods. His Nobel Peace Prize speaks for itself.
Kirk should continue his education. He has no standing to give Dr. King a report card until he writes something as eloquent, electrifying, and convincing as Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Written by Armstrong Williams
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