Gratitude for this efficient polemic re the controversies & hypocrisies that swarmed through the political aftermath following the murder of MLKJr. I especially appreciate your note about Congressmember John Conyers Jr. He was my congressional Rep during the 10 years when I was living & working in Detroit. Your sharp highlights of that time were moving & necessary.
Helms was the only major national opponent of the holiday who was honestly quoting what had been a completely ordinary majority viewpoint among American whites as late as 1967: that King was a troublemaker with extreme ideas who was primarily responsible for the racial turmoil of the 1960s. In fact, in 1966, Gallup had 63% of Americans polled expressing a negative view of King, higher than in any previous year. Only by the early 1980s (not coincidentally when the GOP decided to give up and accept the holiday) was King showing up as one of the most admired Americans of the 20th Century in most polls, with only about 20% of those polled showing reservations. But as many have noted, the King that the holiday and various civic celebrations since celebrated was a conservative reinvention who thought that the only goal was to get to the point where the "content of our character" was what led to inequality rather than the color of our skins.
The odd thing is that there was probably a genuinely "conservative" version of King that could have been mobilized by some imaginable political party--that was focused on social conservatism, "family values", and religion. But the GOP couldn't do it past 1980, despite some modest gestural flailing in that direction, because white evangelism was already so palpably *white*, e.g., as much organized around race and racial power as it was around the content of their religiosity. The Southern Strategy was and remains a winning move on the chessboard for the GOP, but the cost then and now is exclusively playing for racial resentment, even if the semantic key to those resentments continues to relocate and rebrand.
Gratitude for this efficient polemic re the controversies & hypocrisies that swarmed through the political aftermath following the murder of MLKJr. I especially appreciate your note about Congressmember John Conyers Jr. He was my congressional Rep during the 10 years when I was living & working in Detroit. Your sharp highlights of that time were moving & necessary.
Helms was the only major national opponent of the holiday who was honestly quoting what had been a completely ordinary majority viewpoint among American whites as late as 1967: that King was a troublemaker with extreme ideas who was primarily responsible for the racial turmoil of the 1960s. In fact, in 1966, Gallup had 63% of Americans polled expressing a negative view of King, higher than in any previous year. Only by the early 1980s (not coincidentally when the GOP decided to give up and accept the holiday) was King showing up as one of the most admired Americans of the 20th Century in most polls, with only about 20% of those polled showing reservations. But as many have noted, the King that the holiday and various civic celebrations since celebrated was a conservative reinvention who thought that the only goal was to get to the point where the "content of our character" was what led to inequality rather than the color of our skins.
The odd thing is that there was probably a genuinely "conservative" version of King that could have been mobilized by some imaginable political party--that was focused on social conservatism, "family values", and religion. But the GOP couldn't do it past 1980, despite some modest gestural flailing in that direction, because white evangelism was already so palpably *white*, e.g., as much organized around race and racial power as it was around the content of their religiosity. The Southern Strategy was and remains a winning move on the chessboard for the GOP, but the cost then and now is exclusively playing for racial resentment, even if the semantic key to those resentments continues to relocate and rebrand.