Basic Books, 2012.
7 “Increasing Minority Enrollment at the University of California Post Proposition 209: UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships,” Ramona Barrio-Sotillo, 2007, p. 57, http://udini.proquest.com/view/increasing-minority-enrollment-at-goid:304826328/.
8 Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment, Duke University Press, 1994.
Decline and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement
On a recent trip to the South, I found myself in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King, Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet just over thirty years ago. Memphis, I discovered, is home to a “National Civil Rights Museum,” created by a local trust of African-Americans active in civil rights causes. Tucked out of the way on a city side-street, the museum is housed in the building that was once the Lorraine Motel, the very site where Dr. King was murdered.
Except for two white 1960s Cadillac convertibles, the parking lot outside the motel is empty, part of the museum’s plan to preserve the memories of that somber day in April three decades ago. The cars belonged to King and his entourage, and have been left as they were the morning he was killed. Above them, a wreath hangs from a balcony railing to mark the spot where he fell. Beyond is the room where he had slept the night before. It, too, is preserved exactly as it was, the covers pulled back, the bed unmade, the breakfast tray laid out, as though someone would be coming to pick it up.
Inside the building, the first floor of the motel has vanished completely. It has been hollowed out for the museum exhibits, and the cavernous room has become a silent stage for the dramas of the movement King once led. These narratives are recounted in documents and photographs, some the length of wall frescoes, bearing images as inspirational today as then. In the center of the hall, the burned shell of a school bus recalls the freedom rides and the perils their passengers once endured. Scattered about are small television screens whose tapes recapture the moments and acts that once moved a nation. On one screen, a crowd of well-dressed young men and women perpetually braves police dogs and water-hoses, vainly attempting to turn them back. It is a powerful tribute to a movement and leader that were able to win battles against overwhelming odds by exerting moral force over an entire nation.
As a visitor reaches the end of the hall, however, a corner turns to a jarring, discordant sight. Two familiar faces stare out from a wall-size monument that seems strangely out of place. The faces are Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, leaders of the Nation of Islam. Aside from one of King himself, there are no other portraits of similar dimension in the museum. It is clear that its creators intended to establish these men along with King as spiritual avatars of the civil rights cause.
For one old enough to have supported King, such a view seems incomprehensible. At the time of these struggles, Malcolm X was King’s great antagonist in the black community, leading its resistance to the civil rights hope. The Black Muslim publicly scorned King’s March on Washington as “ridiculous” and predicted the failure of the civil rights movement King led because the white man would never willingly give black Americans such rights. He rejected King’s call to non-violence and his goal of an integrated society, and in so doing earned the disapproval of the American majority that King had wooed and was about to win. Malcolm even denied King’s racial authenticity, redefining the term “Negro”—which King and his movement had used to describe themselves—to mean “Uncle Tom.”
King was unyielding in the face of these attacks. To clarify his opposition to Malcolm X’s racism, King refused to appear on any platform with him, effectively banning Malcolm from the community of respect. The other heads of the principal civil rights organizations, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the Urban League’s Whitney Young, joined King in enforcing this ban. It was only in the last year of Malcolm’s life, when the civil rights cause was all but won, and when Malcolm had left the Nation of Islam and rejected its racism, that King finally relented and agreed to appear in the now-famous photograph of the two that became iconic after their deaths.
This very reconciliation—more a concession on Malcolm’s part than King’s—might argue the appropriateness of Malcolm’s place in a civil rights museum. Malcolm certainly earned an important place in any historical tribute to the struggle of the descendants of Africans to secure dignity, equality, and respect in a society that had brought them to its shores as slaves. His understanding of the psychology of oppression, his courage in asserting the self-confidence and pride of black Americans and his final conversion might make him worthy of inclusion in the temple of a man who was never a racist and whose movement he scorned.
But what about Elijah Muhammad? What is a racist and the founder of a hate cult doing in a monument to the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King? In contrast to Malcolm’s portrait, Elijah Muhammad’s is a truly perverse intrusion. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad mirror the white supremacist doctrines of the Southern racists against whom King and the civil rights movement did battle. According to Elijah’s teachings, white people were invented 6,000 years ago by a mad scientist named Yacub, in a failed experiment to dilute the blood of human beings who at the time were all black. The result was a morally tainted strain of humanity—“white devils” who went on to devastate the world and oppress all other human beings, and whom God would one day destroy in a liberating Armageddon. Why is the image of this bizarre racist blown up several times life-size to form the iconography of a National Civil Rights Museum? It is as though someone had placed a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Lincoln Memorial.
After leaving the museum, it occurred to me that this image reflected a truth about the afterlife of the movement King created, whose new leaders had squandered his moral legacy after his death. This decline is reflected in many episodes of the last quarter-century: the embrace of racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton; the indefensible causes of Tawana Brawley, O.J. Simpson, the Los Angeles race rioters and numerous others; the Million Man March on Washington, organized by the racist leader of the Nation of Islam and cynically designed to appropriate the moral mantle of King’s historic event.
The impact of such episodes is compounded by the silence of black civil rights leaders over racial outrages committed by African-Americans against non-black groups—the anti-Korean incitements of black activists in New York, the mob attacks by black gangs on Asian and white storeowners during the Los Angeles riot, the lynching of a Hasidic Jew by a black mob in Crown Heights, and a black jury’s acquittal of his murderer. The failures of civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and Julian Bond to condemn black racists, or black outrages committed against other ethnic communities, have been striking in contrast to the demands such leaders make on the consciences of whites—or to the moral example set by King when he dissociated his movement from the racist preaching of Malcolm X.
The moral abdication of black civil rights leaders is integrally related to their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatreds are a by-product of their anti-Americanism. As a result of this alliance, ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry, not only in the African-American community but among white “liberals” in elite educational institutions as well.11 Harvard’s prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, for example, provided an academic platform for lecturer Noel Ignatiev to launch “whiteness studies,” an academic
