The former executive director for the greater Los Angeles chapter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference believes Dr. King would be greatly distressed at the ongoing racial division in the United States, and he says those presenting themselves as today’s black leaders cannot hold a candle to King and are merely “huffing the fumes of a bygone era.”
“I think he’d be greatly disappointed in what he saw taking place over the last several months, possibly going back as far as the Trayvon Martin shooting,” said Joe Hicks, a former liberal who now aligns with the conservative Project 21 black leadership network. He is also vice president of Community Advocates Inc., a think-tank based in Los Angeles.
The months leading up to Monday’s observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day witnessed some of the most intense racial division in a generation as a result of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. Grand juries in both places decided not to indict the officers connected to those cases. Protests, some of them destructive, broke out in Ferguson. New York City was rocked in December by the murders of two NYPD officers by a man who claimed the killings were retaliation for the deaths of black men in confrontation with white officers.
Hicks said Dr. King would not have been impressed with the protests in either place.
“I’ve had people ask me, ‘Is this the rebirth of the new civil rights movement?’ I hope not because when you have people marching through the streets of New York chanting things like, ‘What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now,’ Dr. King would have been appalled by that,” Hicks said.
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Joe Hicks:
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He places some of the blame for escalating tensions at the feet of today’s black leaders. Hicks said King associates like Jesse Jackson, Rev. Joseph Lowery and Rep. John Lewis are taking on less public roles. That leaves the stage to figures like Rev. Al Sharpton. While he cannot be certain what King would say about today’s black leaders, Hicks is confident the Nobel Peace Prize winner would not be impressed.
“Knowing how he viewed things and the honor with which he approached the things he was doing, I think he’d be a bit appalled by some the antics of somebody like Al Sharpton for instance, as well as some other folks that now claim the mantle,” he said. “These people like Sharpton and others today are standing in the shadows of giants like King and huffing the fumes of a bygone era. I think he’d be a bit saddened by what he sees today.”
According to Hicks, one major difference between King’s goals and those pursued by Sharpton and others is that King championed a concrete, meaningful agenda.
“Dr. King was about some very real kinds of things:Â getting the ability of black Americans to vote, allowing people to access public accommodations, getting rid of discrimination in employment and on and on, a list of actual, real things that were getting in the way of black Americans participating fully in this society,” he explained.
What beliefs and values of King would serve the nation well in the midst of its current division? Hicks said King’s most famous words would be a good starting point in which the civil rights leader implored Americans to judge one another by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He said today’s politics has it exactly backward.
“Something else I think he’d be disappointed in is that we have this sort of racial identity politics that we see being played out in many of these current protests,” Hicks said. “That wasn’t what Dr. King was all about. He wanted us to move past racialism and look at each other based on who we were as individuals, not so much judging people by what their skin color might indicate to others.”
In the 47 years since King’s assassination, Democrats and Republicans have both liberally quoted King to bolster their position on various political issues. Democrats claim they are carrying on the King legacy and reference the liberal path charted by other civil rights figures. Republicans point out that King was a Republican and frequently cite his comments on abortion, homosexuality and the inherent worth of the individual as evidence to the contrary. Hicks said King was probably drifting left in his later days, including his opposition to the Vietnam War, but he believes all sides need to stop co-opting King for today’s political battles.
“People like Jackson, and to some extent John Lewis, are extremely liberal in their politics,” he said. “Would King have followed that road? I don’t know. It’s possible he might have, but again, that’s speculation. A lot has changed and shifted in the culture, particularly black culture and black activism. It’s taken some interesting kinds of roads. I’m not sure King would have been on board for all of that, but we don’t know where he ultimately would have gone politically or ideologically.”
Each year, the federal holiday in King’s honor gives Americans the chance to reflect upon King’s ideals and his impact on the United States. But Hicks said American culture makes it tough to drive home the values of Dr. King year-round, since his legacy is so frequently commercialized.
“Everybody tries to get a piece of this man, and King is not unique in that. American culture has a way of rendering people as innocuous in some kinds of ways,” he said. “How do you prevent that from happening? It’s hard to do because that’s what pop culture does.
“We see the movie ‘Selma’ that just came out that distorts history. I think King would have been a little unhappy with how events were treated by a movie put out by Hollywood, attempting to characterize him and the movement.”
