Martin Luther King: Is Obama his heir?

Time, it appears, does not heal all wounds, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. The 40th anniversary last week of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was a painful reminder not only of that terrible day in Memphis but also of the “second-rate shakedown artists” who have been trying to pass themselves off as King’s successors ever since. Cartoonish frauds like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have desecrated the “national civil-rights pulpit” that King established, and to this roster of “cranks and parasites” must now be added the name of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor and “spiritual mentor” to Barack Obama. King would have been appalled by Wright’s “wacky and bitterly divisive racial rhetoric,” said Juan Williams in The Wall Street Journal. The fact that today’s foremost black leader was one of Wright’s loyal parishioners shows that we still have a “crisis in racial leadership.”

The real Martin Luther King wasn’t as “meek and politically moderate” as he’s remembered, said Cynthia Tucker in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “America is founded on genocide,” he once thundered. During the Vietnam War, he preached that “we are criminals in that war,” and denounced “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.” Like Wright, King spoke more candidly—and angrily—to all-black audiences, said Michael Eric Dyson in the Los Angeles Times. He told them that “the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” This fiery rhetoric may seem out of character for the genteel and unthreatening MLK now held up as a model by white conservatives, in their cynical attempts to marginalize the Rev. Wright and damage Obama. But by trying to portray King as a lovable saint and Wright as a frightening radical, they only “reveal a deep unfamiliarity” with the true, rebellious legacy of the black pulpit.

There were, in fact, two Martin Luther Kings, said David Brooks in The New York Times. The earlier King “was scholarly, formal, assertive, and meticulously self-controlled in public,” and he poured his passion into the writing of great speeches that inspire us yet today. But by 1968, he’d become bitter and angry, sickened by the violent opposition of Southern racists and the mocking contempt he faced from the black power movement, which regarded his appeals to white conscience to be naïve. Obama, clearly, takes his inspiration from the early King—not from “the angry and reckless” King of later years, or from the Rev. Wright. Obama’s uplifting presidential campaign, in fact, is living proof that King’s “inspiration is outlasting his critics.”

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