So Steve, are you also concerned that Americans (of certain political persuasions) exalt Martin Luther King, Jr., and don’t ever address his philandering or plagiarism?

“Philandering” is such an understatement that it must be taken as a euphemism. King took part in wild orgies, especially when white women were available. Although, in fairness, it should be pointed out that apparently a black bruthah would serve in a pinch, according to Abernathy — King was apparently neither a racist nor a sexist, at least in this matter that interested him more than anything else. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to see Hart start off by at least mentioning these suppressed aspects about Westminster Seminary’s hero Martin Luther King, Jr.

Alas, it wasn’t to last. He continued:

The right [meaning, the Right -- ed.] of course looks at those moral failings to discredit King. But what exactly do those failings have to do with what he was trying to do to gain equality for blacks?

This is not the right question, however. The question is, what exactly do those failings have to do with honoring him as an American hero? And the answer is, it has everything to do with that. Moreover, heroes are generally identified not by what they “try to do,” but what they actually do. George Washington was honored by our forefathers not for “trying” to do something, but actually doing it, against all odds — namely, defeating an empire with a rag-tag group of freezing patriots. In contrast, what did King “do”? He was a hollow man that could not even write his own sermons and speeches. He was chauffered up to the front of the parades at just the right camera moment. His movement did not overcome anything. On the contrary, his small band of opponents were beaten down with the combined forces of LBJ, the nationalized militia, the FBI, federal marshals, corrupt judges, and an adoring and dishonest media. All King had to do was show up. What a difference from Washington.

But, Washington was also perceived to be morally blameless. For all intents and purposes, he was beloved by everyone, and that for the double qualification of heroic deeds coupled with exemplary character.

But let’s consider Mr. Hart’s thesis on its own level — what did King’s “failings” have to do with “what he was trying to do”?

According to lore, Mafia bosses “did a lot” to “gain equality for the Italian people.” But most people do not say that the criminal means can be divorced from the end (even if the ambiguity of that end is set aside for the sake of discussion).

I suppose it goes without saying that Mr. Hart would not praise the original KKK for attempting to regain equality for Southerners vis-a-vis the Yankee occupiers.

Why then are King’s methods and character set aside by defenders like Mr. Hart, when they would never do so for a Mafia godfather or KKK leader? It must be either that some heroes are guilty of a skin, and thus must not be honored, or character and methods is not something Mr. Hart actually believes can be set aside when deciding whether to honor a man. As if sensing the corner he has painted himself into, Hart continues:

Was he sleeping with female congresswomen in order to secure favorable legislation? That might discredit some of his stand.

Oh please. This is really quite a revelation of how the slavish political conformity of our Reformed “leaders” has addled their thinking. As if a Congresswoman in 1965 would be thinking, “I really can’t support this civil rights legislation … unless Dr. King would be willing to sleep with me. Then I would.”

A quick check of Wiki indicates that in 1965, of the nine Congresswomen in office, all were White and over 50, except for one Oriental woman from Hawaii. Does Mr. Hart really think that even one of these women would think the way he imputes in the one example that pops naturally into his head?

Does he think any woman holding power, of any race and any age would think that way?

This is one sick dude.

In point of fact, that is one perversion that Martin Pervert King did not choose in plying his trade. Why does Mr. Hart think this way?

Even so, how would such a scenario “discredit some of King’s stand”? Does “the stand” mean the cause — equality for black people — in which case, how could such a sacred cause be discredited by the behavior of any person? Or does it mean, “this man’s standing” — i.e. it discredits this man, personally, this man that is taking the stand? In that case, what does the “some of” qualification of his stand mean? To the extent that the stander not the stand is in view, wouldn’t it completely disqualify?

But for the most part, his failings were personal and private and represented the afflictions that cling to most human beings not born of a virgin.

First, all failings by persons are personal. How does that qualify anything?

Second, “Doctor” King’s failings were not private. The plagiarism in particular was witnessed every time he made a speech, and the plagiarized Ph. D. dilutes the credibility of every other Ph.D. holder, especially those coming from Boston U.

Third, this statement is a preposterous denial of God’s gifts and graces manifested in history. It plasters over human history into a flat sameness. Only, he doesn’t even use plaster, he uses dung.

According to Tacitus, the Germans in their pre-Christian state were more chaste than the African-American community is after three centuries of exposure to the Bible.

Actually, putting it that way is not quite fair… to the Germans. It would be less misleading to say it this way: the pre-Christian Germans were a chaste people; the Christian Negroes are not a chaste people.

But according to Hart, King’s flagitious character represents “the afflictions that cling to most human beings not born of a virgin.”

Michael Dyson says the womanizing is endemic among pastors in the black church. Is Mr. Hart willing to say, “also in my denomination, the OPC?”

Is Mr. Hart willing to say, “most Ph. D. holders not born of a virgin have plagiarized their dissertations”? How should we regard the integrity of Mr. Hart’s own Ph.D. if that is what he thinks?

In fairness, Mr. Hart admits defects in King’s theology, and rejects King’s use of theology for his civil struggle. But that’s not the point. Being antinomian leads to despising God’s work of sanctification where it has occurred, and to God’s common gracious preserving and directing in history. This is the theological fruit one reaps when one reveres the current political order, along with its shibboleths, above just about all else.

Why does Westminster Theological Seminar continue to honor him with an awkward day off in the middle of the winter term? Anyone can guess: Because Martin Luther King, Jr. is a popular Negro, and they want to “reach out” to the Negro community with Reformed theology, by “showing solidarity” or whatever the current buzzword might be.

The only problem is, honesty is more important than being Reformed. And Negroes see right through the condescending prevarication of honkies that take this kind of stand.

If enough of them ever do adopt Reformed Theology, and do so honestly, then they will be the ones to rise up and condemn Westminster for this dishonest and immoral capitulation to political correctness. As a post-millennialist, I think that day will come. Or, perhaps WTS will have stopped this charade by then. That, too, would be a small yet significant sign to give one hope that progress is possible — or at least, an occasional correction of a wrong turn.

But for many people, everything is to be forgiven because of Marty’s advocacy of “non-violent” reform. So a brief analysis of this concept is called for.

Suppose you are the boss, and a cadre of employees enters your office and says, “we are here to make some demands, but don’t worry, we are doing so non-violently.” Or a bunch of you go to the City Council to request that the porno shops be closed down, and your spokesman adds, “… and note that our request is non-violent.” There is something rather odd about this. Why did the subject of violence occur to anyone to begin with?

Consider some of the phrases in Marty’s famous “I have a dream” speech. These are all direct quotes:

• This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.
• It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
• And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

I think any native English-speaker would agree that these statements sound like thinly-veiled threats. They sound an awful lot like a prediction of riots and mayhem — which actually did occur in the subsequent years.

To be sure, he went on to say,

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

However, a close reading shows that the restraint is rather carefully worded. For example, “we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.” But “wrongful deeds” were defined pragmatically by the Civil Rights leaders. Ralph Abernathy writes of the Albany demonstrations,

Who were we to turn on the federal judiciary just because one decision had gone against us? After all, we had made obedience to federal courts a central argument in our efforts to desegregate the South…. Could we now disobey a federal judge and continue to argue that southern whites should submit to the Supreme Court’s decrees on schools and busing? Martin and I discussed the matter at some length and finally concluded that we had no choice but to obey Judge Elliott’s ruling, however wrong-headed we thought it might be. To do anything else would have meant forfeiting further appeal to the principle of law — and at that point we would be finished. (R. D. Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, p. 219)

In other words, the decision to obey or disobey authority was made merely for its propagandistic effect, not principle. Which deeds are “wrongful” were to be recognized only by how they advanced the “cause.”

Likewise, “we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence” is consistent with a view that there is both “creative” protest and “other kinds” of protest. It is the ambiguity of amphiboly. The words do not absolutely forbid the use of physical violence.

And again, the earlier cadences certainly seem to put forth the threat of violent confrontation if the honky establishment does not shape up right away. A simultaneous assertion of P and ~P means you can believe whatever you want to.

Gandhi was often appealed to by King, according to his close colleague:

As his speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church revealed, he was a student of history who had made a careful study of civil disobedience, particularly as preached and practiced by Mahatma Gandhi. Martin could explain the theory of civil disobedience to our people in terms they could understand, and these explanations were crucial to our movement, since you can’t expect people to undergo pain and humiliation without having very good reasons to justify such suffering. Martin supplied those reasons with clarity and authority, and during the months that followed, no one forgot what he had taught. (ibid., p. 156.)

By 1983 when the Gandhi movie came out, even many Aryans were enough dumbed down and demoralized to regard Gandhi as a second Messiah; so one can only imagine the magical effect the mention of such an exotic and distant name would have had on King’s audience of Negroes in 1955.

Mahatma Gandhi’s case is rather complicated. In his early life, he was hardly a pacifist. Indeed, he was almost an Indian counterpart to young Churchill, who never saw a battle that didn’t make his heart leap for joy. His later advocacy of “non-violence” is apparently not accompanied by a manifesto describing his conversion. His writings occupy 80 volumes and are full of contradictions, scatological meanderings, and not much philosophy, according to Richard Grenier.

Significantly, the result of the “non-violent” movement for independence in India resulted in horrific bloodshed, with estimates of the number slain ranging from one to four million.

There was always a small number of exalted satyagrahi [truth-strivers] who, martyrs, would march into the constables’ truncheons, but one of the things that alarmed the British — as Tagore indicated — was the explosions of violence that accompanied all this alleged nonviolence. Naipaul wrote that with independence India discovered again that it was “cruel and horribly violent.” Jaya Prakash Narayan, the late opposition leader, once admitted, “We often behave like animals…. We are more likely than not to become aggressive, wild, violent. We kill and burn and loot….” (Richard Grenier, The Gandhi Nobody Knows, pp. 102-3)

The great King speech was given in 1963. It is instructive to list the cities that burned from Negro riots in the ensuing years:

• Rochester: July 1964
• Philadelphia: August 1964
• Watts (LA): August 1965
• Cleveland: July 1966
• Omaha: July 1966
• Newark: July 1967
• Plainfield, NJ: July 1967
• Detroit: July 1967
• Chicago: April 1968
• Washington, DC: April 1968
• Baltimore: April 1968
• Cleveland: July 1968
• Omaha: June 1969

(It might be interesting to reflect on the fact that only two of these cities were Southern; moreover, by the 1960s, the Southern patrimony of DC and Baltimore could already be questioned.)

In summary, note these three things:

1. The assertion of a negation is always logically suspect. It does not take much reflection to realize that the verbal profession of “non-violence” is actually the threat of violence.
2. In King’s case, the profession of non-violence was juxtaposed with language whose obvious meaning is the threat of violence.
3. In the two most famous movements of the 20th century professing to be “non-violent,” we find that both were in fact attended by horrific violence.

Indeed, we can conclude that “non-violence” means, violence.

When someone comes making a “non-violent” request, make sure your powder is dry and near at hand.

• George Washington
• Gresham Machen
• Stonewall Jackson
• John Calvin
• Cornelius van Til
• Martin Luther King, Jr.

Briefly, let’s consider why each of these would merit such an honor.

George Washington was the heroic founder of our country. Gresham Machen was the heroic founder of Westminster Seminary. Stonewall Jackson was a great example of a pious Presbyterian and man of action. Calvin, of course, is the patriarch of the church and theology that Westminster is dedicated to promulgating. Cornelius van Til is the only original faculty member whose outlook is required to be adopted by all subsequent faculty. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the joke — ha ha, just trying to make sure you’re not skimming too fast.

Ready to guess?

While you are guessing, allow me to distract you with a couple tangents. It may seem like changing the subject, but it is not.

Consider one of the academic policies taken so seriously that it is described on the web page: the use of plagiarism. Plagiarism is not tolerated at WTS. Several professors take the matter so seriously, I can testify, that they distribute supplemental material on it with their course syllabus.

A bit of historical background on WTS might also be helpful. The founder, Gresham Machen, was a nationally–known leader of fundamentalism against liberal Christianity in the 1920’s. He wrote a book, “Christianity and Liberalism” that is still in print and still studied. The argument of the book is that Liberal Christianity is not Christianity at all: it is a different and alien religion.

Enough stage-setting. Have you guessed yet?

Of course the answer is that (1) only one of the names listed is honored with a day off and (2) that one is, of course, the “joke”: Martin Luther King, Jr.

They honor a man whose rank plagiarism would lead to expulsion from WTS itself, and rescission of any degrees granted.

They honor a man whose chronic and unrepentant fornication would render him unfit to be ordained in the denominations served by WTS grads. Nay, if Martin Luther King, Jr. would return from the dead, WTS would not rationally dare to allow him to stay over in their coed dorms!

They honor a man resistance to whose theology was the very reason for the formation of WTS. Actually that doesn’t capture it: the move was largely anticipatory, and even to this day Princeton Seminary’s theology is not uniformly as bad as Martin Luther King’s.

WTS must believe in racial solidarity. They must believe that guilt and atonement are racial matters – and by that, I don’t mean the Adamic race; I mean the white race. Martin Luther King, Jr. must be functioning as the substanceless symbol of a new atonement; one that Machen did not know about.

Brothers, I beseech you: reconsider this insanity. At the time King-day was instituted, there may have been a partial excuse. But too much is known now. Too much is known. It is shameful. Back out of your mistake!

The facts can be summarized rather succinctly. (Numbers in parentheses are page number in Dyson’s book.) Starting in undergraduate college, King’s trial sermon was “greatly dependent on a sermon of a well-known white minister” (144). At Crozer Seminary, “citation habits continued to be sloppy” (145).

Throughout his Boston University career, it is now evident that King plagiarized large portions of his course papers and his dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” completed in 1955. King plagiarized the two principal subjects of his dissertation, but the bulk of his theft concentrated on large portions of Jack Boozer’s dissertation, “The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Conception of God,” written just three years before King’s thesis and supervised by L. Harold DeWolf, King’s major adviser (145).

Then, King’s speeches and sermons also, ahem, “borrowed” heavily from others, chiefly liberal white preachers.

Rev Dyson defends King along these lines:

1. As to the speeches, the borrowings are customary, and included the personal touch — analogous to what a jazz musician does with musical licks (143).

2. Utilitarianism: “A greater good was served by King’s having used the words of others than might otherwise have been accomplished had he not done so” (144).

3. Copying was poetic justice – it used “orthodox liberal ideas to undermine orthodox racial beliefs” (144).

4. Negroes are just academically inferior: what could you expect? At least, that is the only way I can figure to interpret this passage: “The racial climate that made race a scholarly taboo and encouraged the embrace of already validated European subject matter might have been the predicate for his plagiarism. The aversion to write about race was not accidental, but reflected the dilemma that all black students faced: if they wrote about race, they risked being pigeon-holed or stereotyped; if they avoided it, they risked failing to develop critical resources to combat arguments about black inferiority” (150).

Obviously, these are weak arguments and I won’t tire the reader with hashing over the obvious. (Number 2 is particularly delicious: what other thief, liar, or cheat would not make the same argument?) Dyson himself mainly wants to exonerate for the speeches and sermons, and grudgingly concedes that the dissertation plagiarism is troubling.

Now is the time for some honesty. Negroes love to say “DOCTOR King,” because it feels empowering to have a leader that worked his way through whitey’s system, all the way to the top, on whitey’s terms (149-151). Only, he didn’t.

The main difference between a master’s degree and a PhD is the dissertation. Yes, there is some additional coursework, but that is mostly a matter of not passing away for a couple more years. (Not to mention, King plagiarized his course papers as well.) Without the dissertation, it is “AbD” not “PhD.” So, stop referring to King as “Doctor.” Hereafter, anyone that does refer to him as such must be suspected of being a liar like King himself.

Boston University must work up the courage to rescind the degree, or it should gain the reputation of being a race-pandering degree-mill. This can only hurt the reputation of other graduates of that institution, including other blacks.

The fact that King never confessed his sin publicly, nor renounced his title, must unfortunately weigh as additional evidence against his sainted status.

This is a man that lacked even what the Puritans would call “civic righteousness.”

“From his teens, King enjoyed sharp suits and light-­skinned women” (193). His exploits in college led to him and a friend being nicknamed after an Atlanta wrecking company: King bragged “we wreck all the women.” Later, in seminary [!] and graduate school, King’s seduction of women was aided by a dapper wardrobe and possession of a new car. (Someone: follow the money for us.) His addiction to sex was such that he even cheated on Coretta after they were engaged. This was in the 1940’s and 50’s, before the sexual revolution on college campuses, before coed dorms and the Pill.

Later, after he had become a professional demonstrator and speech-giver, it was claimed that he had a girl in every town (194).

When King went to Oslo in 1964 to receive the Nobel Prize, a gaggle of Scandinavian bimbettes serviced him and his entourage but then stole their wallets (194). (The assistants got their share of action by promising access to the Man himself.) King & Co. decided not to press charges because of the potential negative publicity that might be cast on his “cause”.

According to his close associate Abernathy, King had three girls in succession the very night before he was killed (155). At least one was a white girl, and as King felt orgasm approaching he shouted “I’m not a Negro tonight!” (163)

Why did Abernathy spill the beans? Some have suggested jealousy (156). The FBI had tapes, not just of King’s trysts, but of full-scale orgies in his hotel rooms. It appears that King and Abernathy sodomized each other. Dyson quotes Carl Rowan as explaining the evidence away in that black men alone with each other “talk” that way, so that the tape does not prove that sodomy actually took place (164). Note however that in the background the sounds of another couple groaning can be heard, so that the orgy either included another fudge-packing pair, or there were women present, in which case the claim about how male Negroes talk amongst themselves already needs modification.

Enough. There is no possible justification for lowering ourselves into this filth, except that we as a nation are asked collectively to honor a man of this character for a whole day every year.

Dyson is embarrassed by King’s perversion, yet also makes excuses for it that I now turn to.

1. King’s adultery is mitigated by the fact that he sometimes shouted out God’s name as orgasm approached.

Instead of bringing his duties and desires into conflict, King momentarily fused them…At the height of his infidelity, King calls God’s name in vain to bless his fleshly frolic as a way to call attention to his paradoxical predicament: by invoking the divine presence, he is both seeking sanction and inviting scorn on his divided soul. Even though he is breaking God’s law in committing adultery, his reckless invocation of God is at once profane and the ultimate predicate of his existence. No matter what, King’s theology reminds him that God “promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.” (162f.)

First, Dyson does not know that some kind of piety was the cause of King’s shouting the name of God during his excitement: this is wishful thinking. But second, sensing the presence of God during willful and persistent sin is not a mitigation. For the regenerate, it may be an inducement to repentance — a repentance that we see no evidence for in King’s life. For the unregenerate, it is simply a sign of extreme hardness (Heb 12:17).

2. King’s separation from home heightened the temptation, and the need for this was whitey’s fault

In the comparative moral context in which we inevitably view history, their sins were far less grievous than the racial apartheid that led figures like King to spend most of the year away from home, making them more vulnerable to their weaknesses. White supremacy didn’t cause their sins, but it surely gave King and others ample opportunity to succumb to temptations that they may have otherwise been spared. (157)

And not just separation, but escaping the “heat of white hatred”:

King’s desperate hedonism was also a profound gesture of sanity making as he sought release into the forbidden realm of erotic excess as an escape from the unbearable heat of white hatred. It was perhaps a convoluted way of keeping in touch with his own flesh — flesh that was being ransomed to redeem racial justice as a condition of his commitment to black freedom. (162f.)

However, as Dyson’s honesty itself is forced to concede, King’s pattern of sexual promiscuity was already established before he ever hit the road for racial justice (161).

The biblical ethic is more direct, however. Very clearly, if a man cannot take up a cause without it causing him to fall into deep and unavoidable sin, then he ought not to take up that cause.

Let’s state the matter even more bluntly. We are talking about crusades, not to end child pornography, but to end “separate but equal” bathrooms and drinking fountains and such. It is easy to forget this in all the long-faced pontificating and moralizing about the King crusades.

It is simply not possible to excuse chronic adultery in terms of the need to march for the divine right to share a bathroom or a drinking fountain.

3. King was “pure in heart” even if bodily impure

If King was pure, it was in the biblical sense of being “pure in heart’ — that is, obsessively single-minded about the greatest good; loving God and one’s neighbor. King was so committed to that good that he died for it… (158)

First of all, King did not “die for it.” He was shot by someone.

Second, King David was identified as “pure in heart” long before the Bathsheba episode. If David can (as I think) be identified as such afterward, it was in spite of the sin, and exemplified by the depth of his remorse and repentance when confronted with his sin by Nathan. Dyson presents no evidence that King was repentant in a life-changing way.

4. Fornication is common in ministerial circles

Rev. Dyson’s theologico-sexual confusion here is already obliquely evident in his use of the feminine pronoun in references to God (182, 193). But consider what he says: “King was certainly reared in a preacherly culture where good sex is pursued with nearly the same fervor as believers seek to be filled with the Holy Ghost” (157). And earlier:

While black ministers rail against the sexual deviance of rappers, teen mothers, and gays and lesbians, they often fail to confront the rituals of seduction they practice from the pulpit. Bedding women is nearly a sport in some churches. (135)

God help us!

Lest the suspicion arise that this is a Negro thing, he points to Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart (135). But that is quite preposterous. Both those men were disciplined by the Assemblies of God, whereupon they simply left that group. In fact, white churches that still claim the gospel do not tolerate this kind of behavior in ministers. Consider this section from the form of government of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA):

When a minister, pending a trial, shall make confession, if the matter be base and flagitious, such as drunkenness, uncleanness, or crimes of a greater nature, however penitent he may appear to the satisfaction of all, the court shall without delay impose definite suspension or depose him from the ministry. (Book of Church Order, 34-7).

It is not legalistic to suggest that ministers should be held to a moral standard that makes behavior such as King’s unthinkable. Justification by faith does not negate minimum levels of sanctification for ministers: Titus 1:5-16 is nothing less than that.

To be sure, it is hard to talk about this kind of thing without lapsing into self-righteousness. We can indeed say, “but for the grace of God, there go I.” But it is also true that a man should not be a minister absent the grace of God. If the kind of situation that Dyson describes as being typical and widespread in the Negro church is indeed the case, and if nothing is done about it, we cannot say that it is a church at all any more. Let Martin Luther King, Jr. serve as a scarecrow for how bad things can sink. It can reach a point that even such a wicked man can be extolled by men who are regarded as part of the holy catholic church of Christ. A nation can sink so low as to honor such a man with a holiday. God help us!

As befits a Baptist minister, the material is organized under three main rubrics exploiting alliteration: Ideology, Identity, Image. Each rubric becomes a general gathering point for themes from MLK’s life in service to the political theme, which is the need for ongoing penance and payment by whites to atone for centuries of injustice to blacks.

Under the “Ideology” rubric is included the opening salvo against conservative and liberal appropriation, in order to rescue MLK as a true radical. MLK did not advocate merely color-blindness, or a level playing field. “King said that whenever the ‘issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for Negroes is raised,’ many of our friends ‘recoil in horror’” (24). “You’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society” (39). The ideas section also includes a discussion of MLK’s opposition to the Vietnam war, his socialism, and relation to Black Nationalism. The latter includes an interesting description of the Northern “New Breed Negro” or “Authentic Negro” culture (106), which by presenting a public persona of exaggeratedly stereotypical behavior, attempted to retrieve an independent Negro identity, in contrast to the “Doppelgänger” of the South (105).

“Identity” includes a discussion of MLK’s radical religion, as well as a coming to terms with two of MLK’s undeniable moral failings: his plagiarism and adultery, as well as his now politically incorrect “patriarchy.” The connection of MLK’s “identity” with suffering is compared favorably to modern rappers.

Finally, the “image” section discusses the question of MLK’s patriotism, the ease by which MLK can be tamed as an honored symbol, and the way his image has been exploited by his heirs and others.

In evaluating this book, it needs to be noted first that the main three divisions are as artificial as a preacher’s three-point sermon. At times the categories are “fuzzy”: for example, religious liberalism is an ideology, not just an identity. More importantly, the titles subtly suppress or confuse important issues in some cases: being a cheat is more importantly an ethical failing, not just an aspect of “identity.” Patriotism is connected with one’s ideology and identity as much as “image.” These points might seem to be a mere quibble until it is realized that the effect is to derail important criticism and subsume serious questions about MLK’s character under the more innocuous categories such as “identity” in order to keep the reader’s attention on the politics.

Several issues along this line are important enough that I wish to take them up in separate discussions, namely MLK’s plagiarism, adultery, religious liberalism, and the whole notion of “non-violence” for which he is praised even in conservative circles.

In the remainder of my space here, I wish to analyze Dyson’s use of solidarity themes. Throughout the book — despite the occasional qualification as (merely) “vast majority” and the grudging listing of exceptions –, attitudes and behaviors are analyzed, so to speak, in “black and white.” There is “white privilege” (26), “white racism” (31), “black Christian encounters with a hostile white world” (129), “white supremacy” (157) “white world” (285), “white discrimination against blacks… black resistance to white oppression” (293) and a favorable citation of Stokely Carmichael regarding the Vietnam War, “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people” (68).

Likewise, there is a sympathetic interaction with “black nationalism” even if occasional differences with MLK’s vision are noted. But ask: would a correspondingly sympathetic discussion of white nationalism be permitted? To ask it is to answer it.

Throughout, then, we note two pair of poles by which Dyson recurrently analyzes solidarity: white vs. black, and the good vs. the bad. What we find is that whites are supposed to act in terms of solidaric union (i.e. penance) with the evils perpetrated by whites in the past, but must not lay special solidaric claim to the achievements of whites, nor may they claim to be the exclusive participants in white-created civilization. In contrast, blacks have no connection to the evils perpetrated by blacks in the past, nor to stereotypical behaviors; but they can lay solidaric claim to the achievements, as well as victimhood of blacks in the past. In other words, we can form a “square of opposition” as follows:

solidarity with the good? whites no, blacks yes
solidarity with the bad? whites yes, blacks no

Dyson’s square of opposition should be self-refuting once it is seen for what it is. Yet it is amazing how much of the rhetoric of racial politics presupposed that framework, to this day. Dyson himself is an example.

The book suffers some glaring omissions. The question of MLK’s funding needs to be studied. How did he manage to spend so much time traveling around accompanied by an entourage, organizing protests, speaking, even spending time in jail, while supporting an absent family and, secretly, enjoying the high life? This was done in a time of supposed ubiquitous white oppression. We need to follow the money here — a lot of money. Dyson bypasses this subject completely.

The role of the jew in all of this is another, perhaps related topic bypassed completely. The shadowy jew appears at the founding of the NAACP, the SCLC, and at the center of the civil rights posturing of the 60s. Dyson mentions Stanley Levison and Harry Wachtel but without much investigation. Intelligent Negroes are beginning to smell a rat: the jew is willing to exploit the sensitivities of Negroes and use them as shock troops against the civilization the jew hates; but it is hardly with the best interest of the Negro in mind.

In the end, it is the jewish influence that must be rooted out before we can regain something like our almost-lost Christian civilization. The sooner Negroes wake up to that challenge, the sooner a goal of true common interest can be pursued together.

Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There With You: the True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: The Free Press [Simon & Schuster], 2000)