Quote:
Originally Posted by dth123451
MLK also lets them peddle this total BS alternative history where the blacks just finally asked nicely and southern whites had an epiphany and integrated peacefully.
Not to anyone who knows the least bit about what the civil rights movement really entailed. The idea that MLK (or any of the many around him or allied with him or working in parallel to him) has any responsibility for how racist revisionists use the history in which he participated is laughable.
MLK got murdered for his efforts, after all. So did a lot of other people. The idea that he was some uncle Tom clowning the powers is just ignorant and oblivious and very, very far from the truth. The powers went to some effort to portray him as a philandering miscreant and a communist.
Like a lot of his contemporaries, King was fighting a war, and knew it. He had to pick his strategies, and he made his choices. Others (like Malcolm X) made different choices. None of them always got everything just right. But at least they were doing something, moving the issue forward, and anyone who knows how their opponents were, their vicious violent approach to the issue, understands that the decision to use nonviolent methods was a strategic question of guerrilla warfare, very remote from the toadying to power that some here seem to think it was. Other ways were possible, but it's not at all clear that they would have been more effective. King and Malcolm were converging, not diverging, when both got killed.