My piece from last year on “Martin Luther King Day party flyers” (which I realize just now needs an edit…)
Every year, African-Americans celebrate MLK Day with boozy parties at “da club.” Which is fine, I guess. White people have been commemorating statutory holidays with drunk driving and explosives since forever.
It’s not like I celebrate Canada Day by getting really drunk and holding a séance to contact the ghost of my dog, so it would be peevish to expect Americans of any shade to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. through, say, displays of ritual plagiarism. If we’ve learned anything from the aforementioned Kwanzaa, it’s that historical accuracy is largely optional in the sphere of holidays.
But from what I can make out from these MLK party flyers, the whole “adultery” thing, on the other hand, is a key component.
2011, and the new statue on the Mall:
These plagiarism “talking points” were once confined to “white supremacist” chat rooms. Today, the topic (as well as King’s serial adultery) is approaching “everybody knows” velocity.
Perhaps now someone will ask King’s litigious, avaricious estate why they charge exorbitant licensing fees for the use of his speeches in everything from academic papers to TV commercials if those words never belonged to King in the first place.
Helpfully, excerpts from those speeches are carved into the memorial, inadvertently turning it into a monument to intellectual-property theft. (King’s family billed the memorial foundation $800,000 for that privilege.)
“Was the Civil Rights Movement Really Necessary?”
Contrary to the image glorified in numberless PBS documentaries and Hollywood movies—and in defiance of racist “gun control” legislation—many black SNCC, NAACP, SCLC, and CORE field organizers carried firearms, while continuing to promote their organizations as “officially” nonviolent
. They feared, correctly, that if their biggest donors—Northern white liberals—found out they were armed, the money would dry up.
And of course, “The Curse of King Martin”:
Rich Lowry owes John Derbyshire an apology.
When Lowry fired Derbyshire from National Review for writing a “racist” column here at Taki’s, he took particular issue with Derb’s contention that whites should “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”
Lowry was clearly unfamiliar with (black) comedian Chris Rock’s 1996 bit about avoiding any street in America named Martin Luther King Boulevard. As everyone (except National Review editors) knows, avenues christened in honor of that self-proclaimed champion of nonviolence usually run through black neighborhoods and tend to be among the country’s most dangerous.
The Curse of King Martin now seems to have extended beyond eponymous boulevards. In a development that’s sure to equal bad news for the Mall in DC, whites are on notice to steer clear of streets boasting monuments to MLK, too…
