Would Dr. King Really Have Been a Republican?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Civil rights leaders, black Democrats, and Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele went ballistic when they heard a woman in a 60-second radio ad say that “Dr. King was a Republican.”

The ad, bankrolled by the National Black Republican Association, purportedly is running on several Baltimore radio stations. At first glance, the ad is a cheap political shot that stretches political lunacy far past the outer limit. But is it? The ad is not the first time that Republicans, and more specifically Republican conservatives, have claimed Martin Luther King, Jr. as one of their own.



The
debate over whether King has anything in common with the GOP has raged
since the 1980s. Republicans grabbed at King’s famed line in his “I
Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington in August 1963 in which
he called on Americans to judge individuals by the content of their
character and not the color of their skin to prove that he’d be on
their side against affirmative action.

Supporters of
affirmative action loudly protest that this deliberately distorted the
spirit and intent of King’s words. They are both right.


During the
fierce wars over affirmative action in the 1990s, King’s words were
shamelessly used to justify opposition to affirmative action. Yet,
there is enough paradox and ambivalence in the few stray remarks that
King uttered on the issue to give ideological ammunition to liberals
and conservatives.


In several
speeches and articles in the 1960s, King did not demand that the
government and corporations create special programs or incentives
exclusively for blacks but to the disadvantaged of all races. He
vaguely called for the government and corporations to increase spending
for jobs, skills training, education and public works.


With the passage
of the civil rights bill in 1964, King realized that ending legal
segregation wasn’t enough. Integrating a motel or lunch counter did not
provide jobs, improved housing, and better schools for the black poor.
These were stubborn and intractable problems that required massive
spending on new social programs by government and business.


King felt that
the bigger problem for blacks and whites was the disappearance of
thousands of industry jobs to automation. He sensed that jobs were a
volatile issue that could inflame blacks and whites. He claimed that
black and white workers suffered equally when jobs were lost and
tactfully called on labor to fight for jobs for all. But in those days
affirmative action was seen as a tool to prod employers not simply to
hire and promote the disadvantaged of all races, as King insisted, but
blacks. If that happened, King almost certainly knew that this would
leave many whites out in the economic cold.


King’s debatable
ambiguity on affirmative action was only one issue that Republicans
manufacture common cause with him on. Starting with Reagan, Republican
presidents slowly and grudgingly have realized that they can wring
maximum political mileage out of King’s legacy. They have recast him in
their image on civil rights, and bent and twisted his oft times public
religious Puritanism on morals issues to justify GOP positions in the
values wars that they wage with blacks, Democrats, and liberals.


But that
wouldn’t be possible if some of King’s pronouncements did not parallel
the GOP’s positions on crime, marriage, the family and personal
responsibility. Republicans have carefully cobbled bits and pieces from
King’s speeches and writings during the 1950s and early 1960s together
on values issues to paint a King that is anti-big government, welfare,
black crime, and an advocate of thrift, hard work, and temperance.


This is not a
completely politically skewered picture of King. In those speeches and
writings he took the moral high ground and lectured blacks on the value
of hard work, the importance of setting personal goals, and striving to
develop good character.


In countless
speeches in the 1950s, he mingled the demand for civil rights, voting
rights, and the government clampdown on racial violence, with a
forceful call for blacks to practice thrift, self-help. King realized
that government programs meant little if fathers weren’t in the home,
and he railed against the peril of family breakdown. This was a major
social problem that civil rights leaders either ignored or downplayed.


King again
strongly emphasized values training, discipline, hard work, and the
reduction of family violence as the key to resolve the family crisis.
That crisis increasingly caught the policy attention of liberal and
conservative academics and government officials.


In numerous
speeches, even into the early 1960s, King continued to stress personal
responsibility, economic self-help, strong families, and religious
values as goals that blacks should strive to attain.

While King can
never be considered a political conservative, the snippets of
conservative thinking in his musings on the black family, economic
uplift, and religious values blend easily with the social conservatism
of many blacks. In the decades after his murder, it has blended just as
easily into the GOP’s prescription for black ills. And that evidently
is more than enough for black Republicans to say he’d be a big player
on the GOP team.


Columnist Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator,
and the author of “The Emerging Black GOP Majority.”