What Reagan Understood about MLK

By Bobby Miller

Monday, January 16, 2023

 

Today, our nation honors the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the icon of the civil-rights movement in America. While progressives have long excoriated conservatives for having been insufficiently supportive of that movement, the historical record is much more nuanced than the monochromatic narrative they present. Admittedly, the Right has been far from perfect on this critical issue. But the notion that conservatives — those genuinely committed to safeguarding the legacy of the American Revolution and the promulgation of liberty and virtue — are somehow responsible for segregation, a cause championed by John C. Calhoun, the “Marx of the Master Class” himself, and other Southern populist miscreants, is absurd.

 

One of the inconvenient facts confounding the left-wing account of the civil-rights movement is President Ronald Reagan’s establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. Reagan initially opposed the holiday’s creation, tacitly endorsing accusations that King was a communist. “We’ll know in 35 years, won’t we?” he said, in reference to the eventual disclosure of the FBI’s unauthorized wiretapped recordings of King’s conversations with close confidants.

 

So how did Reagan come around? Conventional wisdom is that he saw the writing on the wall. Public opinion had turned decidedly in favor of the legislation creating the holiday by the middle of his first term. However, Reagan’s words suggest a different explanation.

 

In his 1987 proclamation of King’s birthday, Reagan remarked, “King’s vision, as he said so often, was the fulfillment of the American dream. He explained this to the graduates of Lincoln University in 1961 when he quoted our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and said, simply, “This is the dream.” Dr. King emphasized that this dream excludes no one from its promise and protection and that it affirms that every individual’s rights are God-given and “neither conferred by nor derived from the state.”

 

Reagan understood that in calling for racial equality, King was beseeching Americans to live up to the noble principles articulated by the Founding Fathers. Irrespective of his views on how to best organize society, King believed that America is fundamentally good and understood that the only way to change the hearts and minds of Americans was to appeal to their best instincts.

 

Contrast that with contemporary social-justice warriors, who want us to think that the country is immutably racist and rotten to its core. They seek the reordering of every institution and convention they deem insufficiently repentant, which happens to be nearly all of them. Their efforts to spark a racial-justice reckoning since the murder of George Floyd have been far more divisive than King ever was. MLK was asking Americans to live up to their highest ideals. Today’s race-obsessed ideologues want you to forsake those values in exchange for cultural revolution. But it’s King’s legacy that should guide us.