Martin Luther King, Troublemaker
Few moments in the Civil Rights Movement - even more than the Birmingham Bus Protests or the March on Washington - encapsulate the stark moral drama of Martin Luther King and his allies than "Bloody Sunday." On March 7th, 1965, Martin Luther King led 600 protesters, black and white, on a march through the city in protest of voting restrictions and the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson. On the Edmund Pettus Bridge they were met by 150 Alabama State Troopers, dispatched by Governor George Wallace to block and disperse them.The marchers ignored warnings to disperse, while the troopers refused to negotiate. Eventually the police unleashed tear gas, then charged on horseback using whips, chains, clubs and rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire to terrorize and bludgeon the demonstrators. Amazingly, none were killed, though fifty suffered serious injuries. The world was appalled, as television cameras captured the carnage in graphic, unflinching detail. Governor Wallace, shocked by the backlash and pressured by President Lyndon Johnson, allowed a climactic march on Montgomery which gathered some 25,000 participants.
For millions of Americans, Bloody Sunday removed any doubt about the morality of Civil Rights marchers and the evil of their oppressors. Lyndon Johnson, who'd been reluctant to pass the Voting Rights Act until King acted, responded by forcing the legislation through Congress. He announced it in a titanic speech culminating in his adopting the Civil Rights motto "We shall overcome!" Which moved even King, who had a fractious relationship with LBJ, to tears as he watched on television. The Civil Rights Movement reached its apotheosis, thanks to a moment of national outrage.
Bloody Sunday
For William F. Buckley, doyen of the conservative movement, Selma also invoked outrage. Only Buckley directed it towards King and his trouble-making allies, whose defiance of an unjust law disgusted him more than state-sponsored white supremacy.Buckley was already a formidable figure: founder of National Review and Young Americans for Freedom, host of television's Firing Line, he put an energetic, urbane face on conservatism ("stolen it from the possession of old men," in Rick Perlstein's words). Despite his hard line adherence to small-government principles, he gained a reputation both for wit and seemingly reasonable stances, such as excommunicating neo-Nazis and the John Birch Society from movement conservatism.
Unfortunately, beneath Buckley's urbane exterior beat a reactionary heart. A patrician New Englander with a Southern mother and a deep Catholicism, he evinced all the prejudices expected from such a background. His early books carped about "liberal academia" and defended right-wing monsters ranging from Joe McCarthy at home to Francisco Franco in Spain (his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell III, even created a homegrown fascist militia in imitation of Franco). And on racial justice, his era's most pressing moral issue, he was utterly derelict at best.
William F. Buckley
Buckley expressed his views most virulently in his 1957 essay "Why the South Must Prevail." Regarding the battles raging over desegregation following Brown vs. Board and the Little Rock confrontation, Buckley phrased the issues in the starkest terms. "The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."How might the white community prevail? In authoritarian terms belying Buckley's ostensible small government mania. "Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of the minority, in which case...society will regress," he laments. "Sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence." Richard Russell, Theodore Bilbo or Augusto Pinochet couldn't have put it better.
Buckley sparred with any number of black leaders, but reserved particular ire for King. He once joked that "I live in constant fear that I will die before having the opportunity to say no to Martin Luther King." He also dismissed King as "more sensitive, and so more bitter, than the average American Negro, and hence unqualified as a litmus of the Southern Negro's discontent" (as if King were a cranky editorial writer rather than leader of a mass movement). But it was in his response to Selma that Buckley reached his rhetorical nadir.
Buckley announcing his candidacy for Mayor
At the time, Buckley was preparing his quixotic candidacy for Mayor of New York City, finding the Republican candidate, John Lindsay, too liberal and the Democrat, Abraham Beame, unspeakable. On April 4th, he gave a speech before the Communion Breakfast of Catholic Policemen at the New York Hilton addressing the issue of Selma and Civil Rights. To the delight of the 5,600 assembled policemen, but few of the reporters in attendance, he delivered a muscular apologia for George Wallace's beleaguered troopers.When Buckley's speech wasn't grossly ill-informed (twice claiming, for instance, that President Johnson "mobilized the Alabama National Guard - at the Governor's urging," which inverted reality) it alternated between victim blaming and defending police brutality. After all, "Dr. King had crossed the bridge and there policemen, acting under orders - whether ill-advised or not is most precisely not the business of policemen...informed them that they might not proceed." Thus the police had no responsibility for their actions, being merely the instruments of an order.
Who was to blame for the public's reaction, Buckley wondered? Naturally, the media:
"The next thing the American viewer saw was a flurry of night sticks and the pursuit of the screaming demonstrators back across the bridge into the streets of Selma. What the viewer did not see was a period of time, twenty long minutes...when the two camps stood facing each other, between the moment the Sheriff told the demonstrators to return, which order the demonstrators refused by standing there in defiance of it, until the moment when the human cordite was touched...The policemen moved excitedly, humanly, forward; excessively, yes, and their excesses on that day have been rightly criticized, but were ever the excesses criticized of those who provoked them beyond the endurance which we tend to think of as human?"
Thus, the naked violence visited upon King and his fellow marchers was less repulsive than the media daring to cover it. Never mind that Buckley couldn't specify what provocation triggered such a gross reaction from Wallace's enforcers, since one didn't exist; it detracted from his narrative of police victimhood. Here, in the admittedly erudite and well-considered words of a self-proclaimed genius, is the same glib bleating about "fake news" which emanates from today's social media and ideological hate swamps.
Alabama State Troopers in Montgomery
He heaped similar equivocation towards the death of Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit woman murdered by Klansmen several days after the march on Montgomery. While Buckley decried her death, he also dismissed its importance, asking whether the killing "merely confirm[ed] what everyone has been saying about certain elements of the South?" And why, he mused, didn't the press complain about the "unprovoked killing of a policeman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi" that same night?In other words, "All Lives Matter." Buckley's message found its mark with New York City police officers, who resented John Lindsay's calls for police reform and openly sported "Buckley for Mayor" buttons throughout the campaign. Buckley received censure from the press, and entered into a long-running war of words with Jackie Robinson, athlete-turned-activist, but remained unrepentant. If anything, he reinforced them in written editorials defending disenfranchisement of blacks: "if the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote...chaos would ensue."
Buckley's only response to criticism, at the time and in his memoir The Unmaking of a Mayor, was to blame the "liberal media" for misconstruing his words. He complained, for instance, that despite reports of policemen cheering his insensitive remarks, the hall remained silent throughout these parts of his speech. Whether or not this was so (eyewitnesses predictably differed, though Buckley claimed to possess a tape recording verifying his version) seems hardly relevant to the point. Perhaps the NYPD didn't or didn't cheer Buckley's remarks; the remarks remain the same.
King and friends arrive in Montgomery
Admittedly, Buckley's arguments were more sophisticated than segregationists like Congressman William Dickinson, who denounced the marches as a breeding ground of miscegenation. "Negro and white freedom marchers," he declared on the House floor, "invaded a Negro church in Montgomery and engaged in an all-night session of debauchery within the church itself." Such responses from Dixiecrat fossils, however, should surprise no one. Buckley's moral dereliction in the face of naked Evil is better only by degree.Buckley never relented in his criticisms of King. Three days after King's assassination, he wrote a testy editorial wherein he concluded, after some deliberation, that MLK probably didn't deserve assassination. Nonetheless, he slams the slain leader for "describ[ing] his intention of violating the law in Memphis" and blames King for rioting in that city. And Buckley finds King's responsible for his own demise: "The cretin who leveled his rifle at the head of Martin Luther King may have absorbed the talk...about the supremacy of the individual conscience...such talk as Martin Luther King...had so widely, and so indiscriminately, indulged in."
In this, Buckley had many counterparts. Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, said that the rioting triggered by King's death were a "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break." Or Lionel Lokos, a conservative writer who proclaimed that MLK "left his country a legacy of lawlessness." And lest we forget, King remained controversial enough decades that dozens of congressmen voted against commemorating his birthday (and that many states, not all in the south, still refuse to observe it).
King just before his death
Today, conservative Republicans regularly invoke King, from Glenn Beck conjuring MLK for his own March on Washington in 2010 to pro-lifers invoking him as a standard bearer to a Trump spokesman comparing his candidate to King, to the absurd claim that King was even a Republican himself. In one sense, it's gratifying that MLK, once polarizing and controversial, is now so universally beloved that even arch-conservatives claim him as one of their own. Too bad it isn't backed up by history, as the words of Buckley and others attest.King, of course, had a complicated relationship with both parties. He regularly allied with the very moderate Republicans - particularly the hated Nelson Rockefeller - the GOP leadership has spent the past half-century purging from its ranks. He also criticized Dwight Eisenhower for not doing more for desegregation, denounced Barry Goldwater as "morally indefensible and socially suicidal" and Richard Nixon, whom he initially respected for his pro-Civil Rights rhetoric as Vice President only to revile his pandering to the hard-right, as "the most dangerous man in America."
King with Cardinal Spellman (left) and Nelson Rockefeller
Nor was King, in fairness, a liberal Democrat. He branded John F. Kennedy an opportunist who needed to do more "in the area of moral persuasion by occasionally speaking out against segregation." His relationship with Lyndon Johnson alternated between mutual respect and pragmatic alliance, before openly breaking with Johnson over the Vietnam War. For their part, Kennedy called King "so hot these days that it looks like Marx coming to the White House," while Johnson dismissed King as a "nigger preacher," ramped up FBI efforts to discredit him and wondered "what more does he want" than the Civil Rights Act.Naturally, King's objections to Kennedy and Johnson weren't because they were too liberal. As early as 1952 he told future wife Coretta Scott that "I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic." While he remained circumspect about publicly expressing these views, it informed his later critiques of American imperialism and capitalist greed which culminated in his outspoken antiwar activism.
Conservatives who invoke King must ask themselves whether, with their hatred of protests and fetish for "law and order," they sympathize with his view that "a riot is the language of the unheard." Or whether they feel comfortable invoking someone who complained that "the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is...the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice." Or whether someone who urged that "America must move towards a democratic socialism" would truly embrace Paul Ryan or Donald Trump's vision for America.
LBJ and MLK
Which doesn't stop Buckley's descendants from aping their progenitor's cluelessness. Some, confronted with modern protests, merely recycle his arguments. Consider, for instance, editor Rich Lowry's vituperation against "the Left's lawless shock troops" protesting the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014: "The Left has long posited various means of achieving social justice...to these methods must now be added traffic congestion. All of these ordinary people," he complains, "are being inconvenienced for the sin of having somewhere to go."Funny how Buckley made similar complaints 49 years earlier, wondering "how long...should sit-ins be allowed to squat down in major traffic zones?" He continued pondering "at what point do the local authorities begin to transfer their concern from the rights of dissenters to dissent...to the right of the community to practice the professional of living?" For both men, civil liberty and the First Amendment extend only insofar as it inconveniences the white middle class.
Or, with particular effrontery, they ventriloquize King for their own arguments. In another column, Lowry proclaims that "the difference between demonstrators in Selma and Ferguson is the difference between dignity under enormous pressure in a righteous cause and heedless self-indulgence in the service of a smear." Strong words indeed, if a little late. It only took National Review a half-century to recognize King's courage - and only then, "in the service of a smear" against those protesting modern-day inequities.
Like Violet Liuzzo, Heyer might have been physically murdered by violent racists, but the moral blame lies with her allies, and the victim herself. Such twaddle occupies the same moral plane as those who bemoan protesters breaking a Starbucks window while deeming the mass shooting of 500 human beings the "price of freedom." Or how black athletes kneeling silently during the National Anthem are "sons of bitches" while murderous white supremacists include "very fine people."
Eric Reid and Colin Kaepernick
King and Buckley would have recognized these arguments. I can't imagine that their reactions would be the same. And unlike modern morons, I certainly don't imagine that they'd be on the same side.