June 14, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Latest Essay in THE UNZ REVIEW: On Martin Luther King Jr.
Friends,
On June 8, in the wake of what turned out to be a
mini-tempest in a very small teapot, I offered some comments on the new and
quite revolting revelations concerning Martin Luther King Jr., discovered by
his biographer, David Garrow. This information from closed FBI files confirmed
in very graphic ways what had always been asserted about King: he was, in many
ways, a profligate sexual abuser who might give Harvey Weinstein a run for his
money.
Garrow’s findings had appeared first in the British press
on May 26—the Daily
Mail and the Sunday
Times, and the with a major article by Garrow (May 30) in the English journal Standpoint. In England they were major headlines,
dominating both the news and commentary cycles for several days.
In the United States—where one would think such revelations
would have been banner headlines—the echo was anemic. Yet, after some limited,
very brief comment in one or two media sources, a deafening silence. Professor
David Greenberg, writing in Politico,
almost alone among those few who took up the question in a mainstream
publication, asserted that opinion makers (and politicians) needed to consider the
import of the revelations. He defended King. But he also understood that in this
age in which the monuments and symbols of so many of our national heroes are
being unceremoniously toppled, uncomfortable questions could not be avoided.
But not a peep from the #MeToo feminist warrior fanatics—no
expansive hand-wringing—no demands that monuments to a serial sex maniac and
adulterer be taken down—no calls for the history books to be re-written.
Welcome to the United States in 2019 when sex and race have
become weaponized agents in the ideological war against Western civilization. Yes,
the slogans and chants, the demands and outrage, the political posturing all
say: “toxic masculinity” and “white oppression.” But the ultimate goal is power, and to secure that power sex and
race are cudgels, implements employed to assist in the deconstruction of our
culture and our history.
The feminists and professional anti-racists have little
interest in indicting their own: it doesn’t advance their narrative and their
cause ideologically.
The examples are multiple and numerous, and only those rare
situations—like with a Harvey Weinstein or Anthony Weiner—get serious coverage.
But above all the narrative must be advanced, and the ideological
goal must not be sullied, even if that means casting a blind eye at some of the
most egregious violations of what are the new and supposedly enforced standards
of behavior.
My column, with some edits and additions, was picked up by The Unz Review. And I pass that along to
you today:
THE UNZ REVIEW
Martin
Luther King, the Sex Tapes, and the New American Dogmatism
The
news broke (in England) back on May 26 that David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize
winning biographer of the late Martin Luther King Jr., had unearthed a cache of
new documents, many supposedly under strict lock-and-key at least until 2027,
detailing some horrific cases of sexual activity by King, as many as forty such
incidents, and one in which King stood by, watched and egged on a fellow black
Baptist minister in rape.
Here
is the background: On January 31, 1977, Federal District Judge John Lewis Smith
signed a court order that instructed the FBI to deposit all of its extensive
electronic surveillance material—audio tapes, notes accompanying, etc.—with the
National Archives, sealing them for fifty years. However, as Garrow relates in a blockbuster article
(nearly 8,000 words, with documentation) in the English journal, Standpoint:
…in recent months, hundreds of never-before-seen FBI reports and
surveillance summaries concerning King have silently slipped into public view
on the Archives’ lightly-annotated and difficult-to-explore web site. This has
occurred thanks to the provisions of The President John F. Kennedy
Assassination Records Collection Act, which mandated the public release of tens
of thousands of government documents, many of which got swept up into
congressional investigations of US intelligence agencies predating Judge
Smith’s order. Winnowing the new King items from amidst the Archive’s 54,602
web-links, many of which lead to multi-document PDFs that are hundreds of pages
long, entailed weeks of painstaking work.
In
his long essay Garrow continues his explanation of how supposed-to-be secret
documents and tapes became available to him:
Wiretap summaries…were supposed to be sealed pursuant to Judge
Smith’s 1977 order, but by then the Department of Justice had forced the FBI to
share many of its King records with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Activities, often called the Church Committee after the name of its chairman,
Idaho Democrat Frank Church. In turn, all of the FBI’s documents relating to
the Church Committee and the subsequent House Select Committee on
Assassinations came to be covered by the 1992 Kennedy assassination records act.
Now,
Garrow is not a conservative, no right wing fanatic out to besmirch the
reputation of the late civil rights icon. Not at all.
He
was—at least until this article and its implications—a respected liberal author
and academic, whose biography of King, Bearing the Cross (1986),
won him praise from the Left and a Pulitzer, and which has been used as the
basis of film and screen adaptations.
But
after his Standpoint essay, The Washington Post dropped the guillotine’s blade on him:
he had said and written too much, he was no longer a “respectable” (that is,
establishment liberal) historian, his findings were pronounced to be “dubious”
and “of little value.” Indeed, the Post found a whole slew of its favored
leftwing “historians” to literally denounce Garrow for his transgressions, even
though he had written that he believed these new revelations would not damage
King’s reputations [“No. Not at all. I don’t think that’s possible,” Garrow was
quoted.] Indeed, if the revelations earlier about King’s plagiarism of his
doctoral dissertation and his documented relations with American Communists had
not damaged him [see my investigation published by The Unz Review in 2018],
how could this? But, then, this is the age of #MeToo feminism….
The
FBI recordings and notes document as many as forty “sexual episodes” involving
King, a married man, with women, many of them “rough” and “unnatural” sex. But
perhaps the most revolting occurred when King and a fellow black pastor, Logan
Kearse, were staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C., in early January
1964.
Garrow
continues:
Kearse ‘had brought to Washington several women ‘parishioners’ of
his church”, a newly-released summary document from [FBI Assistant Director
William C.] Sullivan’s personal file on King relates, and Kearse invited King and
his friends to come and meet the women. “The group met in his room and
discussed which women among the parishioners would be suitable for natural or
unnatural sex acts. When one of the women protested that she did not approve of
this, the Baptist minister immediately and forcibly raped her,” the typed summary states, parenthetically citing a specific
FBI document (100-3-116-762) as its source. “King looked on, laughed and offered
advice,” Sullivan or one of his deputies then added in handwriting.
Professor
David Greenberg of Rutgers University, writing in the respected Politico, June
4, raises a number of serious questions about these new revelations and what
they may portend not just for the “King legacy” and its meaning, but also for
how Americans view their history. Unlike The Washington Post and
other zealously leftist media outlets who either ignored the story, or else
downplayed it as “speculation,” not based of substantiated or confirmed fact,
Greenberg—no conservative himself—understands that this new documentation and
its significance should be confronted. It could not simply be explained away or
swept under the carpet and ignored.
Certainly,
as Greenberg admits, many of our American heroes, despite their many virtues,
have had “feet of clay,” have had their faults. Nevertheless, we have continued
to admire them…at least, that has been the case until fairly recently, when, it
seems the fanatical Neo-Marxist social justice warriors have sought to totally
cleanse our culture and our country of practically all figures
of historical significance, specifically if they were white and male. Now no
one is safe from the howling and frenzied mob of brainwashed students and
professional race-and-sex warriors.
And
it is not just the statues to Confederate volunteers who went off to war and
died for their states, such as the “Silent Sam” monument that was violently
toppled by a crazed mob on the campus of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill on August 20, 2018, or the equestrian monument to Robert E. Lee at
Charlottesville, Virginia. Now literally the existence or names of hundreds of
statues, plaques, schools, highways, and other symbols of historic figures,
including of Founders such as Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, are
severely threatened with disposal in the waste bin of history…and memory.
Will
these new revelations affect King’s contemporary position in America, a
position and symbolism revered not only by the political and cultural Left, but
also by the pseudo-conservative establishment, who also claim his legacy?
Not
likely. The King case is unique. As demonstrated by The Washington Post’s strenuous
attempt to discredit Garrow and defend King as a kind of plaster saint, largely
untouchable, but also illustrated by the reaction of the dominant
Neoconservatives (on Fox News), King’s status will remain sacrosanct in the
increasingly authoritarian culture and society where the new dogmas of race and
sex reign supreme, and woe be to anyone who dares transgress or come close to
denying them.
Witness
an episode on the Laura Ingraham Show (May 29, 2019), after both the
[London] Sunday Times and Daily Mail had
first reported the revelations, Dinesh D’Souza, who fancies himself an
historian of merit, but whose level of historical knowledge and comprehension
is far less than that of my intelligent cocker spaniel Jasper, attempted to
explain that all America’s black leaders historically were conservatives and
Republicans: “[When I think of] the great black Americans of our history I
think of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and Booker T.
Washington,” he said during an interview with
Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “All of these were Republicans, they were
conservatives….” And Martin Luther King was just the latest in that line: he
had his faults, true, but his “message of equality” was far greater and simply
must be celebrated by all, including conservatives. He was, in short, an
epochal giant who ushered in the final stage of completing that revolutionary
message.
And
in this sense, D’Souza like the dominant Neoconservative narrative, echoed
another vaunted exponent of the King mythology, Jonah Goldberg (August 28, 2013):
“…the genius of King’s appeal
to an ideal of colorblindness was deeply patriotic, rooted in the foundational
principles of the republic….When the architects of our
republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was
to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as
white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. In the American context, these are universal appeals. King pleaded
for the fulfillment of America’s classically liberal revolution.”
[Italics mine]
Which
is a complete inversion of the American Founding and a misreading, purposeful
or not, of American history.
The
symbolic canonization of Martin Luther King and the obligatory imposition of
his cult on the nation was and is an action, collaborated in by both the
zealous progressivist Left and the slightly less-Leftist Establishment
conservative movement, with more dogmatic power and enforcement than any
hierarch in Rome or any despot in Soviet Russia ever dreamed of, because it is
more pervasive, far more than skin deep or simply a prophylactic, as the old
Soviet power over Eastern Europe was for forty-five years. It is emblematic of
not only the insistence on external assent in actions and words, but of a
steady internalization which is equally monitored, the slightest variance from
which brings denunciation, shunning, shaming, excommunication, loss of
reputation and position, and even imprisonment.
This,
then, is the legacy of King and those like him, those who protected him and
glorified him, and the so-called civil rights transformation which opened the
door wide for the aberrations and hideous results in racial and sexual
questions we see and experience around us today.
No.
Would that the Garrow revelations meant a serious re-examination of King, but
they probably won’t. For there is literally no one of stature willing, no one
fearless enough, to risk the obloquy and defamation that would follow. We must,
hopefully, wait for some future generation to do that.
A slightly different version of this essay appeared at Dr.
Cathey’s Web site, MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey.
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