It was quite strange to see all of the “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t support today’s Democratic Party” tweets and postings on MLK Day, especially since it was only a few days before the Inauguration of Joe Biden and a couple of weeks after Neo-confederates received clear Republican backing to try to decapitate congress.
I believe they’re saying this because of some crazy non-sense about Abraham Lincoln being a Republican (which was looooong before King’s time) and the Dixiecrats being Democratic (which happened during King’s time).
So, “would Dr. King be a member of the Democratic Party today?”
Oh my God yes, and anyone saying different is absolutely living in denial…
First off, Martin Luther King Jr. was a Democrat when he was alive. And this was the time of segregation, the Dixiecrats, Jim Crow laws, etc.
And yet he still backed JFK/RFK/LBJ because he knew that liberal Democrats would do more for Civil Rights than Northern Republicans…and they did. LBJ scored more Civil Rights victories than any President of the last century.
He could also see that Barry Goldwater believed the Ron Paul logic that Civil Rights couldn’t be mandated at the federal level, which is, of course, a disaster for black people in the Southeast. And pretty much everyone knew Nixon was a bigot, and Eisenhower (although a good man) did very little for Civil Rights.
So if he was a Democratic voter at the time of Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats, why in the world would he not be one today?
I don’t know if there’s a person in either party who believes today’s Democrats are not more liberal on race than they were 50 years ago—and I know Martin Luther King Jr. would be a lot more inspired by the Barack Obamas and Kamala Harris’s than the Donald Trumps and George Bushs.
Tellingly, just about everybody who actually marched with Dr. King (from John Lewis to Bernie Sanders) is in the Democratic Party.
Come on conservatives; I get that you guys don’t agree with me 95% of the time, but this is an easy one for us to agree on. Although, of course, we won’t…