Redstate

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Then, and still today, there are some for whom Dr. King was not “black enough.” That note was sounded already in the mid-1960s with the rise of the “black-power movement.” Now-forgotten figures such as Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) derided King as “d’Lord.” White radicals, and radicalized liberals of the political class, cheered them on as they declared that King’s day was past. King was accustomed to receiving death threats from whites, but now he was receiving death threats from blacks who accused him of being an Uncle Tom. When Dr. King was killed in 1968, many on the left said privately, and some said publicly, that it was just as well, since he had outlived his time.

And now, exactly forty years later, these arguments are being revisited. Last Friday in this space, I wrote about Senator Barack Obama’s Philadelphia address on race. While criticizing some of the more bizarre statements of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the senator said, “I could no more disown him than I could disown the black community.” Whatever Obama’s intentions, the implication is that the Rev. Wright is representative of the black community. Thus, however inadvertently, did he and some of those who wrote in defense of his speech reinforce an ugly stereotype of blacks being just a little, and maybe more than a little, crazy. The suggestion is a vile slander of the great majority of black Americans.