Joe Biden has said: “Even Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact the George Floyd’s death did.”
In 1968, Joe Biden was in process of graduating near the bottom of his class in law school. I was working in radio and have a different recollection of the events of 4 April than he seems to have.
Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question “Is it right?”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces.Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
On 4 April, 1968, I was 20 years old. That evening, I had the news shift at WLAC, a clear channel AM station in Nashville. In 1968, it was the number one R&B station in the country. Just as my shift was beginning, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis. One of the things I learned that night was the importance of getting the facts right.
I held off commenting on the Covington Kid v. Native American story this past weekend. The initial video didn’t look good, but it also didn’t make sense to me. I waited for corroborating facts, and none appeared. In fact, the additional raw footage that surfaced has discredited the narrative spun around the original edited version. It now looks to me as if someone used the edited video to tell a lie, and that lie resulted in a social media mob rioting, trying to figuratively burn down the lives of some kids who got in the way of The Narrative.
Both morality and the facts matter.
Twitter permanently suspended my business and personal accounts in 2015 based on false allegations of targeted abuse. They restored my business account (but not my personal account) when those claims failed in court. If Twitter really desired to be a trustworthy and safe social media platform, it would suspend the accounts that engaged in targeted abuse of the Covington high school students. Based on my experience, I doubt that Twitter will do the right thing.
@jack, prove me wrong.
UPDATE—
UPDATE 2—My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has these thoughts here.
Kyle Smith has a post over at NRO about the possible effects on Democrats of being perceived as the Party of Kaepernick. While wokeness may appeal to the leftmost members of the Democrats’ base, it may not have the broad appeal necessary to create a winning coalition of voters.
The Kaepernick-led anthem protests were wrong-headed to begin with. Try to follow this logic: The misbehavior of a few police officers means the police in general should be reviled. And if we revile the police the entire American project is to be rebuked by protesting the anthem. Martin Luther King Jr., by contrast, said his stirring vision was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” He called upon us to live up to American ideals. That isn’t Kaepernick’s message.
Read the whole thing.
Indeed, as Smith notes, the hit Nike has taken to its stock value may wind up being an in-kind contribution to the Republicans. That’s fitting. Dr. King was a Republican
The time is always right to do what’s right.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the spring of 1968, I was working at WLAC in Nashville. WLAC is a clear channel AM station that covers 28 states and a large swath of the Caribbean islands at night. During the day, the station was programmed for an upper middle-class local audience in Nashville and referred to itself as “News Radio 1510.” At night, it was the number one R&B station in the country and called itself “Blues Radio 1510.” To make the transition from one format to the other, there was a block of programs that ran from 6 to 8 pm. It started with a local newscast and a series of news, sports, and commentary programs from CBS that ran from 6:00 to 6:35. They were followed by taped programs beginning with a financial infomercial followed by a right-wing political broadcast, a religious program, and a southern gospel music program. Then, the R&B DJs (John R, Hoss Allen, and Gene Nobles) hit the air from 8 pm to 4 am.
My news shift ran from 4 to 10:30 pm. From 6 until almost 8, I was usually the only person at the station’s studios other that the guard at the front door. I did the local newscast from the operator’s position in Master Control and ran the console to bring in the CBS programs, play the recorded local commercials, do station breaks, and play the taped programming.
For many years, CBS radio used a cuing system that consisted of brief chirps transmitted during pauses in programs. Those chirps operated display equipment the network affiliates used to signal what was happening next. In the ’60s, the display was rather crude—an illuminated stepper wheel numbered 0 through 9. One kind of chirp caused the wheel to increment one position upward. Another kind of chirp reset the wheel to 0. At WLAC, the Netalert box was set up in a rack behind the master control operator. We couldn’t see it, but we could just barely hear the device increment. It wasn’t quite loud enough for our mic to pick it up. 5 seconds before a program started, the box would step to a 1 (program cue), and at the end of a program the box would step to 2 (end cue) and then reset to 0. Occasionally, the box would step to 3 for a news bulletin.
So here’s what happened on the evening of 4 April, 1968.
6:28:49 CBS: … Phil Rizzuto, CBS Sports [second netalert chirp, reset chirp]
6:28:50 RECORDED COMMERCIAL: Star Chrysler/Plymouth
6:29:50 LIVE: This is News Radio 1510, WLAC, the broadcasting service of the Life and Casualty Insurance …
6:29:55 CBS: [netalert chrip]
6:29:55 LIVE: … Company, in Nashville, Tennessee. Stay tuned for the Minority Report from CBS at 6:30.
6:30:00 CBS: Dead air
6:30:15 CBS: [second and third chirps]
6:30:25 CBS: This is Douglas Edwards, CBS News New York. Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King, Jr., has been shot in Memphis, Tennessee.
That night, a 20-year-old white kid working as the newscaster on an R&B station with 2,000,000 listeners learned the importance of getting the story right.
There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
The time is always right to do what is right.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But, conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe or politic, nor popular but take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is true that behavior cannot be legislated, and legislation cannot make you love me, but legislation can restrain you from lynching me, and I think that is kind of important.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
There were no Republicans speakers at the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington. That wasn’t true of the original March. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Republican.
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire!
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York!
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi!
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that matter.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.
—Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream, 28 August, 1963
And the President thinks that Dr. King would approve of Occupy Wall Street?