Observances

Here's a screen shot from yesterday's National Review Online. Not even a token actual remembrance of Martin Luther King, JR. or a nod in the direction of the civil rights movement. Nope, to the editors of NRO MLK Day stands purely as a good opportunity to discuss the thesis that one important source of injustice in the United States is that black people have things too easy thanks to "preferences." Of course, I suppose it is a step forward from Will Herberg's September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" (note the scare quotes around civil rights):

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

The lawlessness of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation didn't , of course, much bother National Review. Nor did the lawlessness of widespread efforts throughout the South to deny African-Americans their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But civil disobedience? Affirmative action? That stuff stirs the heart to protest -- something must be done!