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Memories in Memphis

On a recent trip to the South, I found myself in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King, Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet just over thirty years ago. Memphis, I discovered, is home to a “National Civil Rights Museum,” created by a local trust of African-Americans active in civil rights causes. Tucked out of the way on a city side-street, the museum is housed in the building that was once the Lorraine Motel, the very site where Dr. King was murdered.

Except for two white 1960s Cadillac convertibles, the parking lot outside the motel is empty, part of the museum’s plan to preserve the memories of that somber day in April three decades ago. The cars belonged to King and his entourage, and have been left as they were the morning he was killed. Above them, a wreath hangs from a balcony railing to mark the spot where he fell. Beyond is the room where he had slept the night before. It, too, is preserved exactly as it was, the covers pulled back, the bed unmade, the breakfast tray laid out, as though someone would be coming to pick it up.

Inside the building, the first floor of the motel has vanished completely. It has been hollowed out for the museum exhibits, and the cavernous room has become a silent stage for the dramas of the movement King once led. These narratives are recounted in documents and photographs, some the length of wall frescoes, bearing images as inspirational today as then. In the center of the hall, the burned shell of a school bus recalls the freedom rides and the perils their passengers once endured. Scattered about are small television screens whose tapes recapture the moments and acts that once moved a nation. On one screen, a crowd of well-dressed young men and women perpetually braves police dogs and water-hoses, vainly attempting to turn them back. It is a powerful tribute to a movement and leader that were able to win battles against overwhelming odds by exerting moral force over an entire nation.

As a visitor reaches the end of the hall, however, a corner turns to a jarring, discordant sight. Two familiar faces stare out from a wall-size monument that seems strangely out of place. The faces are Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, leaders of the Nation of Islam. Aside from one of King himself, there are no other portraits of similar dimension in the museum. It is clear that its creators intended to establish these men along with King as spiritual avatars of the civil rights cause.

For one old enough to have supported King, such a view seems incomprehensible. At the time of these struggles, Malcolm X was King’s great antagonist in the black community, leading its resistance to the civil rights hope. The Black Muslim publicly scorned King’s March on Washington as “ridiculous” and predicted the failure of the civil rights movement King led because the white man would never willingly give black Americans such rights. He rejected King’s call to non-violence and his goal of an integrated society, and in so doing earned the disapproval of the American majority that King had wooed and was about to win. Malcolm even denied King’s racial authenticity, redefining the term “Negro”—which King and his movement had used to describe themselves—to mean “Uncle Tom.”

King was unyielding in the face of these attacks. To clarify his opposition to Malcolm X’s racism, King refused to appear on any platform with him, effectively banning Malcolm from the community of respect. The other heads of the principal civil rights organizations, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the Urban League’s Whitney Young, joined King in enforcing this ban. It was only in the last year of Malcolm’s life, when the civil rights cause was all but won, and when Malcolm had left the Nation of Islam and rejected its racism, that King finally relented and agreed to appear in the now-famous photograph of the two that became iconic after their deaths.

This very reconciliation—more a concession on Malcolm’s part than King’s—might argue the appropriateness of Malcolm’s place in a civil rights museum. Malcolm certainly earned an important place in any historical tribute to the struggle of the descendants of Africans to secure dignity, equality, and respect in a society that had brought them to its shores as slaves. His understanding of the psychology of oppression, his courage in asserting the self-confidence and pride of black Americans and his final conversion might make him worthy of inclusion in the temple of a man who was never a racist and whose movement he scorned.

But what about Elijah Muhammad? What is a racist and the founder of a hate cult doing in a monument to the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King? In contrast to Malcolm’s portrait, Elijah Muhammad’s is a truly perverse intrusion. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad mirror the white supremacist doctrines of the Southern racists against whom King and the civil rights movement did battle. According to Elijah’s teachings, white people were invented 6,000 years ago by a mad scientist named Yacub, in a failed experiment to dilute the blood of human beings who at the time were all black. The result was a morally tainted strain of humanity—“white devils” who went on to devastate the world and oppress all other human beings, and whom God would one day destroy in a liberating Armageddon. Why is the image of this bizarre racist blown up several times life-size to form the iconography of a National Civil Rights Museum? It is as though someone had placed a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Lincoln Memorial.

After leaving the museum, it occurred to me that this image reflected a truth about the afterlife of the movement King created, whose new leaders had squandered his moral legacy after his death. This decline is reflected in many episodes of the last quarter-century: the embrace of racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton; the indefensible causes of Tawana Brawley, O.J. Simpson, the Los Angeles race rioters and numerous others; the Million Man March on Washington, organized by the racist leader of the Nation of Islam and cynically designed to appropriate the moral mantle of King’s historic event.

The impact of such episodes is compounded by the silence of black civil rights leaders over racial outrages committed by African-Americans against non-black groups—the anti-Korean incitements of black activists in New York, the mob attacks by black gangs on Asian and white storeowners during the Los Angeles riot, the lynching of a Hasidic Jew by a black mob in Crown Heights, and a black jury’s acquittal of his murderer. The failures of civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and Julian Bond to condemn black racists, or black outrages committed against other ethnic communities, have been striking in contrast to the demands such leaders make on the consciences of whites—or to the moral example set by King when he dissociated his movement from the racist preaching of Malcolm X.

The moral abdication of black civil rights leaders is integrally related to their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatreds are a by-product of their anti-Americanism. As a result of this alliance, ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry, not only in the African-American community but among white “liberals” in elite educational institutions as well.¹¹ Harvard’s prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, for example, provided an academic platform for lecturer Noel Ignatiev to launch “whiteness studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is an oppressive “social construct” which must be “abolished.”

Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism, Viking, 1997.

The magazine Race Traitor is the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” This is hardly a new theme on the left, echoing, as it does, Susan Sontag’s equally perverse claim that “the white race is the cancer of history.” (Sontag eventually expressed regrets about her remark, not because it was a racial smear, but out of deference to cancer patients who might feel unjustly slurred.) According to the Race Traitor intellectuals, “whiteness” is the principal scourge of mankind, an idea that Louis Farrakhan promoted at the Million Man March when he declared that the world’s “number one problem . . . is white supremacy.” Consequently, according to Race Traitor, “the key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.” The new racism expresses itself in slogans directly out of the radical Sixties. According to the Whiteness Studies revolutionaries, “the abolition of whiteness” must be accomplished “by any means necessary.” To underscore that this slogan means exactly what it says, the editors of Race Traitor have explicitly embraced the military strategy of American neo-Nazis and the militia movement, and call for a John Brown-style insurrection that would trigger a second American civil war.

These attitudes promote a widespread denigration of Jews, Arabs, Central Europeans, Mediterranean Europeans, East Indians and Armenians—who are multi-ethnic and often dark-skinned, but who for official purposes (and under pressure from civil rights groups) are designated “white.” Unlike anti-black attitudes, which are universally decried, and would trigger the expulsion of their purveyors from any liberal institution in America, this racism is not only permitted but encouraged, especially in the academic culture responsible for the moral and intellectual instruction of tomorrow’s elites.

An anthology of the first five years of Race Traitor has been published by Routledge, a prestigious, academic-oriented publishing house, and was the winner of the 1997 American Book Award. Its jacket features praise by Harvard professor Cornel West, who writes: “Race Traitor is the most visionary, courageous journal in America.” West’s featured role as a speaker at the Million Man March and his coziness with Farrakhan have done nothing to tarnish his own academic reputation, his popularity with students or his standing in the civil rights community. The same is true of Afrocentrist racists like Derrick Bell and the late John Henrik Clarke, who have also been honored voices among the academic elites for decades, often running entire departments. By contrast, a distinguished Harvard scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, who is white, was driven out of his classroom by black student leftists who decided that his lectures on slavery were politically incorrect because they didn’t reflect prevailing leftist prejudices.

In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a common currency of the “progressive” intelligentsia. Examples range from Communist professor Angela Davis, who recently told an audience of undergraduates at Michigan State that the number-one problem in the world was white people, to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose boundless suspicions of white America amount to a demonization almost as intense as Elijah Muhammad’s. In her introduction to an anthology about the O.J. Simpson case, Birth of a Nation ’Hood, for example, Morrison compared the symbolic meanings of the O.J. Simpson case to D.W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, insinuating that white America acted as the KKK in pursuing the guilty Simpson for the murders of Ron Goldman and Simpson’s ex-wife.

With university support, Race Traitor intellectuals in the field of “whiteness studies” have produced an entire library of “scholarly” works to incite hatred against white America, against “Euro-American” culture, and against American institutions in general. Thus, according to the editors of Race Traitor: “Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, race is not the work of racists. On the contrary, it is reproduced by the principal institutions of society, among which are the schools (which define ‘excellence’), the labor market (which defines ‘employment’), the law (which defines ‘crime’), the welfare system (which defines ‘poverty’), and the family (which defines ‘kinship’). . . .” Left-wing racists, like the editors of Race Traitor, characterize the presence of whites on this continent as an unmitigated catastrophe for “peoples of color” and an offense to everything that is decent and humane. In the perspective of these race radicals, white America is the “Great Satan.” In academic cant, they replicate the poisonous message of the black racists of the Nation of Islam.

I once occupied the other side of the political divide, but my views on race have not changed over the years. I opposed racial preferences and double standards when segregationists supported them in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. I believed then that only a government neutral towards racial groups was compatible with a multi-ethnic democracy. I believe that today. Where my views have changed is in the appreciation I now have for America’s constitutional framework and its commitment to those ideals. America’s unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical understanding that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England led the world in abolishing slavery and in establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion. Or that “people of color” are attempting to immigrate to our shores in large numbers in order to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them, as theirs do not.

The creation of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire has afforded greater privileges and protections to all minorities than any society extant. European-American culture is one that the citizens of this nation can take enormous pride in, precisely because its principles provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white, non-Christian and ethnically diverse. That is why America’s democratic and pluralistic framework remains an inspiration to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the understanding of those who have not been seduced by the worldview of the progressive left.

The left’s war against “whiteness” and America’s democratic culture is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are updated versions of the ideas of the Marxist left that supported the Communist empire. The same radicals who launched the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct faculties of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts and leaders of this left display a striking continuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America’s national identity and, in particular, of the moral, political and economic institutions that are its social foundation.

In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of “class bias” was used by Communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with which they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into “enemies of the people,” a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror in revolutionary France through the Stalinist purges in Russia and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left’s self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on accusation and defamation to promote its increasingly incoherent worldview.

It is not that no one else in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so effectively. In the battle over California’s Civil Rights Initiative, which outlawed racial preferences, the left’s opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy whose purpose was to strip its proponents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, himself an African-American, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the nonexistent connection, paying his expenses for the trip. During the Initiative campaign, NAACP and ACLU lawyers who debated its proponents relied almost exclusively on charges of racism and alarmist visions of a future in which African-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights. In their TV spots, the anti-Initiative groups actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses to stigmatize Initiative supporters. A tremulous voice-over by actress Candace Bergen linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts if its proponents succeeded. They even suggested that maternity leaves for pregnant women would become illegal if the law was passed.

The years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative have refuted every one of the left’s dire predictions. Women have not lost their rights, and blacks have not been thrown back to the segregationist era. Even the enrollment of blacks in California’s higher education institutions has not significantly dropped, although demagogues of the left—including President Clinton—have used a shortfall in black admissions at the very highest levels of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to mislead the public into thinking that an overall decline in black enrollment has taken place. One year after the Initiative’s adoption, enrollment had significantly fallen at only six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that consisted of more than seventy-four programs total. Yet there have been no apologies or acknowledgments of these facts from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other groups responsible for the campaign against the Civil Rights Initiative, or for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.

When an article of mine on racial issues was published in Salon magazine, it was attacked by award-winning African-American novelist Ishmael Reed, who suggested that I did not really care about what happened to blacks. Reed’s not-so-subtle imputation, that I was a racist, was typical of the way leftists approached any disagreement over policy that touched on race.²² In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in my article in support of my theses. The left’s response was to dismiss them as “inauthentic” blacks, “sambos,” “neocons” and “black comedians.” For leftists, the only good black was a black who parroted their party line.

A chapter in David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.

There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed. I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the absolute best that this life and this society have to offer. My extended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who disagree with my views on these matters. But all of them understand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for all. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals, not groups, are what matter, and race is not a factor at all.

September 30, 1999, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24316. This was also the introductory chapter to David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.

¹ Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism, Viking, 1997.

² A chapter in David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence, 1999.