A favored view of many conservatives is to blame President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Great Society program for generating dependency and dystopia within black communities. At the same time, they rarely tarnish the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
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Is it because King’s agenda differed substantially from that of LBJ and the Great Society? I think not. Johnson put into practice those programs that King and the Civil Rights movement championed. The record shows that King’s proposed agenda went beyond that of the Great Society to include wealth redistribution and reparations for the Negro.
The reason, I believe, that conservatives leave MLK Jr.’s image intact and draw attention to LBJ’s programs is twofold. One, King has been canonized in the eyes of both blacks and whites. His career with the march on Selma, the “I have a dream” speech, and his dramatic and tragic assassination contributed to a mystique that made him immortal. Secondly, King’s message of racial harmony stood in stark contrast to the rhetoric of black power separatists of his day like Malcolm X or the race hustlers of today like BLM.
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However, like his contemporaries in the Civil Rights movement, MLK Jr. was focused on securing political power for blacks and did not stress the need as George Washington Carver saw it for black Americans to be centered on education, self-reliance, useful work, economic independence, character, and service to others. Carver was less a political activist than a practical educator who believed that knowledge and productive skills could provide a path out of poverty and dependence. Frankly, it was the message of Carver that blacks needed to take to heart. The political power that King and others stressed would have naturally flowed from the personal improvement that Carver recommended.
Here we are sixty years after the Civil Rights movement, looking back at its destructive wake that has left blacks with a sense of little agency over their lives and a resentment toward whites, even after the blacks have attained the political power that King had sought for them.
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