I’m borrowing this answer, with permission, from Quora.
If Martin Luther King Jr. was alive today, would he assist “Black Lives Matter” succeed in their goals peacefully?
Paul White Answered:
Many conservatives have a romanticized view of Martin Luther King Jr. which entails him being some upright, morally pure man who singlehandedly managed to defeat racism by being nice and somehow managing to convince White people that race is irrelevant. Many liberals also have a romanticized view of him, though from the different perspective. They see him as merely another figure in the perpetual social revolution towards inevitable “progress”, and that he would as a result support all other movements in this perpetual march towards what liberals call “progress”. They point to the fact that conservatives of his day hated him and were against the riotous behavior of his supporters, much as many conservatives are against Black Lives Matter and their riotous behavior today.
Aftermath of riot of MLK supporters
BLM riot ongoing
The liberal analysis has a degree of truth, yes, conservatives did not like MLK back in the 1960s, but that is meaningless in relation to conservatives today. Conservatives are perhaps the most spineless demographic in the country, and so they adopt every liberal policy and idea after liberals push it down the public’s throat. Not only has this been seen with the 1960s social movements, but even much more recent phenomena, like gay marriage, or even more recently with transgenderism. While liberals are practically religious in their fanaticism and so they can normalize any idea they want no matter how absurd, conservatives are passive and just rely on whichever crazy liberal idea is fashionable to blow over, which of course never happens.
It also true that Martin Luther King Jr. despite being nominally Christian (I say “nominally” because he rejected the idea that biblical miracles, even when preformed by Christ happened or even could have happened[1]) was quite socially liberal. I do not think he would be particularly socially conservative, he might have some reservations about the most extreme forms of sexual degeneracy one sees, like prepubescent drag queens dancing at homosexual bars and having grown men throw money at them as they sexualize themselves[2], but that would probably not be a deal-breaker for him, especially considering that his primary aim would be to promote the collective interests of his race, not social morality.
The conservative fantasy version of MLK is completely unfounded, even ignoring the plagiarism[3], adultery, and laughing at a woman getting raped in front of him by his entourage[4], politically speaking, he was not what conservatives make him out to be anyway. His attitude was not just “lets be equal to the White man and live and let live” as a he made it out in public, but he supported Whites paying Blacks for reparations for slavery, saying:
“No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. . . . The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement.”
He was also a supporter of mandatory racial quotas in employment, regardless of qualification, saying:
“For instance, if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas,”
On White people themselves, he had no kind words, saying:
“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”
This is quite ironic considering he had to rely on the goodwill of White people to rally behind him and support him and his agenda.
He was also warned multiple times by the FBI that his closest advisor, Stanley Levison,
was supported by the Soviet Union, and despite these warnings, he ignored them. The book Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin by John Barron, which tells the story of an FBI agent who infiltrated not only the communist movement in the United States, but also various communist movements around the world, meeting with top leaders like Mao and Khrushchev. According to that book, Stanley Levison was not only supported by the Soviet Union, but was one of the biggest financial contributors to the Communist Party USA. It was in fact because of MLK’s consistent refusal to clean house of those with direct ties to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union that then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, himself sympathetic to King, allowed the FBI to begin spying on him to begin with.
King also relied on cooperation with the Communist Party, various of its members, as well as various front groups for both financial support and media outreach, despite many of them having direct ties to the Soviet Union, such as Aubrey Williams, James Dombrowski, Carl Braden, William Melish, Ella J. Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Benjamin Smith, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, the Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, and the National Lawyers Guild.
It should also be noted that the media back then, just as it does today, was completely on the side of the self-proclaimed “progressives” on the matter. In fact, without mainstream media support, which portrayed all the opponents of MLK as simply mindless, idiotic “racists” (already a taboo back then) and portraying King as a heroic figure of justice, love, and tolerance. Ironically, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover,
supposedly super-duper racist and evil who wanted to stop King at every turn, refused to disclose to the public or the media (though the latter would probably not even report on it) the information they had gathered in their wiretapping of King, which would have certainly destroyed him. This serves as a lesson to conservatives for the future, no matter how much “fair play” you do, if you do not submit to the agenda of liberals, they will destroy you and your reputation anyway if you are opposed to them.
Ultimately, what MLK supported and believed in was not much different to what BLM supports today, except perhaps BLM is more explicitly vulgar about it, so yes, MLK would undoubtedly be a BLM supporter and activist were he alive today. Liberals would have no problem with the real MLK, as they correctly assess about themselves, whether conservatives would go along with the real him were he alive today simply because of the cult that has grown around him even though he is completely against everything they stand for is hard to say.
Personally, even when I was a conservative, I found the cult of Martin Luther King Jr., especially among conservatives, to be very cringeworthy. I didn’t have any problems with Blacks or other non-Whites, but I didn’t see him as being particularly heroic. Certainly he was no Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Davy Crockett, John Winthrop, Patrick Henry, or anyone like that. I hope that most conservatives are like how I was, and would stand up to King if shown the real version of him, but I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Really, it is only a matter of time before conservatives begin to worship BLM in the same way and for us to have a George Floyd Day in which we genuflect to his greatness.
That is, it is a matter of time unless conservatives actually grow a spine and begin to fight back.
Footnotes:
[1] Was Martin Luther King Jr. a Christian?[2] Are progressives normalising paedophilia? 11 year old dances at a gay bar while adults throw money at him[3] Checking for plagiarism shows Martin Luther King plagiarized[4] Martin Luther King Jr ‘watched and laughed’ as woman was raped, secret FBI recordings allege
