I start this off knowing that this might be a fool’s errand—trying to guess what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might say in response to recent events. Predicting exactly how a single person might respond a specific event might be impossible. But I have made some study of the man and his thought. Using specific words that he has said and even things he has done, I will make the argument and you can judge for yourself what you think of it. Maybe I am right, maybe I am wrong, but I hope you will at least agree it is a thoughtful argument.
And just to be clear, I am going to ignore the effect that time and history might have on the man. If he was alive today, he would be in his 90’s. He would have lived through the disastrous end of Vietnam, the Nixon resignation, the fall of the Soviet Union, the attack on September 11, 2001, the election of our first black president and three presidential impeachments. It would be impossible to predict how those events, and others, might have changed him. So, I am going to pretend his attitudes were frozen in time in 1968—although in real life, that surely wouldn’t be the case.
Moreover, in the end, Dr. King was a man and an imperfect man. There has only been one perfect man in history and, while Dr. King was a good man, he wasn’t that man. Dr. King would be the first to agree he falls short of perfection. In the end, you have to judge not only whether or not Dr. King would perceive things as I think he might, but how we should perceive these things, ourselves.
What made me want to talk about this is when I found out the other day about a fresh horror from the October 7th massacre. It’s horrifying, but it provides context:
A baby was found in an oven, baked to death by Hamas terrorists, leading Israeli first responder @EliBeerUH recounted to an @RJC gathering last night.
— Dovid Efune (@Efune) October 29, 2023
His group was among the first to respond to and witness the Oct 7 atrocities.
Mr. Efune is a reporter for the New York Sun, so I trust the accuracy of his reporting and it brings a fresh degree of stomach-turning horror to everything that happened. I have talked a lot about the level of pure hatred required to intentionally kill a baby. By definition, you could never have a legitimate grievance against a baby, and it would be nearly impossible to argue self-defense against a baby or anything like that. No, if you kill a baby, it is because you believe that there is something inherently wrong with that baby.
There are two forms of antisemitism. The first is religious—that is, you not only disagree with the religion—which is normal—but your disagreement turns to hatred and bigotry. ‘You are not my religion, therefore you are everything bad in the world!’ or some nonsense like that. But if you are killing babies, that’s not about any belief the baby has—a baby has no understanding of that kind of thing. No, if you are killing babies, you believe that Jews are a race or ethnic group, and, as a group, they are so tainted that even a baby cannot escape it. I am talking about a hatred so deep that most people cannot relate to—they never feel anything remotely like it and do not know what it is like to feel it directed at them.
But Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., experienced that kind of hatred first-hand. One specific example of this came on September 15, 1963, when a racist blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. Four little girls died for no other reason than because they were attending Sunday School and they happened to be black. Dr. King wasn’t there on the day of the bombing, but as a reverend, he was asked to give a eulogy for some of the victims at their funeral. The eulogy was undeniably also designed to send a larger message, but it seems crass to call it ‘political.’ He was hoping to change the minds of millions of Americans, but an issue like this transcends mere politics. You can listen to what he said, here:
I have always believed you could hear barely-contained rage in his voice. Here’s the key text in case you have trouble hearing his words:
This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came.
These children-unoffending, innocent, and beautiful-were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.
And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
And so my friends, they did not die in vain. (Yeah) God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. (Oh yes) And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force (Yeah) that will bring new light to this dark city. (Yeah) The holy Scripture says, ‘A little child shall lead them.’ (Oh yeah) The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland (Yeah) from the low road of man’s inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. (Yeah, Yes) These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilled blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham (Yeah) to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience. (Yeah)
And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour (Yeah Well), we must not despair. (Yeah, Well) We must not become bitter (Yeah, That’s right), nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. (Yeah, Yes) Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.
The rest of the eulogy was dedicated to him trying to actually comfort the families at this time of absolute, unfathomable grief—him being more of a reverend than a civil rights leader, at that point. He was of a different religion than most the families left in mourning on October 7. But in that passage that I just quoted, he wasn’t really talking about faith: He was talking about hatred and its poisonous effects. Sadly, Jews have learned a lot of lessons about that throughout history.
What I am saying is that he would probably would have seen a strong similarity between the cruelty visited upon Israeli families in the October 7th Massacre and the cruelty visited on the families of those four little girls in the 16 Street Baptist Church Bombing. Indeed, he wouldn’t have even accepted the fig leaf that ‘we hate Zionists, not Jews.’ Putting aside that the babies Hamass killed had no ideology, Dr. King said famously that ‘When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking antisemitism.’
So, I think he would say that this cruelty was an indictment of antisemitism just as that church bombing was an indictment of racism. He would see it as no different than the racism in his time. He would see Hamass and all the other terrorists in Palestine as being no different than the white supremacist terrorists that threatened him regularly and eventually ended his life. So, he could have literally copied his eulogy for those little girls in 1963 and, with only a few changes, given the same speech to the Isreali families mourning the death of their children in 2023. Let’s see how simple that could be:
This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came.
These children-unoffending, innocent, and beautiful-were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.
They have something to say to every imam who has remained silent behind the safe security of his mosque. They have something to say to every official in the Palestinian territories [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his people with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of antisemitism. They have something to say to world governments that have compromised with the undemocratic practices of Hamass (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of ivory tower academics. (Speak) They have something to say to every Jew (Yeah) who has passively accepted the Palestinian terrorists and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, Jew and Gentile alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the end of that hatred.
And so my friends, they did not die in vain. (Yeah) God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. (Oh yes) And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these children may well serve as a redemptive force (Yeah) that will bring new light to this dark city. (Yeah) The holy Scripture says, ‘A little child shall lead them.’ (Oh yeah) The death of these little children may lead our whole Holy land (Yeah) from the low road of man’s inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. (Yeah, Yes) These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of race or ethnicity. The spilled blood of these innocent children may cause the whole people of the Middle East (Yeah) to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed, this tragic event may cause the Islamic world to come to terms with its conscience. (Yeah)
And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour (Yeah Well), we must not despair. (Yeah, Well) We must not become bitter (Yeah, That’s right). No, we must not lose faith in our Muslim brothers. (Yeah, Yes) Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.
That is a simple edit to alter it to mourn for the death of Israeli children. With a little more editing, I could have included every innocent person who died on that day.
Still, a sharp-eyed reader might notice that I cut out when he said ‘nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence.’ This is where the left would say ‘aha! See, he would want a cease fire, too!’ After all, the popular image of Dr. King is very much tied up in peaceful protest.
But was he really a complete pacifist?
If you get past his slogans, you will see a more complex picture. For instance, the Huffington Post of all places had an interesting piece called ‘MLK and His Guns.’
MLK and His Guns http://t.co/xOGETUjj7i
— 🇺🇸Lionel🇺🇸 (@LionelMedia) January 19, 2015
And it reads:
One issue on everyone’s mind this Martin Luther King Jr. day was gun control. King’s calls for resolving our differences through peaceful nonviolence are especially poignant after Jared Loughner gunned down six people and wounded several others in Tucson. Amid the clamor for new gun laws, [it’s] appropriate to remember King’s complicated history with guns.
Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.
William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as ‘an arsenal.’
As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King’s house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.
So, Dr. King was denied the right to carry a gun under a legal regime similar to the one the Supreme Court struck down in the recent Bruen case (New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn, Inc. v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022)). But the bottom line is that Dr. King wanted to be able to shoot people who threatened him and his family, and he made sure that there were armed men ready to do violence on his and his family’s behalf.
How do you reconcile that with the fact that Dr. King repeatedly said that he believed in non-violence as a moral principle? I think the answer is simple: Dr. King was not being entirely straight with us. Dr. King claimed repeatedly in his speeches that he was dedicated to strict non-violence as a matter of moral principle and, respectfully, I think he was lying.
Look, one has to understand that the truth is for a long time, our society was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of black people defending themselves. I believe the problem has largely, if not totally, evaporated today. For instance, just the other day I mentioned the Andrew Coffee IV case where a black man was acquitted on self-defense grounds even though he shot at the police, because the jury apparently believed he reasonably thought his home was being invaded by criminals. But if you go back in time, you see that black defendants were not given the same benefit of the doubt they were entitled to.
Thus, I think the answer is that Dr. King decided that non-violence was the best tactic. He always presented it as a moral imperative, but he also was sure to point out that it was impractical. For instance, he once said this when explaining how non-violence was the only road to freedom:
I am convinced that for practical as well as moral reasons, nonviolence offers the only road to freedom for my people. In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. In Vietnam, the United States has evidently decided that it is willing to slaughter millions, sacrifice some two hundred thousand men and twenty billion dollars a year to secure the freedom of some fourteen million Vietnamese. This is to fight a war on Asian soil, where Asians are in the majority. Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of the white Western materialism were at stake.
He said he was morally opposed to violence, but by applying for a concealed carry permit and keeping armed guards around him, he was indicating as plain as day that if he was attacked, he or people acting on his behalf would fight back. There’s nothing wrong with that desire to defend yourself and your family, but it can’t be reconciled with his claim that he was against violence.
Furthermore, Dr. King wasn’t afraid to use violence in his speeches. He often spoke of the danger that if the non-violent movement failed that violence would result. This was a threat. This was (paraphrase), ‘I am asking nicely, but if I fail the next guy won’t be.’
And then there is one final piece of the puzzle. There is one instance where Dr. King actually told us all when he endorsed violence, when he said this:
If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi. But if you enemy has no conscience, like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.
To unpack that a little, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor in Nazi Germany who recognized just how evil the regime was. At first, he attempted peaceful methods of resistance, but when that failed, he joined one of many unsuccessful plots to kill Hitler. So, when Dr. King says, ‘follow Bonhoeffer’ it is immediately understood as a call to get violent.
So, Dr. King wasn’t really against violence. He was against violence when his opponents had a conscience. And the fact he did not get violent with Americans tells you that Dr. King (correctly) believed that Americans had a conscience that could be won over—which is why he is today one of the more revered people in American history. But he also understood that some people had no conscience and violence was the only answer.
Do you think he would have thought Hamass had a conscience? The people who slaughtered innocents, committed mass rape, and decapitated and baked babies? I tend to think he would have seen them for what they were: Antisemitic terrorists not terribly different from the KKK terrorists he faced in his own day—only even more nihilistic. And, in any case, it’s the right way to see them. So, I think he would have supported war against Hamass.
Another question is this. Dr. King painted an optimistic picture of how the horror from a uniquely savage incident can change minds. This is how G-d wrings good out of evil. This probably wasn’t theoretical to him. Prior to World War II, many Americans had a negative view of Jews and believed in concepts like racial segregation. And then as the death camps and concentration camps were liberated and the bigoted people saw exactly where their views might lead, they recoiled in horror. ‘This is where my antisemitism and racism leads?’ they thought in collective shock and it made them look inward. It made them want to become better people. And it shocked the victims of such bigotry, too: ‘We can’t just keep our heads down,a anymore. They might literally try to kill all of us.’ Not only is the birth of Israel a reaction to the collective horror of the holocaust, but so was the entire Civil Rights Movement in America.
So, the question is, is there any hope of wringing any good out of the evil we saw on October 7, 2023? I think so. For one, Dr. King said that to those who opposed racism, it was a time to ‘substitute courage for caution,’ and, applied to today, that is certainly true of the Isrealis fighting back against these terrorists. But what about changing the hearts and minds of the rest?
Just earlier today, I came across this piece, which explained a great deal of what is happening in the media right now:
October 7 was so horrific it threatened to ambush the Palestinian cause. So they did what people have done for centuries: They changed the subject and blamed the Jews. That always works.
— Jewish Journal (@JewishJournal) October 26, 2023
Read the article by @DavidSuissaJJ:https://t.co/zXyPyHT9Am@bariweiss @benshapiro…
To quote from it:
What do you do when a cause you deeply cherish betrays you?
What do you do when you spend a lifetime fighting for the Palestinian cause, and then, overnight, it becomes associated with the butchering, beheading, raping and mutilating of 1400 people, including infants, babies, women, rave dancers, families and the elderly?
How do you spin that?
You might try to deny and downplay, but with all the graphic and gruesome videos out there, that’s not easy. And as much as you’d love to erase the word Palestinian next to the word Hamas, you know the connection is a fact.
No, the only real option is to make so much noise that you drown out the horrible news about the mass murder of Jews.
That’s why immediately after October 7, we saw global protests against Israel and in support of Palestinians. This was before Israel launched its counterattacks. And naturally, when Israel did go after Hamas, the attacks against Jews have only accelerated. On streets around the world and across college campuses, Jew haters are now out in full force. The slaughtering of 1400 Jews is all but forgotten; now it’s all about Israel’s reaction to the massacres.
Whether it’s the media jumping to (falsely) blame Israel for the bombing of a Gaza hospital, or the global cries for a ‘ceasefire’ before Israel has even entered Gaza to eliminate the terrorists and deter future attacks, the world is doing all it can to downplay the narrative of ‘Palestinians as butchers.’
The world’s most popular victims, after all, cannot be allowed to be butchers.
The author goes on to talk about how the Palestinians had been the premiere victims in the world, until they flipped the script:
October 7 introduced 1400 complications.
Suddenly, for one gruesome day, Jews were the oppressed and Palestinians were the oppressors. This was no garden variety Palestinian attack where a few Jews get killed, or a few hundred Hamas rockets are neutralized by Iron Dome and bomb shelters. We’ve gotten used to those. No, this was the mass slaughter of Jews by Palestinians in the most barbaric way possible. This was evil in concentrated form.
He goes on to say that they still dug into the old strategy: ‘They changed the subject and blamed the Jews. That always works.’
But is it working? While the antisemites have been more brazen than ever, they have also faced more consequences than ever. Even the fact-free claims that Israel is committing genocide right this minute carries with it a certain degree of desperation. They have to make the Jews monsters, to make the monstrousness of the Palestinian side seem more palatable. But how long will that denial last? There is work to do, but I share Dr. King’s optimism that most people can be reached and will be reached over time.
