MLK Day 2024: Celebrating a Great Thinker

“At cusp, choice is. With choice, spirit grows.” — Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

MLK would know. We Americans are at cusp. This year we have a grave choice. Either we continue our flawed democracy and our long quest for a “more perfect Union,” or we take the path downward toward one-man rule, chaos, and tyranny.

Why would MLK know? He was not just a good man, in the Biblical sense of that word. He was also a brilliant thinker.

MLK could invent a pretty future and give us Biblical-style injunctions to inspire us to greatness. That he did in his “I have a dream” speech. But like few American pols before or since, MLK could also predict the future by analyzing cause and probable effect.

In his speech on April 4, 1967, just one year before his assassination, MLK did just that. He foresaw the catastrophic effects of our blunder in Vietnam and came out against that war. He had waited, perhaps for years, out of reluctance to break with his one-time ally in equality, LBJ.

That’s why MLK’s 1967 speech was so fraught. As we all know today, LBJ had gambled his personal legacy, his “Great Society,” and his presidency on escalating the most bloody and tragic foreign-policy mistake in our history. (Next to our war in Vietnam, which killed 50,000-plus Americans and about 3.5 million Southeast Asians and at one time involved over half a million US troops, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were puny.)

Both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were joint works of MLK and LBJ. Neither could have pushed them into law without the other. MLK provided the political impetus. His marches, speeches and non-violent protests forced our people—and our pols— to see and taste the bitter fruits of segregation and Jim Crow up close and personal. Then LBJ used the social conscience that MLK has aroused to push the laws through Congress by twisting the arms of reluctant Southern bigots.

I’ve thought and read a lot about those legislative triumphs, and I still don’t know how LBJ managed them. From the perspective of some sixty years later, we can now see how resilient was and is bigotry in America. It’s like mold in a shower or bathtub that keeps growing back, despite repeated applications of bleach.

So MLK thought long and hard before giving his 1967 speech, condemning the military obsession of his erstwhile partner in equality, who had pushed through the greatest legal advances in equality since the post-Civil-War Amendments and their Disqualification Clause.

Everyone who wants to know MLK’s greatness should read or listen to that speech. It’s a work of literature, with ample quotations from the Bible and felicitous turns of phrase. But it’s also a brilliant work of prognostication.

In it, MLK predicted precisely what would (and did) happen if we continued our fatal obsession with Vietnam as a false fulcrum of Communist domination. We lost focus on social and economic progress at home. LBJ’s “Great Society” came to an ignominious end. The militarization of our nation and our economy accelerated. And all this led to the neglect of labor and minorities and the apotheosis of weapons of war as solutions to social problems like crime.

If you read that speech with a knowledge of subsequent history, you might think that it came from divine inspiration. I don’t. I just think that MLK was smarter than most of us.

He had devoted his life to practical, cause-and-effect thinking about political and social problems. Those years of hard and careful thinking paid off. He was the ultimate realist, seeing the good and bad in all of us and in our social history. He didn’t think in vague abstractions like “freedom,” without considering what kind of freedom and how that kind of freedom for some would affect others. Our own Supreme Court ought to adopt his brand of cause-and-effect thinking as it decides whether our States may disqualify Trump under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.  

Like Mahatma Gandhi before him and Nelson Mandela after, both of whom had freed disfavored majorities, MLK figured out how to reduce the oppression of a disfavored minority without violence. He relied on the cooperation and empathy that, far more than our overhyped opposable thumbs, are our species’ more important survival traits. Isn’t it interesting that the only three leaders in history to have achieved similar feats without violence were non-white?

But I digress. Today we Americans have a clear choice. We can follow a man without empathy, without logic, whose grasp of cause and effect is limited to manipulating his fellow creatures by intimidation, coercion, delay, stonewalling and projection. Or we can follow a good man, with solid values and immense wisdom and experience, whose only notable deficiencies are in oratory and perhaps age.

If MLK had not been assassinated—along with JFK and RFK in the same decade!—he would be 95 today, younger than Jimmy Carter. As he did in his short but influential life, he would urge us to quell our emotion and suppress our fears. For our times are not just scary ones. We have a choice. We have a chance.

We can re-elect Joe Biden and continue his and MLK’s work to pursue equality, level our economy, empower labor, make voting universal, and secure peace through strength and cooperation abroad. We can follow the leadership of strong and smart Black people in positions they never could have held in MLK’s time: Lloyd J. Austin III, Alvin Bragg, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., James Clyburn, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Letitia James, Hakeem Jeffries, Wesley Moore, and Fani Willis, among many others.

With just a few more votes in the Senate, we can kill the filibuster forever. Then, with federal legislation, we can outlaw gerrymandering and voter suppression, restore women’s reproductive rights nationwide, empower labor unions as FDR did, suppress the tech monopolies that are crushing our economy and letting lies and propaganda overwhelm us, and make billionaires and oligarchs pay their fair share of taxes.

Think of Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House! Last year, he missed winning that office by only six votes out of 435.

MLK was not just a good man and a great leader. He was a brilliant, clear thinker. He would see both the opportunity and the danger in our present times. And he would urge us, as only he could, to seize our chance with both hands, work hard, and never give up hope.


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