Were Martin Luther King alive in 2024 to celebrate his 95th birthday, what would he have to say about his nation’s contentious racial landscape?
Were Martin Luther King alive in 2024 to celebrate his 95th birthday, what would he have to say about his nation’s contentious racial landscape?
Black Americans still face real inequities.
Look at the huge numbers of crime victims, largely black, generated by terrible progressive policies around public safety.
Or the willed decay of America’s public schools, once an engine of black social mobility: the erasure of all standards in order to conceal the failure of unionized teachers to actually teach.
Still and all, America is a far different place from the nation that saw King felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 at the young age of 39.
The United States has seen a black American serve two terms as president and a black vice-president — something King likely thought even his children would never see.
Black people routinely serve at the top levels of the Cabinet, on the Supreme Court, in the Senate as well as the House, as state governors. Indeed, race is no longer any barrier not just to the ballot box, but to elective office.
Here in New York, Carl Heastie became the first black Assembly speaker in 2015; Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the first black woman state Senate majority leader in 2019. And Brooklyn’s Rep. Hakeem Jeffries is now the first black politician to lead a major party in the US House of Representatives, poised to be the first black speaker.
Such achievements surely would cheer Dr. King, for it was all a long time coming. And it came about because the movement of which King was the public face fundamentally transformed America’s sensibility.
Born in the churches of the South, the civil-rights movement challenged white America to purge itself of racism.
