☝WATCH/READ: Martin Luther King's Last Speech Discussed Our First Amendment☝
How can those who celebrate King turn a blind eye to attacks on the free speech values that made his activism possible?
Jamil Jivani | NATIONAL POST
Each year, when Martin Luther King Jr. Day passes, it becomes clearer that many who celebrate the civil rights leader do not share his commitment to free speech.
King has become a political symbol for fighting racism. His most famous comments, such as “I have a dream,” are quoted to inspire us to imagine a more just, fairer world.
Yet, many of the people who celebrate King each January turn a blind eye toward attacks on the free speech that made King’s activism possible.
The Democratic Party, which sings King’s praises to the rooftops, has been exposed by Elon Musk’s Twitter Files as pushing for the censoring of political dissidents on social media. In Canada, the Liberal party celebrates King while seeking draconian control over what Canadians can say on social media via online censorship legislation.
How would King fare under the rule of today’s Democrats or Liberals? One can only speculate. But the civil rights movement’s orientation to challenging the wealthy and the powerful is certainly at odds with the anti-free speech actions taken by wealthy and powerful left-wing political parties.
In King’s final speech, delivered in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968 (one day before he was assassinated), he showed that his demands for justice on behalf of Black Americans were not rooted in political philosophy but in religious conviction.
“We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world,” he declared. “We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”
To make such demands, King relied on free speech. Only in a society that allows for free expression could a reverend seek to upend the political culture around him, and succeed in doing so.
The cause that brought King to Memphis on the eve of his assassination was the plight of sanitation workers. Black sanitation workers were not compensated fairly nor were they guaranteed adequate worker safety conditions. King threatened large-scale economic boycotts in cities across America if changes weren’t made with the needs of working-class Black families in mind. He specifically called out Coca-Cola and Sealtest as corporations worth boycotting.
Again, American free speech values made it possible for a man like King to openly challenge such powerful corporate interests and for such challenges be taken seriously.
Reading King’s final speech, it’s clear that he was a special voice in American politics. For example, in explaining why all people, not just Black sanitation workers, should be concerned by what was happening in Memphis, King masterfully referenced the Good Samaritan parable’s lesson on empathy. “The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me,’” King explained. The real question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”
But it’s puzzling how institutions can celebrate some of his political ideas while also undermining free speech. In the United Kingdom, for example, the country’s largest university, Open University, King for his “radical” political ideas. Yet, it also advocates in favour of anti-free-speech cancel culture. According to The Telegraph, an Open University anti-racism training course offered at over 100 other universities teaches that “cancel culture” helps advance “social and racial justice.”
The contradiction is obvious. You don’t get King’s contributions to “social and racial justice” without free speech. Cancel culture is antithetical to what the U.S. civil rights movement stood for.
If Martin Luther King Jr. Day is to mean anything, then it must be an invitation to have an honest look at how progress has been realized over the past century. King’s legacy affirms why we don’t have progress without free speech.
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