Glenn Beck's Perverse Revision of King's Dream Is Nothing New
"Far too many have either gotten just lazy or they have purposely distorted Martin Luther King's ideas of judge a man by the content of his character," Beck said in June when defending the timing of his rally, which will be held on Saturday's anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. "Lately, in the last twenty years, we've been told that character doesn't matter. Well, if character doesn't matter, then what was Martin Luther King asking people to judge people by?"
Beck insists the event was originally planned for September 12, but that date fell on a Sunday and he couldn't make folks work on the Sabbath. Picking August 28 as the alternate, he says, was a mundane decision: It was the only date that worked for all the principals' schedules. But Beck welcomes the timing. "This is a moment that we reclaim the civil rights movement," he declared on his radio show [2] in May. "It has been so distorted and turned upside down, it's an abomination."
Such theatrics are typical for Beck--his political performances generated $32 million [3] between March 2009 and March 2010—but the ideas behind them are neither new nor particularly radical for the right. Conservatives long ago set out to derail the civil rights movement by co-opting it. Like Beck, the right's Beltway think tanks have always narrowly framed the movement's goals as achieving equal rights and fostering social grace—with victory declared on both fronts. The fact that the proverbial conversation about race is now more focused on racial harmony than racial justice is proof they've succeeded.
Ironically, Beck, Fox and the Tea Party have finally provided today's civil rights leaders a tangible target for challenging this frame-shift. Next generation advocacy groups like Color of Change have consistently targeted Fox, most recently with a campaign to hold the network accountable [4] for Beck's behavior. The NAACP's effort to make the Tea Party take responsibility [5] for racists in its ranks seems like a similar effort to reclaim control of the discussion. Several groups have planned their own march for Saturday, which will culminate on the National Mall. Organizers insist they're not looking for a showdown. "At no point will we interchange," Rev. Al Sharpton told the Washington Post. "We will not desecrate the march and what King stood for."
All of this, of course, begs the question of what King, his movement and this iconic speech in fact stood for—and what reformers stand for today. There are many things about King's dream speech that Beck won't likely point out at this weekend's gathering. Perhaps top among them: the 1963 March on Washington was the work of a war-resisting labor organizer, A. Philip Randolph, and an openly gay man, Bayard Rustin, who was himself a war-resisting socialist.
The event's actual name was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That moniker was a compromise between King, who wanted a more focused event, and Randolph, who helped broker the broad constituency that made the march the largest peacetime gathering in the nation's history at the time. King's iconic speech reflected the event's dual focus on economic and political justice--and it included much, much more than a call to judge people by their character.
King began the speech by harking back to the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation as a "great beacon of light." But he quickly pivoted to the ways in which that light had dimmed. "One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity," King declared. "We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one," he later added.
No one - other than die hard wing-nuts like Sarah Palin take Beck seriously - but it is a mistake to let their circus of depraved ideas and exploitation of people who were truly oppressed go unanswered. While there were probably average wage earners in the crowd, Beck and Palin are making millions off basically calling people names and dreaming up crazy conspiracy theories. No, Glenn Beck Is Not a Civil Rights Icon
My gripe with Glenn Beck has always been with his absurd attempt to claim a connection to Tom Paine.
The furiously self-promotional Fox personality wrote a book last year that he suggested was a contemporary update of Paine's pamphlet "Common Sense."
In fact, Glenn Beck's Common Sense [1] was short on Paine and long on Beck. And it failed to note the founder's canon of criticism of organized religion, concentrated wealth and know-nothing opponents of government. [2]
But, as silly as Beck's attempt to claim Paine might have been, his attempt to associate himself with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a radical critic of not just racism but of an economic system left tens of millions in poverty, would be comic if it was not so sad.
Beck and his followers say they are out to "reclaim the civil rights movement."
Reclaim it from who? Presumably the people who were involved in the civil rights movement.
As Martin Luther King III notes [3]: "My father championed free speech. He would be the first to say that those participating in Beck's rally have the right to express their views. But his dream rejected hateful rhetoric and all forms of bigotry or discrimination, whether directed at race, faith, nationality, sexual orientation or political beliefs. He envisioned a world where all people would recognize one another as sisters and brothers in the human family. Throughout his life he advocated compassion for the poor, nonviolence, respect for the dignity of all people and peace for humanity.
"Although he was a profoundly religious man, my father did not claim to have an exclusionary 'plan' that laid out God's word for only one group or ideology. He marched side by side with members of every religious faith. Like Abraham Lincoln, my father did not claim that God was on his side; he prayed humbly that he was on God's side.
"He did, however, wholeheartedly embrace the "social gospel." His spiritual and intellectual mentors included the great theologians of the social gospel Walter Rauschenbush and Howard Thurman. He said that any religion that is not concerned about the poor and disadvantaged, 'the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them[,] is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.' In his 'Dream' speech, my father paraphrased the prophet Amos, saying, 'We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.'"
That reference to the "social gospel" is a direct rebuke to Beck's attacks on churches, synagogues and mosques that preach a social justice message.
Beck's own religious background seems to be a patchwork of beliefs. Beliefs that see average workers as leeches on society and media clowns like himself as deserving to be millionaires. It is Beck's version of the long held Conservative Republican belief that wealth should be rewarded for its own sake and work should be looked down upon.
