Did MLK cut blank checks for Israel? Do today's anti-Zionists claim too much?

Probably not, according to Martin Kramer, though he elsewhere, in a Jewish magazine, tries to modify himself. Actually, he expands upon his earlier writing, and does so enough that I added the second half of the header as a second rhetorical question, once I started reading.

First, from page 8 of the 15-page PDF at that first link, the famous Seymour Martin Lipset quote:

One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”

Kramer goes on to defend that it was indeed said, and was said in 1968, not 1967.

That said, on page 5, he notes what King said approximately 9 months earlier, shortly after the end of the Six Day War:

I mean the very survival of Israel may well depend on access to not only the Suez Canal, but the Gulf and the Strait of Tiran. These things are very important. But I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.

He then puts that into larger context, noting that King had a quasi-evangelistic tour of Israel previously planned, but realized he would now be a political target whatever he said. He delayed any announcement above officially cancelling, but a couple of months later, he did pull the plug.

I know that other anti-Zionists have seen the second sentence of that paragraph before. Maybe they haven't seen the first, or else have ignored it.

What King is saying, it seems to me, is NOT a moral judgment but a political one. Let us remember that he was a Baptist minister, not an AME one. I've not read anything about what thoughts he had on the "end times," but, as a Baptist and not a Methodist Episcopal, he was surely open at least to some variety of futurist millennialism, as well as politically supporting Israel's future, and supporting it for SCLC reasons, too. Many of his top supporters were Jewish. His right hand man, Stanley Levinson, was, though he was not a Zionist.

But, we're not done. Kramer then puts King's Harvard statement into context — very important context.

There is plenty of room to debate the precise meaning of King’s off-the-record words at the Cambridge dinner. Was he only referring to the clearly antisemitic meaning of “Zionists” in the rhetoric of SNCC militants? [This is discussed by Kramer, the background, on the previous couple of pages.) Or was he making a general statement? We will never know. And just how much weight should be accorded to words spoken privately and never repeated publicly? (Had Lipset not written an article more than a year after the event, King’s words would have been lost forever.) My own view is that this dinner table remark can’t always bear the oversized burden imposed on it.

Food for thought a plenty.

Then, on page 12, Kramer talks about King's "balancing act." That deserves quoting of Kramer himself in some depth:

(I)t is an offense to history, if not to King’s memory, whenever someone today summons King’s ghost to offer unqualified support to Israel or the Palestinians.

There you go.

As for the second link? It's not so much modifying himself as extending himself.

Kramer cites new background material on King's 1959 visit to Israel, including above all, West Jerusalem. Let us remember this being after the Nakba (a word not mentioned by Kramer) but long before the Six Day War and any occupations. 

Kramer's take on King's visit then, including a private dinner with top Palestinians, and his later comments are that, while not dismissing Palestinian concerns, they were on a back burner for him. Kramer notes that he had visited India, laden with poverty, just before.

Then, there's this:

Years later, in 1968, King would allude to this demand as indicative of the weakness of the Arab approach to the conflict, an approach he described as “a stubborn effort to reverse history.”

Well, that does mention, in King's words, the right of return. And, his disinterest in it AFTER the Six Day War.

Kramer then notes that while the Israel-Palestine conflict was national, and to a degree then (tho less than today) religious, it was not racial. And, Israelis calling Palestinians names aside, it really wasn't.

Finally, Kramer speculates that the thought of Reinhold Neibuhr was having an influence on King. He cites this as his top reason King wasn't more emotionally invested in the Palestinian cause. This, because it shows Niebuhr's own Zionism, deserves its own quote:

Given his influence upon King, it’s important to recall the vigor with which Niebuhr supported both the establishment of Israel and its right to defend itself. He had expressed sympathy for Zionism as early as 1929, and in 1942 he founded the Christian Council on Palestine, a pro-Zionist association that grew to include thousands of (mostly Protestant) clergymen. In 1946, he testified in favor of a Jewish state before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. “The fact that the Arabs have a vast hinterland in the Middle East,” he said there, “and the fact that the Jews have nowhere to go, establishes the relative justice of their claims and of their cause.”

In 1948 and again during the Sinai campaign of 1956, Niebuhr defended Israel’s military actions and chastised American policymakers for not standing firmly behind “our only secure bastion in this troubled area.” The Arab refugees, he believed, would have to be resettled elsewhere than in their former homes: “The Jews cannot absorb [them] except in small numbers without imperiling the security of their nation.” In 1967, he justified Israel’s preemptive action in what would become known as the Six-Day War: “Obviously a nation that knows that it is in danger of strangulation will use its fists.” Shortly after the war, he backed Israel’s unilateral unification of Jerusalem.

Basically, if one goes on to read the next page or two of that piece? Niebuhr had swallowed whole the Jewish and British Imperialist mix of opinion about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, without caring to look at any background. He also viewed all of this through a Cold War lens.

That's pretty serious. Especially if you tie it with my speculation about King's millennialist theology.

As for what stance he might have taken today? He didn't even live to the First Intifada. He would have been nearly 60 when it happened, and perhaps "on the bench" of day-to-day civil rights activity by then, had he not been assassinated. Given the stresses of his life, he might have had a heart attack by then.

That said? If we're doing research, we're doing all of it. Kramer is a neocon, teaches at Tel Aviv University, is tied to neocon think tanks, specifically, the AIPAC-connected Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and likes to hate on Palestinian refugees. He is surely right about the King of 1967-68, including via his own connections to neocon nutbar and Zionist supremo Marty Peretz.

Had King lived past the First Intifada, I think he would have realized that, for his legacy if nothing else, his "balancing act" would have to shift to a different center of gravity.

Bottom line? To riff on Kramer, I won't claim that King "really" would have been pro-Palestinian today if his Zionist fellow travelers will follow his own words and stop making much more out of King's comments in Boston than is warranted.

Disgusting: Warmonger Joe citing MLK

Almost as much disgust as a wingnut citing Martin Luther King's color of their skin as an excuse to junk affirmative action and pretend it worked, or if you're a Black wingnut like Clarence Thomas, to ignore that it worked to some degree and you benefited.

Anyway, here's Warmonger Joe Biden, per the WaPost, riffing on King's "I Have a Dream" speech itself, given 60 years ago this week.

First, this:

Trickle-down economics holds that taxes should be cut for the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations, that public investments in priorities such as education, infrastructure and health care should be shrunk, and good jobs shipped overseas. It has exacerbated inequality and systemic barriers that make it harder for Black Americans to start a business, own a home, send their children to school and retire with dignity.

You've done nothing to reverse the Trump tax cuts that exacerbated that, or the Bush tax cuts that became the Obama tax cuts, when your then-boss, Dear Leader, accepted them. And, don't tell me you have a Republican House now; you didn't in the first two years. You've also, while attacking Republicans on Social Security, have offered no concrete plan for shoring it up. And, while in the Senate, you supported partial privatization, like both Dear Leader and Slick Willie did as president.

Second, Martin Luther King didn't die a week after that speech. And as Jonathan Eig knows, and states, in his truly magisterial new bio of King, with an extended version of my Goodreads review here, he went on to protest the Vietnam War, and some degree, militarism in general, as well as the non-racial as well as racial causes behind poverty.

I quote, as he noted in the epilogue:

The epilogue is good in noting Reagan’s resistance to making his birthday a holiday, and how we still have failed to address King’s “call for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism.”

That anti-militarism would surely extend today to poor Ukrainians going into a proxy war meatgrinder, as well as the poor Russians also in that meat-grinder because we never really fully abandoned Cold War politics vis-a-vis Russia, other than when exploiting the nation.

As for the racism? Let's not forget that Warmonger Joe, like Bill and Hillary, was Superpredator Joe back in the 1990s.

Is it any wonder that Biden and #BlueAnon surrogates fear a third-party presidential run by a Black man, Cornel West, who is hitting on all three of these things?

King: the man, the myth, the complex reality, and the alternative history

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A powerful book in which Eig, in part with the help of recently declassified FBI files, access to materials from King's "unofficial archivist" L.D. Reddick, audio tapes by Coretta Scott King in the early months after Martin's assassination as editor's notes for her first memoir, and notes for an unpublished memoir by Daddy King, gives us a complex portrait of a complex person, and the times around him. In addition, more than 200 interviews went into the book.

First, a few notes about what I learned about the pre-famous King, from childhood to Montgomery bus time. They're behind a spoiler alert at Goodreads, but pulled out here:

1. Daddy King was a womanizer and MLK knew it before he went to Crozier. His pledge not to follow in daddy’s footsteps was doubted by a woman to whom he told it at the time.
2. King was non-academically plagiarizing sermons on occasion from early on.
3. Daddy King was a hypocrite over Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta premiere and big PR.
4. MLK seriously dated a white woman while at Crozier, but broke it off after accepting such a marriage would crush his reputation. Harry Belafonte and others said she was his one true love.
5. In the intro chapter, Eig says King made a couple of childhood halfhearted suicide attempts. It sounds like a mix of biological depression plus struggles already then with Daddy King’s full legacy.
6. And, this I didn’t know either. Guess it just never popped. His dad wasn’t born “Martin Luther” King and neither was he. It was “Mike.”  (To be more precise, I may have heard that before, but it never stuck. I do know that my racist conservative Lutheran pastor father hated Martin Luther King Jr. having that name.)

Moving to the adult King, Eig uses the new materials to show more of several things already known to some degree about his efforts with the SCLC. 

First is, from the additional FBI materials (and 2027 will reveal more) just how much Hoover’s hatred drove not just him, but senior assistants, on the spying on not just King, or King plus Stanley Levinson, but also tapping phones of Bayard Rustin and others. And, of course, the biggest laugh is that King only started to question the worst of capitalism, contra Hoover’s claim that he was a Commie, AFTER the taps and moles inside SCLC started. (The reality is that Rustin and HIS background were a bigger threat to “turn” King than Levinson ever was. Rustin knew that, and that’s why he often stayed in the background.

Related to that, and also in part from the new FBI materials, is just how much LBJ started signing off on Hoover’s claims, and how much, despite his trying to blame RFK (and a little, JFK) he wanted more. Sadly, Bobby’s first replacement, Katzenbach, was no better. It was only when Ramsey Clark became AG that the nonsense at least diminished.

Second is better discussion than other bios I’ve read of how not-so-popular King was, not with whites, but other organizations and their leaders. The NAACP and Roy Wilkins, as Eig notes, found him kind of a showboat early on and stressed that their legal victories, not King marches, were the big issue. Then, even before Stokley Carmichael and Black power, James Farmer at CORE, John Lewis preceding Carmichael at SNCC and others thought King too passive at times, too willing to compromise at times and also, not fully buying into nonviolence.

Through all of this, King walked various tightropes, often dependent on Ralph Abernathy as well as Coretta. Especially in earlier years, Eig fleshes him out well. (He didn’t want to move to Atlanta after Martin did, afraid of being under his PLUS Daddy King’s shadow, but eventually agreed.)

Third is King himself, as preacher and prophetic voice, movement inspirational leader, and movement manager. Eig, excerpting from sermons and speeches of his, notes his greatness in the first area while also noting the plagiarism problem that began pre-adult and went through academia never went away. The second? I think one good anecdote is of so many people meeting King in personal and being surprised that he was only 5-7 or so, expecting a much bigger man. His "presence" was huge and magnetic. The manager? Eig is honest on King's lack of organization at times (something he notes that — and notes was discussed by Blacks — seemed then at least to run through Black church denominations and ministers), also his battles for funding and focus with the other organizations mentioned above, but also his own sometimes scattershot approach to specific situations, like going north to Chicago. Plenty of details on all three aspects abound in this book.

Fourth, Eig talks about sexism in the civil rights movement in general. Part of this was due to its pre-feminist movement start. Part of it, he says, also relates to the Black church, and I think that's a fair judgment. On social issues outside of civil rights-related things today, even relatively more liberal Black church denominations and individual members tend to be more conservative than their White counterparts. There's a lot of details, most of it about simply refusing to accept women in leadership roles.

Fifth, per what he noted in the introduction?

There’s not a lot new to me on the personal side OTHER THAN Dorothy Cotton as his … mistress. THAT was all new, while Eig notes insiders called her his “second wife.” As part of this, I found Coretta Scott King’s denialism of it interesting, especially since she knew and accepted his womanizing foibles in general.

The epilogue is good in noting Reagan’s resistance to making his birthday a holiday, and how we still have failed to address King’s “call for an end to the triple evils of materialism, militarism, and racism.”

That said, Jason Sokol’s “The Heavens Might Crack” goes more into that resistance.

Note: While this is a biography, this leads to the speculative “What If” … as in, if King had not been assassinated by James Earl Ray. It’s beyond purview of a review, but as noted at Goodreads, I'm addressing it here.

View all my reviews

And with that, on to the alt history.

What would have happened had King not been assassinated? Starting with the nearest term, my first guess is that he might have got modestly more concessions for the Memphis strikers than Coretta but not a lot.

The Poor People's March? For reasons partially outside his control (the abysmal DC weather that hit the actual event), but largely reasons inside his control — his lack of focus, as noted above, and specific to this event, something warned about by Rustin strenuously, so much so that he refused to participate, and others as well — and the likelihood of a Vietnam tie-in "spoiling it" with national thought leaders, while probably not attracting "poor whites," many of them still (and today still) "mudsills" in their racism, means this would have been about as much a flop with him as with Coretta and with his name attached.

So, what then on his legacy after that? If Bobby is still assassinated, does King, who had never before endorsed a candidate but given hint that he might do that in 1968, swallow hard at the tail end and mention Humphrey's name after LBJ's bombing halt? Or does he call the halt itself hypocritical? And, what if Bobby is not assassinated? It's possible LBJ + Daley and other Northern urban bosses ram through the Hump anyway. 

Wiki's page on the 1968 convention notes that, after the Cal primary, Humphrey still had a plurality, albeit not a majority, of delegates.

At the moment of Kennedy's death the delegate count stood at Humphrey 561.5, Kennedy 393.5, McCarthy 258.

Those 1,200 or so delegates are less than half of the 2,600 or so voting at the convention, and they hugely rejected a "peace plank" and adopted a platform without one by a confortable margin before nominating Humphrey.

The platform was passed by a narrow margin, with 1,567 delegates voting for the platform while 1,041 voted against.

Sorry, Wiki, but that's not "narrow." It's 3-2, or 60 percent in favor. 

Getting into alt-history with RFK as well as MLK, I highly doubt he would have run a third-party candidacy. That means Bobby in 1972 vs. Tricky Dick. Does McGovern call Bobby a hypocrite in primaries, first? Or does he stand aside? In either case, Bobby running in 1972 covers up Teddy taking Mary Jo Kopechne to his favorite Chappaquiddick law firm of Weiner, Deiner, Dicher, Dunker.

So, King would have been stuck again. Side note: McCarthy, largely attacked years and decades later as "soft" on race issues, lost the California primary precisely because he was NOT soft and talked of having public housing for Blacks scattered throughout the LA Southland, a proposition radical for the time. Bobby explicitly rejected that in a debate just days before the primary vote.

Sidebar: While Eig doesn't go into details, just a bare statement of the facts of April 4, 1968, yes, yes, yes, James Earl Ray did it.

There are a couple of other points of alt-history to consider.

First, would Hoover have gotten more ruthless in his wiretaps, etc., and related, would Nixon had gotten more ruthless with what he wanted and did? A qualified yes to both.

Second, would King, having expanded his movement to accommodate poverty in general, and a focus on war, have ever come to terms with, let alone embraced, feminism? I doubt it, and I think the post-Roe world, especially, would have further diminished his reach. More feminists in general, and White liberal ones in particular, would have consider him yesterday's news.

Once again, note to "antifa," violence is not the answer

Some of the folks with the pretentious name of "antifa" thought it WAS the answer over the weekend.

The basically rebranded old Black Bloc folks, in Portland (remember, the Pacific Northwest is the heart of the Black Bloc) attacked and assaulted Andy Ngo.

The fact that Andy Ngo is a wingnut makes it no better.

It's rare as hell for me to agree with someone like Hillbot Charlotte Clymer on a  matter of substantive politics, but I do here.

The likes of Andy Ngo thrive on producing a reaction just like this. It's fuel for furthering their narrative.

Much of the Black Bloc doesn't care about that anyway. For 20 years, many of them have shown — primarily in violence against property, but, with Trump unzipping his id letting them do the same, now in more violence against persons — that violence is their stock in trade. To be frank, as with the Seattle WTO meeting 20 years ago that kicked off their violence against property (not that I am fetishizing property), I think many of these people just look for excuses.

"Librulz," left-liberals and leftists who are edumacated SHOULD know this. Should have known this for years.

And yet, too much of my Twitter feed over the weekend had comments defending, even glorifying, these nutters.

Also, you may not like the media sources for which he reports, or his style, but he is a journalist.

So, "congrats." You assaulted not only a person, but two of the five freedoms of the First Amendment. Possibly three, as I think again.

I use filters much less on Twitter than on Facebook, via FB Purity. I debated, by Sunday, about doing it there. I didn't. Rather, it lets me keep my eyes open in case I need to do some muting, even blocking.

As with librulz like this:

Fuck his free speech I guess. And yours tbh https://t.co/NtXxBeH3Re

— Kamala Harris is a Cop (@BethLynch2020) July 2, 2019

I'm not a First Amendment absolutist, because I'm not a philosophical absolutist in general. So, I'm not Glenn Greenwald or Popehat, both of whom, IMO, are "First Amendment weaponizers."

But, short of that, I take those five freedoms very seriously.

Beth, and others, could stand to revisit Thomas More's famous lines from "A Man for All Seasons":

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law! 

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? 

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that! 

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Or listen to other famous characters or real people.

As both Tevye and MLK knew, riffing on the bible, attitudes like this, riffing on "eye for eye and tooth for tooth," leave the whole world blind and toothless.

Beyond that, there's a boatload of #twosiderism already popping up on this issue.

Time for Idries Shah again:

"To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides." ~ Idries Shah

This one of his, in photo poster, is also good

#MLK50 and #JFK, and #LBJ and the #MuellerTime FBI

First, MLK and JFK.

They aren't even close in terms of political morals. If you believe Camelot was real, click that link. If you still believe Camelot was real after that, whether on Vietnam, Cuba, or other foreign policy adventurism, Jack as first neoliberal president or other things, please go away and never bother me again.

Second, MLK, LBJ and the FBI. Per this cartoon, if you're "normalizing" today's FBI, also please go away. NOTE: This is NOT to support two-siderism, to say that Devin Nunes is anything but a Trump stooge or anything else. But, both Hillbots AND a fair chunk of Berniecrats among Dems need a reality check, too.

And, speaking of Democrats, to tie to MLK another way, namely, police violence? When Dems trot out "Oh the SCOTUS" again in 2020? A ruling like this, where Kagan and Breyer said that's it's OK for cops to shoot black people, is a good rebuttal.

TX Progressives say goodbye to Obama, hope for last clemencies, salute #MLK, look at #txlege start

The Texas Progressive Alliance says goodbye to President Obama — while holding on to last faint hopes he commutes the sentences of Leonard Peltier and Chelsea Manning — and salutes the life and legacy of eventual socialist Martin Luther King Jr., as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff thinks that the fight over Dan Patrick's bathroom bill could cause a real and lasting schism between Texas businesses and the Texas GOP.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes Texas Republican lawmakers on Trump's front lines in the war against our constitution and freedom of the press.

Dan Patrick and Donald Trump both managed to make news from a certain urological perspective, blogged PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Socratic Gadfly take note of the opening bell of the Texas Legislature and gets snarky about the first day's events.

Neil at All People Have Value said that the work of opposing Trump is up to each of us. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

==================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Robert Rivard gives state leaders an F on their public school accountability test.

The Dallas Observer highlights the legal strategy behind the latest anti-abortion bill filed in the Lege.

Better Texas Blog reminds us that Obamacare repeal would mean a lot less mental health coverage.

Kevin Nix argues that the place to look for child predators is online.

Therese Odell recoils in horror from Trump's press conference.

The Lunch Tray shows how the restaurant industry failed to keep its promise to clean up kids' menus.

Juanita "celebrates" the return of Yachting Randy Neugebauer.

Jonathan Coopersmith evaluates President Obama's legacy in science, technology and innovation.

The problems with Selma

There's a bunch of stories out there about historic accuracy problems with the movie Selma. Rather than chase a dozen links, I'll post one from Truthout, that's about Selma and two other movies, one of them not in the Best Picture running, and go from there.

First, Selma's not the only big-history picture to deliberately alter history for drama; famously or infamously, Steven Spielberg de-unanimized Connecticut's Congressional vote on the 13th Amendment.

That said, that was different than this; it didn't fundamentally change the perception of a main character in the movie.

By claiming LBJ sicced J. Edgar Hoover on Martin Luther King, though, Selma does exactly that.

First, it's pretty clear that LBJ had no advance knowledge of Hoover's "tomcat" letter to King, in which he attempts to force King to drop his civil rights work, perhaps even commit suicide. It's not clear how long after it was sent, in fact, that LBJ knew about it.

Second, if anybody sicced Hoover on King, it was the Kennedys.

Third, since LBJ had as much trouble keeping his pecker in his pants as did Jack Kennedy, Hoover had the drop on him. If LBJ had known in advance about the "tomcat" letter, he might have acquiesced. Not that that would have been good, it's just the reality. (Sidebar: Presuming the homosexuality rumors about Hoover are true [deliberately not using the word "gay"], he obviously kept it buried through a mix of discretion and of having the goods on anybody who seriously thought about trying to leverage him.)

At the same time, the movie's handling of this is part of how it gets King wrong.

King didn't let this letter stop him from involvement in the second Selma march. Rather, that march didn't have a green light from a federal judge, so King wouldn't march, beyond the famous "turnaround," discussed in Wikipedia's overview of Selma 1965. This had nothing to do with Hoover's letter, and everything to do with details of King's nonviolence strategy, and not breaking the law when breaking the law would have hurt the movement.

And, thus, one error becomes compounded into two. Or more.

In turn, that seems to be part of larger problems with Selma the movie's treatment of King, and of King vis-a-vis other parts of the civil rights movement.

Basically, the movie underplays the level of distrust between King, and the likes of James Forman and others from SNCC, from what I understand. So, we get a sanitized view of the civil rights movement, along with a Manichean view of LBJ vs. MLK.

I also find this response, noted in the Wikipedia article about the movie, disturbing:

Director (Ava) DuVernay and U.S. Representative John Lewis (whom she portrays when a young man) responded separately that the film Selma is a work of art about the people of Selma, not a documentary. DuVernay said in an interview that she did not see herself as "a custodian of anyone's legacy". In response to criticisms that she rewrote history to portray her own agenda, DuVernay said that the movie is "not a documentary. I'm not a historian. I'm a storyteller". Lewis wrote in an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times: "We do not demand completeness of other historical dramas, so why is it required of this film?"

Actually, we do, John. See my note above about Lincoln. That was just one of several errors or issues of framing which drew a lot of critical comment, as Wiki notes. The opening scene, with Lincoln talking to the black soldiers, face to face, also drew potshots, as did the issue of whether history had been, in general, sacrificed on the altar of drama. That said, at least Lincoln offered an honest portrayal of the passage of a major Congressional action.

And, DuVernay's own comments indicate that she seems to have a postmodernist view of issues of historical accuracy, with her "accurate to whom?" comment. Besides that, she admits that it was about drama, and her own drama, when she says elsewhere that it's about "what I feel about LBJ."

LBJ was a bastard in a number of ways. And, after his falling out with MLK over Vietnam, he may have pulled some of his punches on civil rights, though he did manage to ram the Fair Housing Act through Congress in 1967.

When we're still far from being a post-racial nation, making out LBJ to be the bad guy doesn't help issues. Distorting what King's nonviolence angle was about doesn't help matters, either. Nor does making it look like Selma was a "King show" through and through, along with papering over both diversity and dissent in the civil rights movement.

Because this is an issue that's more ongoing than the legal end to slavery via the 13th Amendment (albeit Lincoln's larger legacy, and how much Andrew Johnson misunderstood it, or understood it correctly is still an issue), the Selma movie inaccuracies are also more potent than the Lincoln ones.

And, not all critics, or at least one Oscars voter, like the movie as art, either, and the narrative flow of the movie may add gasoline to that, too.

Is it a bad movie? I don't think so.

Could it have been an even better movie, within the budgetary, independent film constraints? Yes. Both more historically accurate AND, I think, more dramatic.

And, claiming that its critics are "smearing" the movie? Comes close to the social justice warrior POV, to me.

Message for Obama from MLK

While today's U.S. Army may be more racially balanced than it was in Vietnam, it's still largely an army of the poorer, those with less opportunities. And we still export war, and we still sell as many weapons as the rest of the world combined.