IT IS often forgotten that Martin Luther King Jr. was a deeply patriotic American.
In King's day, as in ours, there were influential Black Americans — men like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and H. Rap Brown — who claimed that the American ideal was always a hypocritical lie. That was the opposite of King's view. Based on everything we know about him, MLK would have recoiled from someone like Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor in Chicago for 20 years, who preached "God damn America" and gloated after 9/11 that "America's chickens are coming home to roost." Never would MLK have endorsed the Black Lives Matter activists who called the American flag "a symbol of hatred," still less approved of those who trampled on the flag to show their contempt for it.
Far from reviling America, its Founding Fathers, and the symbols of its high ideals, King revered them. The civil rights movement, he always said, was "standing up for the best in the American dream."
Whether writing behind bars from a Birmingham jail, preaching to 250,000 civil rights marchers at the Lincoln Memorial, or accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of Norway's royal family, King always grounded his calling within the American tradition. On the last full day of his life, in the last speech he ever gave, this great American reiterated that those who struggled for Black civil rights "were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers."
![]() Civil rights activists carry American flags as they march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. |
To listen to that final speech, knowing that King was just 39 and would be killed the next day, is to marvel that America could have produced so outstanding a liberator. He evoked the shame of his nation's grievous racial injustices with devastating force, yet never broke faith with that nation nor doubted that if its conscience were aroused it would eventually take to heart its creed of liberty and justice for all.
"All we say to America is: Be true to what you said on paper," King told his audience at the Mason Temple that day. "If I lived in China or Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand ... the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there." But America had committed itself to uphold freedom of speech and assembly and conscience. "The greatness of America is the right to protest for right." Far from writing off that commitment as a dead letter, King never stopped insisting that it be lived up to.
It would have been unthinkable to King to treat the flag with disrespect. In some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement, the Stars and Stripes are borne with pride and reverence by the throngs of Americans, Black and white alike, who rallied to King's cause.
For some years now, Glenn C. Loury, a tenured professor of economics at Brown University, has been making what he calls "the case for unabashed black patriotism — for the forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people." He describes himself as a sometime "man of the left" who was "mugged by reality" and who firmly rejects the bitterness toward America that in recent years has come to dominate public discourse about race in the United States.
"The 'America ain't so great, and never was' posture, popular on campuses and in liberal newsrooms, is a sophomoric indulgence for blacks in the [21st] century," Loury wrote in a 2022 essay for First Things. "Our birthright citizenship in this great republic is an inheritance of immense value. Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness." Of course racial inequality is real, Loury has argued, "but American politics obsesses to an unhealthy extent about racial identity."
Identifying himself as "a descendant of slaves," "a beneficiary of the civil rights revolution," and "a patriot who loves his country," Loury pleads for an end to the "fashionable standoffishness characteristic of much elite thinking concerning blacks' relationship to the American project."
No one need deny the ugly chapters of America's history to regard the United States as "a good country, one affording opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship," he maintains. Like King before him, and like Frederick Douglass before him, Loury cheers "the founding of the United States of America [as] a world-historical event, by means of which Enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power were instantiated for the first time in real institutions."
True, Black Americans had to wait too long for those rights. But in the end the civil rights movement led to "the greatest transformation in the status of an enserfed people that is to be found anywhere in world history." In his lifetime, observes the 76-year-old Loury, "we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet. The question, then, is one of narrative. Will we blacks regard the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or will we see our nation for what it has become over the last three centuries: the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?"
It is striking that two of America's 11 national holidays, Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, are commemorations of the struggle to overcome the evils of slavery and establish Black liberty and civil equality. No other American holiday so earnestly celebrates the history of any racial or ethnic group. Even one such holiday would have been unthinkable in the America of MLK's youth; now two of them are enshrined in law.
Patriot that he was, King never espoused the toxic message that America is a land permanently made hateful and irredeemable by its "systemic racism." On the contrary, he was proudly American to his core, not only staking a claim to the American dream, but enriching and expanding it for all. He knew that, for an American, patriotism is inseparable from the pursuit of justice — and that America was to be loved not because it is perfect, but because it is perfectible. King never doubted that this nation would ultimately "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed." Neither should we.
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Keenan votes 'present'
It wasn't exactly a profile in courage, but on Beacon Hill this month a Democratic senator — John F. Keenan of Quincy — did something that required at least a rudimentary backbone: He declined to vote for the reelection of Karen Spilka, the Democratic Senate president. Unlike his 34 fellow Democratic senators, Keenan voted "present" during the roll call to choose a leader for the chamber. Following the vote, Keenan released a statement saying he abstained "because changes are needed" in how the Senate conducts its business.
In the Massachusetts Legislature, the bare outward forms of democratic decision-making are preserved. The chamber goes through the motions of a leadership "election" whose outcome is a foregone conclusion, just as it goes through the motions of voting on bills that rank-and-file members are given no chance to review, let alone debate. In reality, the state Senate and House of Representatives operate as one-party autocracies, with nearly all power concentrated in the hands of each branch's leader. That includes the power to appoint committee chairs, the power to decide which bills will be considered, the power to assign office space, and the power to decide which members' requests for budget earmarks will be approved. A vindictive Senate president can make life miserable for a rebellious senator — so senators rarely do anything except follow orders and vote as expected.
Which means that even a comparatively trivial gesture of independence — such as voting "present" on the reelection of the Senate president to another two-year term — is highly unusual.
![]() Senate President Karen Spilka joined fellow legislators during the swearing-in ceremony at the Massachusetts State House on New Year's Day. |
Keenan's statement called for an overhaul in the way the Senate is run.
"We have had significantly fewer roll calls, routinely missed deadlines, failed to adopt joint rules, waived rules, passed bills beyond the end of formal sessions with limited opportunities for members to participate fully, and have often been at odds with our partners in the House of Representatives," he said. "We have been less transparent and less connected with what the residents of the Commonwealth rightly demand and deserve from the Massachusetts State Senate."
According to the Boston Herald, Keenan said his vote was "indicative that I don't support her reelection." If he really meant that, he would have voted "no," not "present." That would have been a profile in courage. But Keenan wasn't about to go that far — by voting "present" he made sure Spilka could still claim to have been reelected with no opposing vote. In any case, Keenan immediately neutralized whatever impact his gesture may have had. "I appreciate the work of Senate President Spilka and congratulate her on her reelection," his statement continued.
In an interview with Michael Jonas of CommonWealth Beacon, Keenan said his major beef with the way Spilka runs the Senate is the practice of passing major pieces of legislation by unrecorded voice votes, with members routinely denied the opportunity to study the measures before they are approved.
He lamented that the failure to meet the biennial deadline for reporting out bills and waiving rules whenever they prove inconvenient have undermined public trust in the Legislature. While there were almost 700 roll-call votes during the Senate's 2015-16 session, he told Jonas, there were only around 250 in each of the last two biennial sessions. Not only are more bills passed by voice vote, but more unrelated measures are routinely bundled together into big omnibus bills. Bottom line: "We are less accountable to our constituents. [And] if people don't trust the way we make laws, how do they trust the laws we make?"
Of course, Massachusetts residents don't trust the Legislature. That is why they voted so lopsidedly last November to empower the state auditor to pierce the veil of secrecy and conduct a proper audit of Senate and House operations. Keenan's halfhearted show of resistance isn't going to galvanize any meaningful change in how the Legislature functions. Real reform requires adopting either mandatory term limits or strict session limits — or better yet, both — and as things stand now, there is not the faintest possibility of either.
Still, let's give credit where credit is due: Keenan didn't kiss Spilka's ring and the sky didn't fall. It isn't much, but it's a start.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "The media's antigun bias," Jan. 17, 2000:
On no other issue is there a wider gulf between mainstream America and the media. There are more than 225 million civilian firearms in the United States. Some 45 percent of US households own at least one gun. To tens of millions of Americans, guns mean safety and peace of mind; they know intuitively what statistics prove: gun ownership reduces crime.
Yet in the nation's eminent newsrooms, it is axiomatic that guns are nasty, that more guns mean more crime, and that those who defend the Second Amendment are "gun nuts." No wonder the NRA gets such bad press. And no wonder so many gun owners have abandoned newspapers as their chief source of information.
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The Last Line
"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (April 16, 1963)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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