My mother was a committed packrat. She never threw away anything that might be of use, value, or interest someday. Therefore, I have the privilege of perusing occasionally a trove of mid-19th-century letters written by my ancestors, who came to Texas well before the Civil War.
On March 7, 1860, F.M. Hays wrote from Smith County to his brother. Hays was a classic frontiersman, Civil War veteran, and Texas Ranger.
In about the same tone that he would use to describe the cotton market, he writes: “I attended another negro sale yesterday. Negroes did not sell so high as they did the first of January. I bought one little boy about 10 years old for $1151.00, about as good a bargain as was sold on that day.”
This poignant passage provides an apt backdrop for thinking about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, held on the National Mall on August 28.
Apparently the rally was scheduled inadvertently on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech, delivered 47 years earlier at the same location.
To blunt the criticism Beck went out of his way to associate himself with MLK, Jr., saying that he and the thousands attending the rally were planning to “reclaim the civil rights movement.” MLK, Jr.’s name came up often, and his niece made an appearance.
Our modern tendency to misappropriate historical figures for our own purposes inclines us to overlook the ill-conceived nature of the comparison between the “Restoring Honor” rally and the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech on August 28, 1963, was the seminal event of the movement, which was a forward-looking effort to rectify the deep injustices of the past. It’s easy to forget how profound those injustices were, but the casual description of the purchase of a young slave by my respectable, pillar-of-the-community, church-going, and slave-holding ancestor ought to be a fair reminder.
And while that all may have occurred long ago, MLK, Jr. was able to say, justifiably, that one hundred years later “the Negro is still not free.”
In fact, the podium and the crowd were filled with Americans who were still suffering from the legacy of slavery and a century of discrimination based on the colour of their skin. The civil rights movement was a committed effort to resolve those injustices.
The goals and motivations of the “Restoring Honor” rally are much less clear. For the most part, the movement looks away from modern American problems like increasing inequality, energy independence, pollution, and climate change. Instead it looks to the past, imagining a more homogeneous America in which our problems have vanished, rather than been resolved.
So, the rally satisfied itself with praising God and honouring the troops, always more or less worthy efforts. But, really, Glenn Beck and MLK, Jr., were he alive, both ought to feel a little uncomfortable just to find themselves mentioned in the same sentence.
John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.