Today is being celebrated as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Now, I understand that the African-American community feels the need to commemorate one of their own, but I have to say that King is hardly one that I would want to honor with a national holiday. (And this doesn't make me a racist, though opponents of the King's birthday holiday seem to get automatically tagged as such.) While, in the early days of his adult life, he was a positive force for civil rights, he eventually ended up taking a position that I cannot call honorable: while he spent so much of his life trying to gain rights for his own fellow African-Americans, he stood in the way of this country's effort to gain freedom for people in Vietnam. Certainly not a person worth honoring.
I suppose that African-Americans should get to choose their hero, but wouldn't Thurgood Marshall have been a better choice? Marshall was the primary advocate for the side trying (successfully) to end segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and argued for civil rights in a number of other cases, and eventually ended up as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. I don't know when Martshall's birthday was, but I'd sooner make that a national holiday than King's.
I suppose that African-Americans should get to choose their hero, but wouldn't Thurgood Marshall have been a better choice? Marshall was the primary advocate for the side trying (successfully) to end segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and argued for civil rights in a number of other cases, and eventually ended up as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. I don't know when Martshall's birthday was, but I'd sooner make that a national holiday than King's.
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