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XPost: dc.politics

In her new best-seller Ann Coulter breaks with the politically
correct history of the civil rights movement by openly
criticizing Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The always provocative Coulter makes the case that King’s
embrace of mass street protests, specifically breaking the law
by staging marches without permits and gaining public sympathy
by purposely putting children in the way of vicious dogs and
blasts from power water hoses used by rabid segregationists, is
a prime example of how liberals throughout history get their way
by using angry, inflammatory mob behavior.

Coulter writes in her book “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is
Endangering America,” that “Martin Luther King Jr. ...used
images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause,
deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent
confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’
Connor,” the Birmingham sheriff who was known to be easily
provoked to brutality and violence to enforce racial segregation.

She spoke with me as she was writing because I am the author of
several books on the civil rights movement, including “Eyes on
the Prize – America’s Civil Rights Years.” And she uses
quotations from my best-selling biography of Thurgood Marshall,
the liberal legal giant who became first black justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall, like Coulter, was a critic of
King’s tactics.

“Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling
him an ‘opportunist’ and ‘first rate rabble-rouser,’” Coulter
argues in her book. “Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion
that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall
replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not
be entrusted to children. King, he said, was ‘a boy on a man’s
errand.’”

You have to give Coulter points for shrewdly using the words of
one black liberal civil rights icon to indict another liberal
black liberal civil rights icon. She has a conservative agenda
and she is a world-class provocateur who knows how to inflame
her liberal critics.

Coulter and I disagree most of the time, especially on her
regular use of harsh, partisan hyperbolic language to caricature
people. Her tirades against liberals get lots of media attention
and sell books but they overshadow the serious insights she has
into American history. And when Ann is right, Ann can be
devastatingly right.

In any case, Marshall worked to achieve racial equality by
ending laws that discriminated against Americans in schools, in
playgrounds, housing, on juries and at work. And he told me over
the course of months of interviews of his differences with King.
“I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his the
theory.”

Marshall said in one interview as we discussed King’s street
protest tactics. “I didn’t believe in that. I thought you had
the right to disobey the law and you have the right to go to
jail for it.” In the same interview, Marshall conceded that King
had tremendous influence. “He came up at the right time,” he
said. “I think he was great – as a leader. As an organizer, he
wasn’t worth s—t..He was a great speaker...but as for getting
the work done, he was not too good at that…All he did was dump
all his legal work on us (the NAACP) including the bills. And
that was all right with him so long as he didn’t have to pay the
bills.”

In those interviews I learned that there were times when
Marshall deeply resented King’s fame – particularly when Martin
Luther King Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.

The left often has a simplistic view of the civil rights
movement as monolithic. The truth is that Marshall and King
represented very different approaches to ending the bitter
history of segregation. Marshall favored using the law while
King favored bold demonstrations to gain media attention.

History tells us that both the demonstrators and the lawyers
played vital roles in bringing about the end of segregation in
America. But Marshall’s more conservative view of how to create
lasting social change is often forgotten because he never wore a
dashiki or patronized the idea of race riots as helpful to
achieving racial equality. He was seen by many of the 60’s
activists as a boring, law and order, establishment judge who
deeply believed in the Constitution, loved America and was a
social conservative.

How is it boring to win the landmark Supreme Court decision to
end school segregation – the Brown decision – and break barriers
as the first black Solicitor General and Supreme Court Justice?

Coulter’s brand of vituperative political commentary has
sometimes poisoned our political discourse over years. She and
her fellow provocateurs on the far right are featured
prominently in my upcoming book “Muzzled: the Assault on Honest
Debate.” But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. On this
one, Coulter has her history exactly right and that is why the
left is screaming.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/06/16/is-ann-coulter-right- about-civil-rights-movement/#ixzz1VxXXbwZs


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