1963 speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington D.C. to 250,000 people of the civil rights movement, regarded as one of the most important speeches in US history. Jon Meacham writes that, “With a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who’ve shaped modern America”.^[8] 

“A half-century after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. is as revered as ever. But have we been following his example, or merely paying lip service to his ideas? Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, weighs in.”

By Jason Riley. Read or watch the original here where you can also find references:

https://www.prageru.com/videos/where-are-you-martin-luther-king

Transcript followed by my comments:

It’s been 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, and over the decades he has become one of the most revered figures in American history. There is an impressive memorial to him in Washington, DC, and a museum celebrating his life in Atlanta, Georgia. Countless schools and boulevards have been named after him, and a national holiday is dedicated to his memory. 

How is it, then, that so much of his legacy — what he hoped to pass on to the future — has been lost? 

King wanted equality under the law and said, famously, that  people ought to judge one another based on character, not skin color. But he also believed that blacks had an important role to play in their own advancement.

The black civil rights battles in America are now over, and King’s side won. The best indication of that may be that King has had no real successor. If black Americans were still faced with legitimate threats to civil rights—such as legal discrimination or voter disenfranchisement—it’s likely that leaders of King’s caliber would have emerged to carry on the fight. Instead, what we have today are pretenders who have turned the civil rights movement into an industry, if not a racket.

And what have these racketeers accomplished? A lot for themselves and very little for their constituents. Racial gaps in income, education and home ownership were narrowing in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but after King was replaced as the spokesman for black America by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others, these gaps began to widen in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

This suggests that the racial disparities that continue today aren’t driven by whatever racism that still exists, despite all the claims to the contrary from progressives and their allies in the media. It also suggests that black culture — attitudes toward marriage, education, work and the rule of law — plays a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge.

More marches won’t address out-of-wedlock childbearing. More sit-ins won’t lower black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.

Electing more black politicians and appointing more black government officials can’t compensate for these cultural deficiencies, either. Black mayors, congressmen, senators, police chiefs and school superintendents have become commonplace since the 1970s. 

Even the election of a black president—twice—failed to close the racial divide in many key measures. Black-white differences in poverty, homeownership and incomes all grew wider under President Obama.

Discussion of antisocial behavior in poor black communities, let alone the possibility that it plays a significant role in racial inequality, has become another casualty of the post-’60s era.

King and other black leaders at the time spoke openly about the need for more-responsible behavior. After remarking on disproportionately high inner-city crime rates, King told a black congregation in St. Louis that “we’ve got to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world,” he said, “but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”

The pretenders to King’s legacy mostly ignore this advice, preferring instead to keep the onus on whites. Where King tried to instill the importance of personal responsibility and self-determination, his counterparts today spend more time making excuses for counterproductive behavior and dismissing any criticism of it as racist.

Activists who long ago abandoned King’s colorblind standard, which was the basis for the landmark civil-rights laws enacted in the 1960s, tell young black Americans today that they are victims, first and foremost. White society is against you, they say, even if you have no clear examples of discrimination to point to. They are told that fire hoses and poll taxes have been replaced by unconscious racism, white privilege and microaggressions.

A generation of blacks who have more opportunity than any previous generation are being taught that America offers them little more than bigoted teachers, biased employers and trigger-happy cops. It’s not only a lie, but as King understood, it’s also self-destructive.

Black activists and white progressives stress racism because it serves their own interests, not because it actually improves the station of blacks. But this neglect of the role that blacks must themselves play in righting their own lives can only make things worse. A half-century after King’s death, plenty of people are paying him lip service. Far too few are following his example.

I’m Jason Riley for Prager University.

© 2026 PragerU. All rights reserved.

Bud:

Merit wins every time! 

It does not take a village. 

Imagine a basketball game where the teams are forced by color of law or the squeaky wheel of rioters and media to hire their players based on an algorithm decided by community consensus, aka democracy (small “d”).  Would you be a paid spectator? 

Now imagine the dating scene where your mate is chosen by color of law or the squeaky wheels of pervasive media, government eugenics, or religion.  Would you marry?  Would you procreate?   

This is the unsaid theme of the 1997 movie Gattaca,  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurmond, Gore Vidal, Ernest Borgnine, Jude Law, Alan Arkin, and others produced by Danny DeVito and written and directed by Andrew Niccol.  It is also one of the several themes in book by George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-four (1984) and two movie versions (1954 and 1984) of that book. https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2065472025/?ref_=vp_nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_nineteen%2520eighty%2520four

Martin Luther King, Jr. would have disavowed affirmative action as a dystopian dream. 

As a person around at the time of MLK Jr. and sympathetic to the cause, yet observing people of today regardless of their nation and culture, it is obvious there are many of my generation and younger generations who somehow believe they are “woke”, when in fact they have been conditioned as in Gattaca and Nineteen Eighty Four.

Bud

P.S. In 1963 when MLK Jr. made his famous speech, I was working beside Moses.  I became his student.  We were cleaning the cages and runs etc in my dad’s animal hospital in Atlanta.  I did that until graduating high school in 1967, growing into learning to do the laboratory analyses and finally couple of live surgeries.  Around that time, I and a good many of my friends demonstrated against Atlanta and Georgia authorities outside our school because Willie Jean Black and other kids, who lived across the street from our school, were being bused across town to a segregated school.  This practice was unacceptable to us.  We were not under the influence of rare media exposure in those days, nor politicians or teachers of any persuasion.  This was a time when Lester Maddox stood at the street by his restaurant in Atlanta (The Pickrick*) with an axe handle deciding who could enter the parking lot.

*The Pickrick Restaurant was a prominent Atlanta eatery owned by Lester Maddox, who later became Governor of Georgia.  Opened in 1947 on Hemphill Avenue near the Georgia Institute of Technology campus, it specialized in skillet-fried chicken with all the fixin’s and became a thriving business.  The Pickrick served great old fashioned Southern Cooking, “soul food”, well known in the South.  But the restaurant gained national notoriety for its segregationist policies, particularly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.