Opinion
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Martin Luther King worked for national unity.

Martin Luther King Day celebrates America's progress toward the goal of one people unified in democracy. This holiday is a good time to examine national goals for unity that extend back more than 200 years.

I doubt if King the mentor would rejoice that his pupils celebrate his life by quoting his speeches without understanding them. Too many people see King as a black leader and the civil rights movement as one that only benefited Black Americans. They are wrong. He was one of many national leaders dedicated to the struggle for national unity.

President George Washington spoke urgently for national unity in his farewell speech. He warned against ethnic loyalty. He told citizens their unity of government made them one American people whether native born or immigrant. He said that unity was the foundation for independence, freedom, and prosperity. The problem was that his group's ethnic loyalty, support for white supremacy and slavery, was dividing the nation as he spoke.

Seventy years later, President Abraham Lincoln also spoke about need for unity and the curse of disunity. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." He fought the Civil War against the Confederacy to prevent the break up of the nation. Ending slavery was a necessary means to this end.

Despite President Lincoln's assassination the Republican Congress continued support for national unity. It passed the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the States ratified constitutional Amendments XIV and XV to extend all the civil rights enjoyed by white citizens to all Americans.

Those legislative acts should have ended the need for a civil rights struggle long before King was born since unity and equality of treatment was law. Instead it marked the beginning of a bitter struggle that required resistance to racial intimidation, court challenges and the loss of thousands of lives to murderous terrorism.

Almost 100 years after the 1866 Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King also urged the nation to unify as one American people. Different from President Washington in 1796, King used his 1963 "I have a dream" speech in Washington, D.C. to address racism and white supremacy issues. So, only people confused by ethnic and racial loyalty cannot see that Martin Luther King was a great national leader who continued the struggle for national social unity.

Most Southerners still hurt from their Civil War defeat. Enslaved to ideas of racial loyalty, many of them substituted newly freed Americans with African ancestors as people to hate for their humiliation in place of the better armed U.S. Government. They took revenge and tried to restore their self-esteem by holding American with African ancestors in a subhuman social and economic status. They looked on civil rights advances toward national unity as a threat to them. Kings' strategy of peaceful demonstration was fitting for this social environment.

Southerners' white supremacy theme harmed them. Those Southern areas that promoted white supremacy most passionately also suffered the most social conflict and the lowest per capita income from the disunity. Ironically, they also benefited most socially and economically from the more harmonious social environment that resulted from King's civil rights movement.

Ethnic loyalty and loyalty to the artificial idea of race is an equal opportunity curse that infects any mind willing to embrace it. That Africans had innate cultural differences and could not live in unity with White Americans was the logic white supremacists used to support race-based slavery and racial segregation. Martin Luther King's writings, speeches and civil rights efforts helped dispel this myth and helped win acceptance for civil rights and unity. Having dispelled this myth, one expects Americans, especial those with African ancestors, would zealously guard against allowing this destructive idea to gain acceptance again. He or she would be wrong.

Under some misguided idea of racial loyalty, some Americans claimed innate African cultural differences based on their ancestry and skin color. They adopted African-American for their identity. This claim reversed a hundred years of civil rights advances and made acceptable again white-supremacists' ideas of innate racial differences. It supports George Washington's idea of American unity that excluded Americans with African ancestors. This claim made Martin Luther King's plea for Americans to judge each other by character and not skin color less compelling.

Americans not enslaved to racial loyalty will harm society if they allow this lunacy of racial and ethnic loyalty to rule. King, Washington and Lincoln were right about the advantages of unity and the costs of disunity. We will pay those costs by losing our leading world position to unified societies even if we somehow avoid self-destructing in another civil war.

Kenneth Brooks is a freelance writer and speaker. Contact him at P.O. Box 882, Vallejo, CA 94590. opinion@ethicalego.com