FROM THE ARCHIVES: BLACK MOSES:

-AUDIO: Martin Luther King, Jr: "I've Been to the Mountaintop" (American Rhetoric)

The Reverend King had gone pretty far wrong by then, descending into stock Leftism -- welfare mau-mauing and appeasement of the Soviet Union -- but while he didn't get to the Promised Land with us he did get us there. When you listen to his speeches you realize how important it was to have the leader of the civil rights movement make moral claims rooted in Judeo-Christianity upon an American people informed by the faith. He succeeded because we could not be both segregationist and American.

[originally posted: 4/04/07]