From “Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World–and How to Repair It All” by Lisa Sharon Harper
In January 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Jamaica to finish the manuscript for what would become his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? One year prior, in 1966, King had witnessed the White backlash against the gains of the movement and began writing the manuscript. He wrote about the profound disappointment of Black America, which was handed the hope of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act only to have northern congressional members strike deals with southern members to slow implementation and enforcement. He witnessed the seething rage and growing disillusionment of young Black men and women who had dared to believe their lives were about to change only to find the ones who made the promises had just bartered their rights away. In the shadow of the Watts riots and reflecting on the rise of the Black power movement, King wrote of the “unregenerate segregationist,” that these citizens “have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality.”
King was talking about the very men who fathered the religious right: southern segregationists. The rotten core of their movement now stands exposed in our present age. Four years of verbal and political abuse by the executive leader of our nation was papered over by the cultlike loyalty of White evangelicals. They flanked Donald Trump while minimizing his sins and protecting him from accountability. They ignored or echoed daily assaults on truth. They ignored and minimized Trump’s collusion with Russia to undercut American democracy. In the name of the culture wars, they hailed their chief for packing federal courts with far-right extremists – some of whom are known members of hate groups. And they rubbed their hands with glee when the GOP Senate broke its own rules to flip the Supreme Court, making it the most conservative it had been since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that upheld segregation. And White evangelicals, drunk with power, militarized the police and directed the evisceration of democratic institutions like the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, public education, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.