In a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day post, Esquire blogger Charles Pierce accused present-day conservatives of distorting history in their attempt to use the civil-rights movement as “a weapon against issues on which Dr. King surely would have come down on the progressive side,” and declared that the movement “no longer can be used as history's truncheon against the legitimate social, cultural, and political aspirations of the people who are its truest heirs.”
“For nearly 40 years now,” Pierce alleged, “the Republican party has married itself to a conservative movement that has sought to obscure the events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as surely as the tear gas once did, and to obscure those events for the purposes of gutting everything that was accomplished, and gutting everything that was accomplished for the same reason people didn't want those things accomplished in the first place.”
From Pierce’s post (bolding added):
[The civil-rights movement] has been turned into a weapon against issues on which Dr. King surely would have come down on the progressive side…If you can't see the line between the scene [in the movie Selma] on the bridge, and the decision to gut the Voting Rights [Act], then you don't want to do so…Leaving the history of the civil rights movement in the hands of white people has not worked out well at all.
Selma forces an important issue. If the Civil Rights Movement belonged to all Americans -- and, therefore, if its memory belongs to all Americans -- then that ownership must be an honest one. The Movement can no longer be a device by which white Americans feel good about themselves. It no longer can be used as history's truncheon against the legitimate social, cultural, and political aspirations of the people who are its truest heirs. For nearly 40 years now, the forces of reaction have tried to drown out this simple truth, or twist it beyond recognition so that they could use it for their own selfish purposes. For nearly 40 years now, the Republican party has married itself to a conservative movement that has sought to obscure the events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as surely as the tear gas once did, and to obscure those events for the purposes of gutting everything that was accomplished, and gutting everything that was accomplished for the same reason people didn't want those things accomplished in the first place.
So we hear that the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, which were aided within the government by a Democratic president and the kind of Republicans who don't exist any more, are somehow cheapened and lessened by what, say, Robert Byrd and Hugo Black did in their 30's, and nobody notices that there no longer is a constituency within the Republican party for extending the franchise. The Civil Rights Movement…was an American war that culminated in an American victory, no more or less decisive than what was negotiated on the decks of the USS Missouri. It belongs to the country, which turns its back on that victory to its everlasting shame.
