anarchiddy

Lmao, just saying 'you proved my point' doesn't make it true, but I'm ok with walking away from this one cus it really seems like you need it more lol

A person could apply King’s own words to show how he’d denied the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.

But clearly not in the case of Palestinian liberation, since democrats' refusal to address it lost them the election. King not speaking about Vietnam actually proves my point, because not only did he extract the concessions from Johnson he was working for on civil rights, but he caved to pressure because it was no longer advantageous to deny it as an issue since popular sentiment was overwhelming.

It's not amazing, but actually kind of pathetic, how desperate you are to dodge the points i'm making. I'm not surprised.

He spoke out about it 4 years after its start, and explicitly said he avoided it for so long because of Johnson. I was trying to give you another example of your point, genius. Do a little more than picking the first Google result.

Oops, looks like you stopped before the good part:

but you would have to assume that the advantage gained by not speaking on those issues outweighs the disadvantage from denying that justice being demanded. I’d say, in some recent cases, complacency and denial of justice have proven to be more disadvantageous than not.

Still, neither MLK nor Douglass would say that the tension and agitation caused by civil rights protests is the fault of protestors. MLK would tell you that “we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension” and also that the democrats risk loosing ‘young people whose disappointment with the party is turning into outright disgust’, and that they will bring about their own destruction by continuing to deny the justice being demanded.

Lmao, I think i'm picking up the clues now. You don't like the letter because you're in the picture

“I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action" <-- That's you!

Lol, I guess if I wanted to be charitable I could acknowledge the point you're trying to make, which is that civil rights activists like MLK knew that speaking on some issues could undermine the effectiveness of their agitation on other issues (such as MLK avoiding speaking about Vietnam because he wanted Johnson to be sympathetic to civil rights issues) - but you would have to assume that the advantage gained by not speaking on those issues outweighs the disadvantage from denying that justice being demanded. I'd say, in some recent cases, complacency and denial of justice have proven to be more disadvantageous than not.

Still, neither MLK nor Douglass would say that the tension and agitation caused by civil rights protests is the fault of protestors. MLK would tell you that "we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension" and also that the democrats risk loosing 'young people whose disappointment with the party is turning into outright disgust', and that they will bring about their own destruction by continuing to deny the justice being demanded.

Ok.... so it has no relevance with MLK's letter then? You agree fully with his methods and contentions in the letter, like the below? I don't have any idea what you're trying to say, you'll have to use more of your words.

? Does that have relevance to his letter from Birmingham...? Are you saying MLK was not one of Americas most effective civil rights advocates, or...?

Winston Churchill was a homophobe but that doesn't mean I think he was on the wrong side of WWII....

You wanna cover your gripe with MLK and the letter from Birmingham now?

Guess nobody advised Douglass of that, then.

What about voting against them?

I had to go and pull out my copy of Blight's book on Douglass, because it had been a while but I remembered that section of the book differently.

The whole passage is expressing a sentiment very different from the one that 'Grunge' article is representing - without transcribing that whole section i'll just quote the last little bit that summarizes his summer leading up to the election:

The comparison is not quite as clear as I think you'd like, since Douglass's tentative 'support' of Lincoln was motivated by a desire to bring the north and south closer to outright conflict, not as a way of picking a lesser evil or mitigating harm. I'd say Douglass's sentiment is more in-line with current-day pro-palestinian activists, who acknowledge the political calculus of a moderately-favorable party against an outright hostile one, but who publicly oppose voting for them themselves. He'd be in that same 'protest-vote' pool that most people here keep complaining about. I'm actually lightly amused by this apparent reversal, since today it's more common to find people who say 'i will vote for democrats' but then actively campaign against them, but again I think the comparison is strained.

Either way, trying to argue that Douglass 'worked for Lincoln' is still incredibly misleading at best, and clearly a liberal self-centeredness that he (and most other black civil rights activists in our history) actively loathed and berated:

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it. Douglass summed up his bitter complaint as “this terrible paradox of passing history” rooted in a distinctively American selfishness. “Whoever levies a tax upon our Bohea or Young Hyson [two forms of Chinese tea], will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets.” If some foreign power tried to “impress a few Yankee sailors,” Americans would go “fight like heroes.” Douglass fashioned a withering chastisement of American self-centeredness that would match any modern complaint about the culture’s hyperindividualism. “Millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us,” he complained, “and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as ‘sucking doves.’ ” His “wickedly selfish” Americans loved to celebrate their “own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.” They lived by the “philosophy of Cain,” ready with their bluntly evil answer to the famous question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Douglass’s use of the Cain and Abel parable is all the more telling if we remember that, unlike the more sentimental ways the “brother’s keeper” language is often employed today, Cain had just killed his brother, and to God’s query as to Abel’s fate, Cain replies in effect, why should I care? Douglass wanted the indifferent Americans, with blood on their hands as well, to read on further in Genesis and know Cain’s fate as “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.”

Doubtless he wouldn't have seen as much in the way of redeeming qualities in Biden or Harris, since far from Lincoln's willingness to engage the south (for the wrong reasons in Douglass's mind), Biden repeatedly cowered away from confronting Israel's antagonism and actively sheltered them from consequence. But then again I think neither of us can do more than speculate as to what he'd think of us more than 170 years later.

Check my edit. He campaigned for him after his first term (through which he actively opposed him), and only really saw him as an ally after the first 3 years through the civil war (and after Lincoln's own perspective had shifted).

Edit: keep in mind that Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation January 1st of 63, before Douglass had any interest in campaigning for him. He had literally already abolished slavery before Douglass threw his hat in for him

..... You have that backwards. Edit: it's possible that you're referring to Lincoln's campaign for reelection, but that was still 4 years after the start of the civil war.

If you're actively curious and not just using this selectively to support your own stances on current events, here's a pretty good resource that describes the bigger picture of their relationship

Douglass opposed Lincoln both when he was a candidate and through most of the beginning of his term as president. Lincoln was, at first, a supporter of the American Colonization plan - which was a belief of some white abolitionists that blacks and whites could not live peacefully with each other, so they sought to emigrate the freed slaves to colonies in Africa. Douglass was justified in detesting that plan and condemning Lincoln's support of it. Douglass went as far as to say of Lincoln's presidency that he "has resolved that no good shall come to the Negro from this war."

I think there's ample reason to think that Lincoln's shift in perspective by the end of the civil war was a direct result of Douglass's influence, but by no measure does anyone on 'the left' think of Douglass as a traitor to his morals. He was a patriot who fought tooth-and-nail for what was right, even in the face of compromise presented as 'progress'.