Barry Barely Cared About Martin Luther King, Jr.

FPM: Back in January, President Donald Trump dedicated his weekly address to Martin Luther King Jr. “Dr. King’s dream is our dream, it is the American dream, it’s the promise stitched into the fabric of our nation, etched into the hearts of our people and written into the soul of humankind,” the president said. “It is the dream of a world where people are judged by who they are, not how they look or where they come from.”

Democrats and their media allies didn’t like it, and as the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination approached, one pundit slapped a gag order on the president.

“When it Comes To Honoring Martin Luther King, Maybe Trump Should Skip It,” headlined a March 7 Miami Herald commentary by Leonard Pitts Jr. “Now April 4 looms, and it occurs to me there is literally nothing Donald Trump can say that will be equal to the moment.” Unlike Clinton and Bush, according to Pitts, Trump “has no credibility here.”

By contrast, “President Obama seemed tailored for such moments, as if sent from some celestial Central Casting to testify to the possibilities and potential inherent in black lives.” That invites a look at what that the celestially cast president said about King on his way up the ladder.

Barry, as mother Ann Dunham called him, was born on August 4, 1961, so he had yet to turn three on August 22, 1963, when King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech. Ann Dunham married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro and Barry was attending the Besuki school in Jakarta when King was murdered on April 4, 1968. The author of the 1995 Dreams from My Father is pretty quiet about the impact at the time.

In that book, Barry’s strongest influence is “Frank,” portrayed as a kind of Grady Wilson character, drinking whisky from a jar and warning the student of the dangers of womenfolk. After publication, the author clearly identified Frank as Frank Marshall Davis but portrayed him only as a prominent poet. Frank was actually a dutiful Communist who first came to Hawaii to help Stalin bring the island into the Soviet orbit.

In Dreams Frank gets more than 2,000 words but the poet says nothing about Martin Luther King Jr. and bids Barry farewell as he heads to upscale Occidental College. There the student gathers books from the library, but not Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, from 1958, King’s first book. Neither does he retrieve Strength to Love, Trumpet of Conscience, Where do We Go From Here? or Why We Can’t Wait, also by King.

He did gather books by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. DuBois. But as the author explains, “only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me. The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”  MORE HERE