Maureen Dowd (cc photo: DoubleSpeak Media) vs. Martin Luther King
The corporate media campaign against the movie Selma (FAIR Blog, 1/8/15) continues–the kind of barrage of criticism you don’t see unless something has hit a nerve. The latest pundit to pile on–just in time for the Martin Luther King holiday–is New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (1/17/15), who complains of the filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s “portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights.” Writes Dowd:
Instead of painting LBJ and MLK as allies, employing different tactics but complementing each other, the director made Johnson an obstacle.
Getting up on her highest of horses, Dowd pronounces, “On matters of race–America’s original sin–there is an even higher responsibility to be accurate.”
Yes, it is important to be accurate on matters of race–particularly for white columnists lecturing African-American directors about black history.
For example, Dowd writes that
LBJ loyalists…said that the president did not…let J. Edgar Hoover send a sex tape of her husband to Mrs. King. (Bobby Kennedy, as JFK’s attorney general, is the one who allowed Hoover to tap Dr. King.)
Dowd appears not to know that when Hoover passed along evidence of King’s infidelities, the Johnson White House’s actual response (as conveyed by Walter Jenkins, Johnson’s No. 1 aide), was that
the FBI could perform a good service to the country if this matter could somehow be confidentially given to members of the press.
(The transcripts of the Church Committee investigation, which looked into the FBI’s surveillance of King as part of its inquiry into intelligence abuses, are a valuable corrective to the idea that the Johnson White House was either unaware of or somehow an unwilling participant in the FBI’s anti-civil rights activities.)
Nor is there any indication in Dowd’s column that she knows that when King asked Johnson about voting rights, Johnson replied, “Martin…I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get voting rights through in this session of Congress.” Or that Johnson is on tape saying of King, when he was using the protests in Selma to push for that Voting Rights Act anyway, “He better get to behaving himself or all of them are going to be put in jail.”
Dowd is outraged by the fact that Johnson was depicted as an “obstacle.” But the activists in Selma clearly saw him as an obstacle; why else would they have staged sit-ins at the White House and Justice Department? Did the columnist forget that part of the movie? Imagine that it was made up?
Or perhaps Dowd thinks she knows better than the activists at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee how civil rights organizing should be done. If only she had been around back then to tell them who their friends really were.
She could have also helped out if Martin Luther King had let her see a draft of his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” (4/16/63). In that letter, King wrote:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well-timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
Dowd could have set him straight: If you would only just wait, people in power will give you your freedom. They may be employing different tactics–but they are your allies, not obstacles.
It’s not hard to understand why, when she sees a white liberal being portrayed as “patronizing”–Dowd takes that personally.
Yup, if all them Uppity colored folk had just listened to Maureen, they would have them a whole a passel of rights….
It is hard for those “who know everything” to understand how little they really know, but she does prove that old adage, “your entitled to your own Opinion, not your own facts.”
Thanks for taking the time to address this. I just read her little article. She writes about the facts like the movie was so off base. It was her opinion that the director puts LBJ as obstacle. I guess she missed the important fact that MLK was trying make him take action. I guess reporting on the “Black Teenagers who received free tickets” kept her from realizing the point of the movie.
Dowd appears not to know this or that. Dowd is a corporate whore and racist who is a poster girl for Plantation Liberalism. The world would be better off if Dowd had been aborted.
Maureen Dowd is just another “Cocktail Liberal” running her mouth when she should listen and learn something. When you think you know everything and know little you always get into trouble.
Mr. Naurekas:
To your knowledge, does this film portray LBJ and his actions accurately?
Well, that’s nice. But Johnson did get a Voting Rights Act, in that very Congress.
So – ah – who’s history is accuate here? It’s surprising that anyone would claim that LBJ told MLK he couldn’t do exactly what he did do.
Funny…
But I don’t recall the Times being this concerned over Hollywood’s portrayal of matters relating to race relations following “The Help”, “The Butler”, “Forrest Gump” (its mischaracterizing of the Black Panther Party) and so on.
The Times was also silent on “Zero Dark Thirty”‘s misrepresentation of the intelligence gathering process that led to the Navy Seals’ ability to track down Bin Laden and kill him. Torture is that movie’s hero, in spite of publicly available expert testimony to the contrary.
And there is the movie “Argo”, which purports to detail the effort by the CIA and Canada to rescue hostages stranded in Tehran after the revolution: the dissing of the British and the New Zealanders in that movie (they were key in the success of the rescue plot); the never-happened last-minute escape; no mention that the CIA is the cause of the turmoil in Iran in the first place.
OK, maybe I am being unfair…
Has anyone heard that Ms. Dowd is going to keypad out a column decrying the refusal of Eastwood’s “American Sniper” to portray its lead character Chris Kyle in the fullness of its real life source as a uniformed psychotic serial killer with seriously retrograde values regarding race? Here is her chance.
And what a fat chance it is.
Two things: first, so many people have the idea that anyone “let” J. Edgar Hoover do anything. As far as I know, he had so much dirt on everyone he worked for that he did as he pleased.
Second, at least Dowd didn’t feminize MLK, as she did so often with Obama when he was running for President.
(Bobby Kennedy, as JFK’s attorney general, is the one who allowed Hoover to tap Dr. King.)
And JFK signed the order.
Julian Bond and another of MLK’s younger organizers (Andrew Young?) at the time both said no such conversations ever happened between MLK and LBJ. They were not happy with the director’s alteration of the characteristics of the relationship. I think I’ll go with Bond and Young rather than some twit who never met the man she has portrayed inauthentically.
This article is ill-informed, intemperate, and inflammatory. Many of the posted comments are worse. Whatever the problems with Dowd (and there are plenty), this reflects very poorly on FAIR. I’m deeply committed to educating people on the truly radical vision of MLK, and his profound critique of the dominant systems in the US, but this is disheartening. Instead of providing a platform for dogma, can’t FAIR find someone who can speak authoritatively to the historical actual interplay between MLK/SCLC and LBJ in the struggle for social change?
Ooooh! Burn! Way to call her out!
Passed commentary along to ‘letters[at]nytimes.com’ but my guess is they’ll probably delete it.
Jim withheld the facts again. Dowd’s defense of LBJ is caused by her very close relationship with him. “Under the table” was a frequent description of their antics back in the day.
Dowd’s columns are a perfect example of the kind of commentary her class is capable of – petty instead of expansive, resentful instead of inquisitive, intuitive instead of analytical. Her carping is all of aggrieved mainstream bourgeois political sensibilities. Their mythical telling of the civil rights movement of the late 50’s early 60’s is a fairy tale where a non-threatening black preacher led his people out of the desert into the paternal embrace of noble and enlightened white liberals. That’s a story full of bronze monuments and refrigerator- magnet quotes from parsed and edited speeches that never once challenge the American capitalist Imperialist paradigm. The truth is far far different than that. Being of a certain age ( and of course class) Maureen Dowd probably feels personally aggrieved, and threatened by any deviation from that “white washed” version of recent history – the “official” version.
Spa Kil
The FBI had and has no legal or constitutional authority to invade a citizens privacy (to make a “sex tape” for instance) for the purposes of political character assassination. The fact that more and more people like you are willing to ignore such outrageous transgressions is why American democracy and the rule of law are dying . Maybe your all good with that . I have to assume you are.
It is deeply unfair to charge MLK with ‘homophobia’. King had an opinion on the morality of homosexuality that is antiquated by decades, and obviously religiously-informed, but there’s no evidence that he would have supported the political discrimination against homosexuals. In fact, he was perfectly willing to be close friends and a collaborator with such men as Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin who were open enough with their lifestyle that King certainly would have been aware of their orientation. The Stonewall riots, the semi-official launch of the gay rights movement, was one year after King’s assassination. We cannot know how he would have supported the movement, but I suspect he would have supported his good friend Rustin.
Maureen, when you’ve walked the miles of tauntings, been thrown in jail and had the heat turned on in the summer and the AC turned on in the winter, beaten and told you were going to be killed along with your family, had your house bombed with your children asleep, lived with your spouse never knowing if you’d return, lived in a little bungalow by the tracks, and, through all of this, maintained your dignity and gave people, like myself, hope for humanity (I’m not of color), and become a symbol of hope for the world, you might, perhaps but probably not, tell someone else how to do it better. All because of LBJ? You’re too young for senile dementia.