Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [75]
And then the South was finally crushed, slavery abolished, and America marched on. The Draft Riots didn’t even prevent Lincoln from carrying New York State in the next year’s elections.
The first exception to Americans’ abhorrence of mob action came in the sixties. The civil rights movement gave mobs a halo. Disgust with the Jim Crow laws overcame Americans’ natural aversion to disorder. At the outset, the civil rights movement consisted of peaceful citizens battling mobs that were oppressing blacks—mobs that were, as always, led by Democrats. Orval Faubus, Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—Democrats all.
But as soon as blacks started to vote in large enough numbers to matter, the whole Democratic Party switched sides. Unable to win elections by appealing to the racist mob, the anti–civil rights wing of the Democratic Party disappeared virtually overnight. In the blink of an eye, the Democrats went from being the Party of Bull Connor to being the Party of Al Sharpton. The Democrats simply traded one mob constituency for a new one. You might say they traded their white robes for a track suit and a giant medallion.
This is the history of the Democratic Party: Find out what the mob believes, then leap in front of the mob in order to lead it.
One man who didn’t like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way—by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court. Marshall was the anti-Rousseau, using words, not pictures, to get justice.
Martin Luther King Jr. was the heir to Rousseau. He used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor.
Connor was a machine-politics, pro-union Democrat who had been elected to the Democratic National Committee from Alabama. He was also a vile racist, endorsed by Alabama’s Democratic, segregationist governor, George Wallace. After witnessing Connor’s brutal tactics to enforce segregation, the good citizens of Birmingham stepped in to remove him from his position as Commissioner of Public Safety. Birmingham’s middle class, business leaders, and Jewish community weren’t interested in having beery KKK nightriders in their town. First, they voted to eliminate Connor’s office; then—to be extra clear—they decisively voted against Connor when he ran for mayor.
It was over—responsible citizens and civil rights advocates had won. But Martin Luther King planned one last protest before Connor’s term expired. City merchants, including the black millionaire A. G. Gaston, opposed King’s protest on the grounds that Connor had already been beaten at the ballot box. On the day of Connor’s electoral defeat, Burke Marshall, a champion of civil rights in Kennedy’s Justice Department, called King and asked him to call off the Birmingham protests.43
But King decided to deliberately provoke Connor, who was insane. This was a way to extend the movement, just as, years later, King would branch out from racial justice into “social justice.”
With television crews crawling all over Birmingham, King arranged for hundreds of black children to march on the city. As expected, this led to a total conflagration when Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on little children, some as young as six years old. The explosive images from this confrontation were instantly broadcast around the world.
King had stoked this incredible fire to ignite his dying movement—dying because civil rights had won in the courts, at the ballot box, and in the hearts and minds of Americans. But King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Wyatt Walker were “overjoyed” at the mayhem they had caused. Walker gloated, “There never was any more skillful manipulation of the news media than there was