Charles Hurt: Political Zealots Attempt to Destroy Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

Modern-day ISIS in America is not just hellbent on obliterating the history of our Founding. They are also determined to destroy our more recent history — both our darkest struggles and our most brilliant shining moments.

They seek to replace 1776 with “1619” — to keep slavery alive. And they want to erase the stunning successes born out of the painful Civil Rights Movement.

President Biden recently claimed that Republican efforts to secure Americans’ voting rights were “the worst challenge to our democracy since the Civil War.”

Tell that to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, or 14-year-old Emmett Till.

Asking voters to provide a government ID to cast ballots, he said, is a “21st Century Jim Crow assault.”

Really? So says a wealthy white liberal who never got his skull cracked trying to cast a lawful ballot. An entitled old white guy who never got attacked by frothing dogs or blasted with a firehose while standing up for his most basic constitutional rights.

But Mr. Biden got arrested rescuing Nelson Mandela from his jail cell. Or something. In his own mind, anyway.

These people destroy history for their own personal political gain. They twist any truth — no matter how sacred — for their own benefit.

They deface any hero from our history — if they can make it all about themselves.

A planeload of ridiculous state legislators flee Texas in a chartered jet and a case of beer to protest proposed election integrity laws. Now they portray themselves as modern-day Little Rock Nine — because they had to wash their underwear in a hotel sink.

These people don’t deserve to clean the toilets of the Little Rock Nine.

The real damage these people do by distorting history is to convince young people today who are still learning our history that there is somehow some kind of connection between these silly bozos today and the truly courageous men and women who fought and won the Civil Rights movement.

The great heroes of the civil rights era called it the “second Revolution” because they celebrated the ideals of the first Revolution — no matter how imperfect the immediate outcome. In civil rights marches, protesters carried American flags and wrapped themselves in the Constitution.

Unlike these vermin today, those heroes always kept their eyes on the prize, which was freedom.

None spoke with greater clarity than Martin Luther King. “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself — a society that can live with its conscience,” he said. “And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.

Dr. King paid the ultimate price for his unflinching courage. But he lives on today with the freedoms he secured.

Too bad the anti-history political zealots of today work so hard to erase the inheritance he left us.

• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor of The Washington Times.

Source