THESE PEOPLE INVITED MIKE HUCKABEE TO "RE-ASSASSINATE" DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ON HIS HOLIDAY

THESE PEOPLE INVITED MIKE HUCKABEE TO “RE-ASSASSINATE” DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ON HIS HOLIDAY

©Wendell Griffen, 2022

The Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, an agency within the Arkansas Department of Education, invited Mike Huckabee to deliver a “keynote address” during an invitation only “interfaith prayer breakfast” that will be hosted at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion by Governor Asa Hutchinson at an undisclosed time on Monday, January 17, 2022, the federal holiday established to honor King’s life and ministry. I have called the Huckabee invitation another example of how people, including political and religious figures, are “re-assassinating” Martin Luther King Jr.

Mike Huckabee served as governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He came in second (behind former Senator John McCain) in the 2008 campaign for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States and was unable to win the nomination in 2016. He is host of the Huckabee talk show that ran on the Fox News Channel from 2008 to 2015, and which has aired on the Trinity Broadcast Network since October 2015. Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is a Republican Party candidate for Governor of Arkansas who formerly served as chief of White House communications during the administration of former President Donald Trump.

On March 1, 2011, Mike Huckabee falsely commented that former President Barack Obama had “grown up in Kenya” during an appearance on The Steve Malzberg Show. This is what Huckabee said: “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, [is] very different than the average American.” Later in that interview, Huckabee said of Obama: “...if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”[1]

Barak Obama was born in Hawaii. He grew up in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kansas. What evidence shows that Martin Luther King Jr. would have done something like Huckabee did?

After several Asian American women were murdered in Georgia, after former President Trump labeled the novel coronavirus that causes Covid 19 “Kung Flu,” and after Major League Baseball announced in April 2021 that it would move the annual All-Star game from Atlanta to another location to protest laws passed by the Georgia legislature that suppress voting, with particularly oppressive impact on African American voters, Mike Huckabee posted the following message on his personal Twitter account: “I’ve decided to ‘identify’ as Chinese. Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my ‘values’ and I’ll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain’t America great?”[2]

When he was challenged about that tweet, Mike Huckabee claimed that he was speaking in jest. What evidence shows that Martin Luther King Jr. treated murdering Asian women, blaming a global deadly pandemic on the Chinese, and suppressing voting rights of Black people as joking matters?

The Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission invited Mike Huckabee to deliver a “keynote address” on the King holiday. The Commission’s executive director is DuShun Scarborough. The Commission members whose names appear on the guest list for that event are Chairwoman Sharon Ingram; Gerald Canada; Paul Davis; Jonelle Fulmer; Patrick Gulley; Carmen Helton; Charles Killion; Andy Montgomery; Kent Oliver; Kermit Parks; Derek Scott; and Gary Tobar.

The event will be held at an undisclosed time on January 17 at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Asa Hutchinson is the current Governor of Arkansas. The King Commission website accurately reports that Hutchinson “is a graduate of the University of Arkansas law school.”[3] Hutchinson’s official website also mentions that he holds a law degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law.[4]

Neither website mentions that Hutchinson obtained his undergraduate degree from Bob Jones University, a private religious fundamentalist institution in Greenville, South Carolina. Hutchinson enrolled in BJU as a first-year student in the fall of 1968, months after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

When Hutchinson applied for, was admitted, and enrolled in BJU, that school refused to admit African and African American students.

Bob Jones University denied admission to African and African American students until 1971, only admitted married Black students between 1971 and 1975, and banned interracial dating and marriage. In 1976, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the university’s tax-exempt status retroactively to December 1, 1970, because BJU was practicing racial discrimination. The interracial dating ban was continued even after BJU lost its appeal of the IRS action before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983.[5]

Governor Hutchinson, the host of the January 17 “interfaith prayer breakfast” event where Mike Huckabee is slated to make a “keynote address” presented by the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, attended, and graduated from Bob Jones University, a school that had racial segregation as its official policy long after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed it. Hutchinson’s bio does not mention that history.

When Asa Hutchinson enrolled in Bob Jones University in 1968, that university had racial segregation as its official policy based on a radio sermon Bob Jones Sr. preached on April 17, 1960, which was Easter Sunday, “Is Segregation Scriptural?”[6] When Bob Jones Sr. moved the university from Tennessee to Greenville, South Carolina, he built a number of dormitories that were named after local Ku Klux Klan supporters who sat on the board of directors of the university.[7]

For its part, the official website of Bob Jones University does not mention its history as a bastion of white supremacy and racism.[8] It also does not mention its role in the decades-long backlash against federal efforts to make sure that tax-exempt private schools were not segregated.

As Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist who has spent years covering religious nationalism in the United States wrote in her book, Unholy – Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (Random House, 2020), BJU graduate Rev. Bob Billings was “a leader in conceiving of, advising, and leading the nascent fundamentalist Christian school movement… [T]he backlash against the federal government’s moves to desegregate private schools became the spark that thrust Billings into national politics as he crafted campaigns intended to bring rank-and-file churchgoers into his antigovernment crusade. Billings portrayed his Christian schools as an antidote to everything about the 1960s that conservatives despised: the moral laxity, the secularism, and most critically, the heavy hand of the federal government in public education, and particularly, desegregation.”[9]

Bob Billings, a Bob Jones University graduate, eventually became one of the co-founders of the Moral Majority movement and served as its executive director before accepting a position in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration. Sarah Posner mentions in Unholy that while he held that position it became known that the Clarksville School of Theology from which Billings obtained his doctorate “was a correspondence school that state officials had shut down because the degrees it offered were ‘false and misleading educational credentials.’ The champion of Christian education had a ‘doctorate’ from a diploma mill.”[10]

Mike Huckabee, an unreconstructed Southern (slaveholder) Baptist preacher, right wing politician and political pundit, and father of a person who was chief spokesperson for the vicious policies of former President Donald Trump, will deliver a “keynote address” during an “interfaith prayer breakfast” on the King holiday because Asa Hutchinson and other unreconstructed white Christian nationalists control state government in Arkansas. DuShun Scarborough and the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission are the feckless servants of that cabal of King “re-assassins.”

This is the situation in Arkansas, the state where Daisy and L.C. Bates led nine courageous Black children to enter Little Rock Central High School in 1957 and where Martin Luther King Jr. attended the graduation of Ernest Green, the first Black graduate of Little Rock Central, in 1958.[11]