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Is Ann Coulter Right About the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King?

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In her new best-seller Ann Coulter breaks with the politically 
correct history of the civil rights movement by openly 
criticizing Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The always provocative Coulter makes the case that King’s 
embrace of mass street protests, specifically breaking the law 
by staging marches without permits and gaining public sympathy 
by purposely putting children in the way of vicious dogs and 
blasts from power water hoses used by rabid segregationists, is 
a prime example of how liberals throughout history get their way 
by using angry, inflammatory mob behavior.

Coulter writes in her book “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is 
Endangering America,” that “Martin Luther King Jr. ...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,” the Birmingham sheriff who was known to be easily 
provoked to brutality and violence to enforce racial segregation.

She spoke with me as she was writing because I am the author of 
several books on the civil rights movement, including “Eyes on 
the Prize – America’s Civil Rights Years.” And she uses 
quotations from my best-selling biography of Thurgood Marshall, 
the liberal legal giant who became first black justice of the 
U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall, like Coulter, was a critic of 
King’s tactics.

“Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling 
him an ‘opportunist’ and ‘first rate rabble-rouser,’” Coulter 
argues in her book. “Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion 
that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall 
replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not 
be entrusted to children. King, he said, was ‘a boy on a man’s 
errand.’”

You have to give Coulter points for shrewdly using the words of 
one black liberal civil rights icon to indict another liberal 
black liberal civil rights icon. She has a conservative agenda 
and she is a world-class provocateur who knows how to inflame 
her liberal critics.

Coulter and I disagree most of the time, especially on her 
regular use of harsh, partisan hyperbolic language to caricature 
people. Her tirades against liberals get lots of media attention 
and sell books but they overshadow the serious insights she has 
into American history. And when Ann is right, Ann can be 
devastatingly right.

In any case, Marshall worked to achieve racial equality by 
ending laws that discriminated against Americans in schools, in 
playgrounds, housing, on juries and at work. And he told me over 
the course of months of interviews of his differences with King. 
“I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his the 
theory.”

Marshall said in one interview as we discussed King’s street 
protest tactics. “I didn’t believe in that. I thought you had 
the right to disobey the law and you have the right to go to 
jail for it.” In the same interview, Marshall conceded that King 
had tremendous influence. “He came up at the right time,” he 
said. “I think he was great – as a leader. As an organizer, he 
wasn’t worth s—t..He was a great speaker...but as for getting 
the work done, he was not too good at that…All he did was dump 
all his legal work on us (the NAACP) including the bills. And 
that was all right with him so long as he didn’t have to pay the 
bills.”

In those interviews I learned that there were times when 
Marshall deeply resented King’s fame – particularly when Martin 
Luther King Jr. Day was made a federal holiday.

The left often has a simplistic view of the civil rights 
movement as monolithic. The truth is that Marshall and King 
represented very different approaches to ending the bitter 
history of segregation. Marshall favored using the law while 
King favored bold demonstrations to gain media attention.

History tells us that both the demonstrators and the lawyers 
played vital roles in bringing about the end of segregation in 
America. But Marshall’s more conservative view of how to create 
lasting social change is often forgotten because he never wore a 
dashiki or patronized the idea of race riots as helpful to 
achieving racial equality. He was seen by many of the 60’s 
activists as a boring, law and order, establishment judge who 
deeply believed in the Constitution, loved America and was a 
social conservative.

How is it boring to win the landmark Supreme Court decision to 
end school segregation – the Brown decision – and break barriers 
as the first black Solicitor General and Supreme Court Justice?

Coulter’s brand of vituperative political commentary has 
sometimes poisoned our political discourse over years. She and 
her fellow provocateurs on the far right are featured 
prominently in my upcoming book “Muzzled: the Assault on Honest 
Debate.” But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. On this 
one, Coulter has her history exactly right and that is why the 
left is screaming.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/06/16/is-ann-coulter-right-
about-civil-rights-movement/#ixzz1VxXXbwZs
                  Ť

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Is Ann Coulter Right About the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King? "Ronny Koch" <rkoch@banmlkday.com> - 2025-01-24 01:11 +0100

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