STEVE HILTON: Sixty years on from ‘I Have A Dream’, the unifying vision of Martin Luther King has been betrayed by BLM and their fellow Leftist Zealots

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So what went wrong?

Some black conservative scholars claim the main culprit is too much government intervention – specifically the welfare state and failing schools. According to this analysis, the expansion of welfare schemes initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in his War on Poverty in the 1960s incentivized behavior that hurt black Americans’ chances of climbing the ladder of opportunity.

They point to the huge rise in family breakdown and absent fathers, from around 25 per cent in the 1960s to more than 75 per cent now. More than three quarters of black children are born without a stable family. Study after study shows that strong family structures are one of the most important building blocks of a successful life.

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Education was supposed to rescue impoverished children from these grim outcomes. Instead, the American school system, dominated by militant Left-wing teacher unions, has multiplied the disaster. In my home state of California, in vital subjects such as maths, test scores have shown the average black pupil is four years behind white pupils.

You might think that with the devastating evidence, accumulated over so many years, of the failure of Left-wing policies to lift black Americans into King’s ‘promised land’, campaigners for racial justice – or ‘equity’ as we are now told to call it – would change course.

Perhaps they could use their evident cultural power to help black faith leaders in their quest to change attitudes on family, marriage and parenting? Maybe join the black community leaders pushing for educational choice, enabling parents and pupils to escape the calamitous dysfunction of many inner city government-run schools?

Not a chance.

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The recent successors to King’s civil rights movement, starting with the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2014, have drifted further and further away from positive, practical problem-solving into the fringe obsessions of a clique of Marxist academics, under the banner of Critical Race Theory.

According to this extremist dogma, society is structurally racist, and any difference in economic or social outcomes is by definition the result of racism.

In place of King’s unifying mission to ‘transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood’, today’s race campaigners seek to divide.

…mounted a vicious assault on the institution of policing, demanding the defunding and dismantling of police departments.

The resulting explosion in urban crime has made life even worse for black communities…

 Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric, have created a heyday for criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime, crime will continue to soar.’

Exactly. As Margaret Thatcher once said, the facts of life are conservative.

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Here’s a sobering question, though: do we see any sign that in 60 years’ time, Dr Martin Luther King’s vision of true equality and racial harmony will be realised? I fear not, unless we wrest control of the racial justice agenda away from the far-Left ideologues who have run it into the ground.