Ending the War on Pot Would Help Complete Martin Luther King’s Call for Civil Rights

Today is a national holiday
that commemorates the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the larger civil rights movement of which he was such an important
part.

America and the world has changed a great deal since King was
shot in 1968, most of it for the better. Certainly, the country is
a far more hospitable place for African Americans than it was in
King’s day.

I hope that President Obama’s recent comments on marijuana
legalization augur the beginning of the end of the drug war, which
causes for more disruption in the black community than the sort of
overt racism King fought against.

As Jacob
Sullum noted eariler today, the president candidly told

The New Yorker than pot is no more dangerous than booze and
that the war on pot is prosecuted in such a way that minorities,
especially African Americans, are arrested and prosecuted for drug
crimes at far higher rates than whites. “I don’t think it is
more dangerous than alcohol,” said Obama of weed, and he cheered on
legalization in states such as Colorado and Washington:
“It’s important for it to go forward because it’s
important for society not to have a situation in which a large
portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and
only a select few get punished.”

About 750,000 people a year get
arrested for pot, with more than eight in 10 being charged only
with simple possession. Almost half of prisoners in federal
prisoners are in for drug offenses and for most of its existence,
the Obama administration has prosecuted medical marijuana
dispensaries in California
with far more energy than even George W. Bush did. It’s within
the president’s power – power that he is happy exceed when it comes
to waging wars overseas and in other circumstances – to start the
reclassification of pot from a Schedule 1 drug, but he refuses to.
If Obama is in any way serious about ending the
war on pot, he’s got a lot to work with. Yet in his New Yorker
interview, he immediately pivots lauding the state-based
experiments in legalization to speculating about what terrors it
will wreak:

If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say,
Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can
show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If
somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t
going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?”

Look, if Obama really thinks pot is no more dangerous than
alcohol and that the war on pot systematically screws over blacks,
why should there be any hesitation in liberalizing the federal
policies over which he has control? And using the bully pulpit to
push for broader legislative change at the federal and state level?
What is he waiting for: a third term? One of the very most
frustrating things about Obama is that he is still acting as if he
just moved into the White House and is sorting through all the mess
left behind by the previous tenant. He’s in his sixth year as
president!

Time to start moving, Mr. President! Especially on an issue on
which
58 percent of Americans agree.

It would be a great way to add to the civil rights legacy of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and others.

Here are some of Reason’s writings about King and other
movement leaders (more links at bottom of post).

Justice for All: The new Martin
Luther King, Jr. National Memorial honors King’s universal
commitment to justice.

Kmele Foster | October 14, 2011

…it’s fitting that the memorial’s sole quotation directly
referencing race contextualizes the subject within King’s broader
project. “If we are to have peace on earth,” the memorial reads,
“our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our
loyalty must transcend our race, our tribe, our class and our
nation, and this means we must develop a world perspective.”

In the minds of too many Americans, King is primarily a “black”
leader and the civil rights movement he has come to embody is
principally the endowment of black Americans. But that view
inappropriately qualifies the man and the movement. King wasn’t
narrowly interested in race; he was broadly committed to
justice….

Read the
whole piece here.

A
Fitting Tribute to Medgar Evers: America honors the civil rights
hero.

Ira Stoll | November 14, 2011

Each civil rights leader had his own role to play in the
struggle for integration. Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer. Martin
Luther King, Jr., the inspiring orator. And Medgar Evers was the
martyr.

Evers was the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. After
President Kennedy had given a nationally televised civil rights
speech on June 11, 1963, Evers’s wife had let their three children
stay up past midnight to wait up for their father, who was
returning from a strategy meeting. At about 12:20, they heard the
sound of his car, which they recognized. Then they heard the car
door open, and then the sound of a rifle shot.

The children kept crying “Daddy, get up, please get up,” as
their father bled to death.

Medgar Evers was back in the news over the weekend with the U.S.
Navy’s christening, at San Diego, of the USNS Medgar Evers, a
689-foot, $500 million new dry cargo/ammunition ship. There were
remarks by the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, a former governor
of Mississippi. And by Medgar Evers’s widow, Myrlie, who
said, ““I will not have to go to bed ever again wondering
whether anyone will remember who Medgar Evers is.”…

Read the whole story here.

Dream Interpretation: The March On
Washington’s enduring legacy

Ronald Bailey | August 25, 2003

…[MLK’s “I have a dream”] speech also lent momentum to two of
the most consequential pieces of civil rights legislation in
American history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act outlawed state-sanctioned
and enforced racial
discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws. For
example, it allowed blacks to come down out of that theatre balcony
in Bristol Virginia. The Voting Rights Act insured that Southern
blacks who were being systematically denied the franchise by
corrupt voter registration officials would have
access to the ballot box.

Sure, these laws are not perfect. For example, Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act has been interpreted as authorizing the creation
of affirmative action programs. This despite the fact that Senator
Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) declared specifically that Title VII “would
prohibit preferential treatment for any particular group,” and
famously promised that if this turned out to be wrong that he
would eat the
pages on which the statute was printed. I wonder if the
Senator would have liked the pages sautéed or with a nice béchamel?
And yes, the Voting Rights Act has led to “racial
gerrymandering.” Still, we are a far better, and fairer country
because of those laws.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the only remaining speaker from the
1963 march, told the Washington Post, “I wish Dr.
King could see the progress that we have made, see the distance
that we have come.”…

Read
the whole thing here.

Like Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,”
King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” remains a touchstone in
American political rhetoric and is always worth reading on a day
like this (or any other, for that matter). A snippet:

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its
application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of
parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an
ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an
ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation
and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful
assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point
out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would
the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who
breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a
willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who
breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly
accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the
conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality
expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil
disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar,
on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was
practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to
face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks
rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.