How MLK's Ghost Will Haunt Mitch McConnell - by Joy-Ann Reid
Mitch McConnell tried to silence Coretta Scott King—and Elizabeth Warren. Instead, all he managed to do was to add fuel to the resistance.
JOY-ANN REID
02.11.17 12:01 AM ET
This week, we crashed through yet another floor in the rapidly pancaking edifice that is Donald Trump’s America, when Jefferson Sessions, a man deemed too racist to be seated as a federal judge during the Reagan era, was sworn in as the 84th attorney general of the United States. And while he is far from the only steep price the country will have to pay for elevating a vengeful reality show crank and theoretical billionaire to our nation’s highest office, it’s worth pausing to note the particular horror of his ascension, and the breadth of the damage he could do.
There are few instances when American history offers us two clear sides of a moral line. On matters of racial equality and civil rights, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his aides and collaborators like Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis, and his ever-dignified wife Coretta Scott King stood on one side of that very bright line, with the forces of racial revanchism standing firmly on the other.
This week, Mitch McConnell roused the Kingian ghosts in a way he and his party may come to regret. As Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren rose to read the words written by Mrs. King in 1986, in searing opposition to Sessions’s elevation to a federal judgeship, McConnell silenced her, invoking the upper chamber’s Rule 19 to accuse Warren of “impugn[ing] the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama.”
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” added McConnell.
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