MLK Day speaker calls better civil discourse the next 'mountaintop'

Douglas A. Blackmon called the election of President Barack Obama an event that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. could have and would have imagined.

Blackmon is the new forum program chairman of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. Blackmon, who starts full-time at the Miller Center in February, is a senior national correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”

In his Monday speech that celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at the Miller Center, Blackmon described the election of Obama as the “mountaintop” King spoke about before he was assassinated in 1968.

Politics, Blackmon said, had nothing to do with that assertion.

“I say that not in the sense of the particular man that was elected or the particular party that he represented, but the historic nature of what had occurred,” he said. “I think Dr. King would have seen that as the mountaintop.”

With that peak reached, Blackmon said, America is left looking for the next mountaintop. The new pinnacle, Blackmon said, is much less complicated than dealing with race issues.

“The mountaintop now appears to be something much simpler, and that is political stability itself,” he said.

Blackmon listed presidential inexperience, a weak economy, a divided Republican Party and a “merciless” effort for political gain on both sides as factors in what he called a decline of public dialogue in America.

“At the moment, we’re deep in the third cycle, as I reckon it, of a descent into a kind of degraded civil discourse that I sometimes find terrifying … We as a nation have rallied in the present time, around a different idea … and that is that American service men and women fighting abroad should never again be the victims of a bleak political landscape at home.”

Political ideologies have been getting more polarized and contentious at least since the Clinton years, Blackmon said. The presidency of George W. Bush did not improve things.

“The Clinton and Bush cycles of deterioration have been supplanted by an atmosphere in which political figures are demonized without reservation, even within their own parties … The will of the American people in overwhelmingly electing a candidate is routinely challenged, as if the election of a president of the United States was of no more consequence than a bad call by an NFL referee.”

T. King, a doctor from Richmond, said he agreed that taming disagreement is the next mountaintop, but said that getting there will take time.

“It depends how fast technology moves,” he said. “There’s a lot of degradation that’s been going on for a while now. It’s just that everyone has a voice now.”

Derek Redmond, an attorney from Richmond who attended Blackmon’s speech, said he thinks that there has always been hostile political dialogue, but increased access makes the problem seem more acute.

“I was … thinking that we have a population that is paying more attention than we have in the past,” he said. “My question was whether we need to create a new expectation of how the political discourse occurs … so that people understand that uncivil discourse is unacceptable.”

Ultimately, Blackmon said, he is optimistic that America can find its way out of its current contentious political state, as long as people are willing to start listening to one another.

“I believe that we all, as individuals and collectively … can find the path to the next mountaintop if we can quiet down a little, open our minds to the opinions of others,” Blackmon said.