Watcher's Council Forum: Who Are Your Three Favorite Heroes In American History?

Each week the Watcher's Council hosts a forum as well as a weekly contest among the members for best post. This week's forum question is "Who Are Your Three Favorite Heroes In American History?" I have been kindly invited to respond.

The first great American hero is our deity, God, or at least our relationship to him through religion. Rev. Jonathan Mayhew was the first, in 1750, to argue that the source of our British rights was God and to articulate a doctrine that can be summed up in the phrase "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." His writings spread throughout the colonies and were adopted in various forms by most of the "dissenting" religions. When, in 1775, Boston royalist Peter Oliver wrote of the causes of the Revolution, he placed the blame squarely on the "Black [robed] Regiment" of clergyman who so roused the colonists in righteous defiance against the British. It is fair to say that the dissenting clergy, from Georgia to Massachusetts, played an indispensable role in driving the Revolution. To paraphrase one Hessian soldier, this was not an American Revolution, it was a Presbyterian Revolution.

As late as January, 1776, it was not clear what we intended by our fight with the British. Most colonists still wanted no more than an adjustment of our relationship with Great Britain, not an independent nation. Yet in January, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the best selling book our nation has ever seen on a per capita basis but for the Bible. In it, Paine used largely biblical arguments against the divine right of Kings to rule. His arguments electrified the nation, and set us almost immediately on the path that ended less than six months later in the Declaration of Independence.

And then there were at least two "acts of God" during the Revolution that were so fortuitous and unusual as ought to leave in the most hardened atheist with a bit of uneasiness. The first was at The Battle of Long Island. The British had decimated our forces and had surrounded Washington and his 9,000 men. Had the British completed their attack, the Revolution would likely have ended there. Washington ordered a night withdrawal by boat. That night, a very unusual fog descended on the area, one so dense that soldiers said they couldn't see further than 6 feet to their front. The fog allowed the withdraw to continue through night to the dawn and after, until all 9,000 soldiers had crossed to safety.

The second "act of God" occurred as the British, in June 1776, attempted to capture the wealthiest port city in the colonies, Charleston, S.C. Had Britain succeeded, the whole nature of the Revolution would have changed. The centerpiece of the colonist's defense of Charleston was a half built fort on Sullivan's Island that the British expected to easily defeat with an infantry attack across the ford separating Isle of Palms from Sullivan's Island, a ford at low tide that virtually never exceeded three feet. Yet in June, 1776, a highly unusual wind pattern developed and, even at low tide, the water at the ford was over 7 feet deep. With the British infantry stopped cold, the fort survived the most devastating bombardment of the war even while the colonists wreaked destruction on the British ships, saving Charleston from occupation for a critical three years.

And then, of course, it was this view of God as the source of our rights that animated our Founders. Our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not bestowed by man. They are natural rights that come from God. The first and most important hero of our nation must be God.

The second most important person in American history is George Washington. People who study the Revolution call him the "indispensable man," and that he was. He took charge of an army of amateurs and led them against the world's superpower of the era. He was in an impossible situation against impossible odds.

Washington was never a great military commander. He was outfoxed all too often on the battlefield. Indeed, by December 1776, he had been beaten so badly over the preceding six months that everyone on both sides thought the Revolution was over but for the signing of surrender documents. Yet Washington, a man whose persistence and refusal to surrender was inhuman, on Dec. 25, 1776, led a beaten force of 2,500 across the Delaware River in horrendous conditions. The next morning, his soldiers surprised the best light infantry forces in America, the Hessians at Trenton, and won a victory so stunning that it literally saved the Revolution.

And while Washington's command of the Continental Army over the next seven years was critically important, it was his actions at and after the end of the war that proved of importance equal to his victory at Trenton. The history of revolutions was equally a history of successful military commanders taking power as dictator or King, from Caesar to Cromwell. But not with George Washington, who not merely voluntarily relinquished all power at the end of the war, but put an end to a revolt of officers who had not been paid.

Then it was Washington, called out of retirement, who lent his credibility to the Constitutional Convention that resulted in the drafting of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. And while all knew that Washington would be elected President - he was elected to two terms with 100% of the electoral college votes - Washington easily could have chosen to be President for life. But instead, he opted to go back into retirement after two terms. Washington was a hero and perhaps the single man indispensable to the creation of our nation.

The third choice for American hero is harder. There are so many who could legitimately take this position. Let me just give it to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The history of America's treatment of blacks is indeed a mark on this nation. Even after the end of slavery and the enshrinement of equal rights in our Constitution at the end of the Civil War, racism and unequal treatment were still rampant in this nation. Rev. King was born in 1929. He did not start the Civil Rights movement, but he became its most important voice. He shamed white America with their failure to live up to the promise of this nation, enshrined in our first Founding document, The Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal." Dr. King brought a moral message that our nation could not ignore, and he pushed it relentlessly, at great danger to himself, and he did so with non-violence. His speech in 1963 in Washington D.C., now known as the "I Have A Dream" speech, is perhaps the most recognizable speech in our nation's history, and rightly so. He finished the speech with a stirring call for an America where people are judged "not . . . by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

In our unique nation, Rev. King's call for equality was not only a moral clarion call, but a necessity if we are to survive as a melting pot. Since Rev. King's death, the movement he started has been wholly bastardized by the left for their own ends. That does not in any way detract from Rev. King's message, indeed, it only increases the need for us fulfill his vision.

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The Death of Freddie Gray & Baltimore's Race Riot (Updated)

The headline article in the Daily Mail says: Huge blazes rip through Baltimore as Freddie Gray rioters torch buildings including a nursing home, loot stores and attack police, injuring fifteen officers, as violence rages into the night. Baltimore is indeed convulsing in race riots over the death of 25 year old black male, Freddie Gray. This is reminiscent of Detroit, 1967.

A week ago, Freddie Gray died in Baltimore City Police custody. Here is what we know. Approximately two weeks ago, Baltimore City Police officers showed up near where Mr. Gray was standing in public. Mr. Gray took off running. That gave police probable cause to stop him. Mr. Gray had no outstanding warrants. When police finally caught him, they did a search and found a small knife not unlike what millions of Americans carry around on their person every day, myself included. I am still not clear if it was a valid arrest even under insane Maryland law, but I think it was. Maryland is California writ small in terms of it being a leftist cesspool these days.

Mr. Gray was in good health when he was arrested and placed in the patrol car. Something happened during transport, precisely what is not clear, nor is it clear how long it took the police to get Mr. Gray medical attention. Mr. Gray died a week later of a severed spine sustained within an hour, if not minutes, of his arrest. This could be anything from simple negligence to murder.

The police seem to be doing the right thing in their investigation of the incident, and everything is being carried out in public. There has been no delay in the investigation, nor it would seem any attempt at a cover-up. And yet, Baltimore has exploded in black riots undertaken for no other reason than an opportunity to riot, apparently. The Mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, has been worse than useless. She did not officially ask the Governor for help at the outset of the rioting, and indeed, went so far as to instruct Baltimore City Police to give space to the rioters that "wished to destroy."

The Mayor has gotten more than she bargained for. Thugs have turned Baltimore into a nightmare, with the more feral elements of the black community threatening anyone who isn't black. There is at least one report of a serious racial attack in Baltimore, and already fifteen police have been injured in the riots. Black street gangs have made common cause to stop attacking each other and concentrate on attacking the police. The Governor has declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard.

(H/T Instapundit)

Obama and the left have spent the last six years stoking racial tensions at every opportunity. In the absence of actual racism, they must still convince blacks in our country that we America is nothing more than Selma 1954 writ large. In the nightmarish fantasy world of the left, any effort to insure the integrity of the vote is somehow racism. Applying the same standards to all Americans in whatever context is somehow racist. George Zimmerman was a racist and Trayvon Martin was an innocent youth murdered in cold blood. In Ferguson, Missouri, an evil racist cop shot an unarmed gentle giant, Michael Brown, just as he had raised his hands in surrender.

Before 1968, when the leadership of the civil rights movement was in the hands of a Republican, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the clarion call of the movement was for a colorblind society with equality of opportunity. After the left took over the civil rights movement, they morphed the movement into one where blacks were to become a permanent victim class, a color-centric group forever entitled to special treatment and equality of outcome. Dr. King's niece, Dr. Alveda King, said in an interview yesterday that if her uncle could see the riots in Baltimore, "he would be hearbroken."

I have no doubt that she is right. The people of Baltimore and this nation have every right to be angry about what happened to Freddie Gray and to demand justice on his behalf. That is not what these riots are about. The rioters are people, many in systemic poverty, who have been fed for the past fifty years on a steady diet that they are victims, that their number one problem is white racism, and that they are entitled both to special treatment and to act out. The issues facing the lower socioeconomic strata of the black community - endemic poverty, single parent homes, horrid educational opportunities, violence and criminality - are real and pervasive, but white racism is not among them. And until the actual issues are addressed honestly, they will never even begin to be solved.

And in all fairness to the good people of Baltimore, black and white, the majority are not involved in this riot. It is a clique of thugs and young people, some of whom clearly have parents outraged at the actions of their children. Update: Indeed, indications are that at the heart of this violent rioting are elements of the groups involved in instigating the violence in Ferguson. That would not surprise me in the least. And it is to the honor of the family of Freddie Gray that they have spoken out clearly condemning the violence and rioting that occurred in the wake of Mr. Gray's funeral, and believe it to be motivated by concerns other than the death of Mr. Gray.

From Hot Air, here is a video of one Baltimore Mom delivering an epic whooping to a son she saw rioting in what Hot Air is calling the "slap heard round the world."

Updates:



That child doesn't realize it at the moment, but he has a damn good mom.

There is also another video out of a retired Army MSG facing down the rioters in Baltimore. There is no organization as fully and successfully integrated as the U.S. military. It is what our nation should be aspiring to, not the balkanization of the left.



At any rate, the problems giving rise to these riots are not something the left wants to cure. The race hustlers have already started to portray what is happening in Baltimore as an eruption of anger at racist police, just as they did in Ferguson - that even though Baltimore's Mayor, the majority of its city government, and indeed, the majority of its police force are black. It has already started with Representative Elijah Cummings, from Maryland, who recently stated:

"This whole police community relations situation . . . is the civil rights cause for this generation, no doubt about it," . . .

Cummings noted that the Maryland delegation in Congress had asked for the Department of Justice to conduct a civil rights investigation into the death of Gray.

"We've got to take this department apart and try to figure out what is wrong and what is right," he said, referring to local police.

Just sickening. So, there will be another investigation by the DOJ. Prepare for a repeat of the Ferguson scenario. No racism will be found in the arrest of Freddie Gray, though I am sure they will find negligence in his treatment, or it could even rise to the level of murder. Then there will be a disparate impact statistical analysis of incidents in Baltimore and, lo and behold, it will show a higher incidence of arrest among blacks in proportion to their representation in the city. Wait for yet another DOJ lawsuit against the city and more NAACP mailers to raise money off of racism rampant in society, as alleged in the DOJ report. And of course, the next race riot will be in the offing, blacks will continue to vote 90% for Democrats, and their plight, worse now then in 1964 when this embrace of the Democrat Party began, will not improve in the slightest.

Update: From the left wing side of the media, here are ten tweets that really need to be seen to be believed. The least offensive is from Jamil Smith stating that the rioters are merely children attempting to communicate. The most offensive are from Vox, Salon and Te-Nehisi Coates apparently in full support of the violence. On CNN, Anchorwoman Brooke Baldwin has placed the cause of these riots at not merely the feet of the Baltimore City Police, but more particularly, military veterans hired into the police force who she thinks are all too ready to do violence.

This from former U.S. Rep. and former U.S. Army LTC Allen West:

[W]hat is playing out before our eyes is the depraved spectacle of anarchy, violence, wanton criminality and an utter lack of leadership. To have the mayor of Baltimore issue a statement allowing these thugs “space to destroy” is unconscionable. Is the rioting over Gray’s death or just an excuse for the most disgusting aspect of human nature? . . .

But the fact that police officers are being injured and that three black gangs have pledged allegiance in order to attack police is beyond disconcerting. What is there to gain by destroying one’s own neighborhood? Is this the new mantra of “no justice, no peace?”

Perhaps this would be somewhat understandable if it weren’t for the recent episode in North Charleston, South Carolina where a police officer fired several shots into the back of Walter L. Scott, killing him. There were no violent riots and the officer was arrested and charged. The Scott family even went so far as to demand that Al Sharpton not come to Charleston.

But in Baltimore they’ve had to cancel a baseball game and there are warnings for people to stay away from the city. The governor has finally declared a state of emergency to activate the National Guard. But where is the mayor of Baltimore? Where is the leadership for the city? Imagine the horns of a dilemma upon which the Baltimore police find themselves. The mayor basically gave carte blanche to the criminal thugs to take the streets and the police seemingly are only employed to try and contain the “destruction.”

As of now, 15 police officers have been injured. As the NY Post reported, “Baltimore police officers were injured on Monday as rioters threw bricks, broke windows, looted businesses and burned patrol cars in violent protests following the funeral of a black man who died after he was injured in police custody. The riots broke out just a few blocks from the site of the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in northwest Baltimore and then spread through other parts of the city in the most violent demonstrations since looting in Ferguson, Missouri, last year.

Television images showed mobs of rioters jumping on top of a police car, destroying a taxi and setting two other patrol cars on fire after teenaged crowds ignored calls to disperse and clashed with lines of hundreds of police. Gangs had threatened to target police officers, local law enforcement said. Schools, businesses and train stations closed in Baltimore, a city of 662,000 people 40 miles (64 km) from the nation’s capital.”

So we are watching the result of a social media post calling for a “purge” for Monday at 3pm. But this is not just about the death of Freddie Gray, this is about something far more tragic: the breakdown of the inner city and the black community.

Where are the parents of these kids? Where are the adults and community pastors? Why are these kids responding to this call for violence instead of heading home and preparing for end of year final exams? Does anyone believe these looted businesses will be restored — therefore black unemployment in Baltimore will be even worse. Perhaps if there were a thriving job market and better opportunities, these black teens would be working in these stores, not looting them.

When I was watching the TV reports, Baltimore looked more like East Jerusalem than an American city with a proud patriotic heritage — Ft. McHenry the birthplace of our national anthem. And this is a city just some 40 miles away from our nation’s capitol — where is the leadership that demands this behavior is unacceptable?

The Baltimore police are showing incredible restraint because we all know the liberal progressive media is just waiting for some unarmed — although I consider tossing a brick a projectile — black kid to get shot.

My greatest fear is that there will come a day when police basically leave the urban communities to their own devices — in other words, abandon them and let them be overrun by gangs and other perpetrators of deplorable behavior. After all, the anarchist sentiment is to not abide by the rule of law — but rather to take matters into the hands of the mob and establish the rule of mobocracy. And if there are no elected officials willing to support the police — realizing that there are bad apples in any batch — then what is the motivation for police officers to patrol those disrespectful and unwelcoming streets?

Freddie Gray tragically lost his life, we know little about how or why. What we do know is that the black community of Baltimore is not comporting itself in a manner that will garner sympathy — but rather contempt.

The joys of living in the post-racial world of the left. It is obscene, not just that a segment of the black community should be acting out like this, but that the issues actually facing their community go unaddressed.

Update: At Powerline, Paul Mirengoff makes the point that these riots are not about racism or the Baltimore City Police:

The Post’s reporting suggests that, at root, the protests aren’t about the police department (which, as noted, is not a White institution and almost certainly not a racist one). One of the protest leaders said:

Officials are not interested in bettering our neighborhoods. People are tired of their quality of life, and they’re frustrated nobody helps them. They want to be heard, and they will do what it takes.

In other words, a population grown dependent on public officials is lashing out because said officials aren’t helping them attain the quality of life they desire.

I agree that the hard-working people of Baltimore have been let down by public officials. For one thing, liberal public policy has encouraged dependence on “officials.” For another, liberal housing policy helped produce the economic crisis that hit Baltimore so hard. In addition, liberal education policy has undermined educational opportunity. And now, liberal immigration policy seems determined to bring in foreign laborers to compete for jobs with hard-working, low-income Americans.

I find it depressing to see Baltimore in such a sorry state while Washington, D.C., fueled by the federal government, flourishes by comparison.

Obama spoke up on just that topic today, claiming that if Republicans would just pass an infrastructure bill, that would solve the problems actually at the root of the rioting. The left is completely out of ideas at this point. The solutions tried since the Great Society have not simply failed, but have made matters worse, and the only option remaining for the left is to pretend that the problems plaguing inner city blacks are all external. One wonders how much longer that canard will work?

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A Note To Ann Althouse - To Fix Black Society, Follow The Example Of Martin Luther King Jr.

What is it with those on the right, that either they argue with no passion or they simply cede ground to the left, as if engaging in the arguments is distasteful? Case in point - James Taranto's article in WSJ stating lukewarm disagreement with Ann Althouse that the right should not be pointing out white on black violence in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

In the Trayvon Martin shooting, the race hustlers of the left saw an opportunity to argue to the black community that white racism was still alive and their greatest enemy. To say that they grossly overreached is an understatement.

There is a backlash now to that from many on the right who see the canard - and indeed, are its targets. And the most obvious response is to point to outrageous acts of black criminality against whites, asking the civil rights community to address it. It is a trap of course, as to address this violence, they would open up the entire can of worms on the ills of black society. Thus it is something both the left and Ms. Althouse would studiously ignore. She labels such acts as "counter Trayvoning." According to her, as quoted in the WSJ:

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations.

. . . To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.

One, while a color blind society is absolutely what we should all strive for, that will not happen by conservatives ignoring race out of distaste for the argument. Ms. Althouse fully misperceives what is moral in this case. In all cases, facing problems and facing them with honesty defines the moral highground. When the left interprets everything through a racial lens and regularly makes outrageous charges of racism, then following Ms. Althouse's prescription would mean we cede the argument to the left. It is being in a war where only one side is allowed to fight.

Two, her claim that it steps "into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you," is simply ridiculous. The left wholly ignores problems in the black community because they do not want to have to address them. Indeed, the left attacks any attempt by the right to raise address these problems by anyone on the right as ipso facto racism. The absolute last thing the left wants is an honest conversation "into the arena taking account of race." Indeed, as James Taranto points out in his WSJ article, "counter Trayvoning" has provoked liberals into dismissive responses, and thus might not be such a bad thing.

Lastly, her claim that to raise issues of color would give succor to white supremacists is a non-sequitur. White supremacists are and should always be outcasts. But demanding changes in and for the benefit of the black community in order to finally realize equality is an entirely different animal. At some level, doing so might provide temporary succor to supremacists, but the moral imperative to help black society is far and away more important, and in the end, wholly contradicts the goals of white supremacists. Ms. Althouse's argument seems to be analogous to the argument that children should not be inoculated against disease because some small portion of them will become very sick from the inoculation, irrespective of the fact that many more will be helped.

Indeed, Ms. Althouse's argument is taking a tack precisely opposite that followed by Martin Luther King Jr. His most powerful speech, given those fifty years ago, honestly addressed the problems of race, stated the moral imperative, and shamed white America into agreement that equality should be an overriding goal in America. As he said, blacks had come to Washington to cash the check that said "that all men are created equal." I concur, but we won't get there by following the advice of Ms. Althouse and ignoring race.

America should indeed be a land of colorblind equality where racism should not be tolerated. Fixing the plight of blacks in America today is every bit the moral imperative it was in 1963. There should not be massive, cyclical poverty for over 25% of blacks. Blacks should not have the worst jobless rate in America. Black children should have the same educational opportunities as whites. Black families should not be dysfunctional, with almost 3 out of every 4 children born to single mothers. And crime should not be disproportionately a problem of the black community, with blacks far more likely to commit violent crime, including murder and robbery. This state of black America is obscene in the 21st century. But, but, but . . . those problems are not the work of conservative white racism.

The idealists of the 60′s, JFK, Patrick Moynihan and their ilk, were deeply concerned and doing what they thought best to truly help the black community. Well, they shot their bullets and, while some of what they did helped spectacularly – the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act – other things that they did failed equally spectacularly – welfare and public education.

If the left could find a way out of this that would not result in their own weakening – or even perhaps demise – they would, I am sure, jump on it. Their catch-22 is that such a solution does not exist.

For the far left to truly address the problems plaguing the black community today would mean addressing failures of left wing programs. It would mean taking on the teachers unions (the group that underwrote the MLK 50th anniversary race hustler palooza a few days ago). It would mean taking a stand on traditional morality. The mortal danger to the left in doing so is that it would fracture the blacks as a monolithic voting block. And in an age where only a few percentage points of votes are what separate Republicans from Democrats, that could well be catastrophic for the left. They are quite happy to leave the black community to wallow in horrendous dysfunction so long as they can make money and gain power off their backs.

So the left continues to beat the drum of imaginary racism as the only true ill of black society. At the same time, they studiously ignore all the problems of the black community. The only way to address this issue is to do what Martin Luther King Jr. did. To raise the problems continuously, to do so with utter honesty, and to refuse to be cowed into silence, whether by the left or Ms. Althouse.

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Obama's Speech & Links On The Anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" Speech

On Aug. 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave the single most compelling speech in our nation's history on the moral necessity of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of our skin. It change our nation's trajectory.



As we await comments from our Race Hustler In Chief, here are some links relevant to the day.

Here is my take on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, something that was once concerned with equality, but now exists because of its value as a political tool for the left - The Civil Rights Movement, The Left & The Legacy of MLK

Perhaps the most thoughtful column of today comes from Dr. Ben Carson, who reflects on MLK and the Civil Rights movement of today in the Washington Times.

James Taranto at the WSJ ponders why the left needs to maintain the canard of rampant white racism in three parts - I, II and III.

Black Professor John McWhorter, who writes for TNR, takes to the WSJ to make the point that fifty years on, white racism is not the overriding issue facing blacks in America today. I agree with his conclusion, though I think that his assessment of the challenges is off.

At Black & Right, Bob Parks ponders the conservative messages of MLK in his famous 1963 speech, concluding with his own "dream" for Americans.

From Bookworm Room, Martin Luther King III Rejects His Father's Legacy & Goes To Washington To Parrot The Race Hustlers and her Thoughts On Race & Racism In America.

Update: You can read President Obama's speech here. As to the speakers in the lead up to Obama, not a single one mentioned the near total breakdown of the black family with nearly three quarters born to single mothers. Not a single one spoke to the problems of serious crime in the black community. Not a single one spoke to the problems of failing schools and the fact that DOJ is now pursuing a law suit in Louisiana to keep black children there in those feeling schools.

If we go down the checklist: Trayvon Martin - check. Stand your ground laws - check. Voter integrity laws - check. White racism today - check. Chris Lane - no. Delbert Benton - no. Fannie Gumbinger - no. Amelia Rudolph - no. Ginger Slepski - no. Indeed, no victim of feral black teen youths were mentioned, even though their acts are symptomatic of the real, true problems facing black society today.

And then there was Obama's speech. He did mention the same of the things above, but surely did not articulate anything resembling a clear message that these are the overriding problems of the black community, that they are not caused by racism, and that blacks need to focus on solving those problems within their community. His central message was that those who disagree with him are racists and what Blacks really need is more socialism, at one point suggesting how evil rich people were for hanging on to their money when it could be used to fund teachers unions crumbling schools.

What I found most sickening about Obama's speech was that he spoke of the economy as if he has had nothing to do with it over the past near 5 years. Obama's economic policies have done more harm to blacks in America in the past five years than the worst racist of whom any can conceive. Obama lambasted crony capitalism, as if it was something that was totally unconnected from this administration. And he spoke about the lack of good job opportunities when it's purely his policies that are turning us into a nation of part time Mc-workers.

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Black Civil Rights Leaders No Longer "Have A Dream"

On Aug. 23, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr stood on the steps of the Washington Monument and delivered one of the two most notable orations in our nation's history, (the other being The Gettysburg Address). MLK spoke of having "a dream" that one day, all Americans would be judged by "the content of their character, not the color of their skin." It was the perfect speech given at just the right time. It had moral clarity. It was a demand for nothing more or less than that America finally live up to its founding claim, that "all men are created equal."

Now, fifty years later, Democrat Representative John Lewis, a man who was there with MLK on that day, shows what has become of the civil rights movement. He is not a black civil rights leader, fighting to correct the ills of black America. He has become a full member of the far left, a movement that cynically uses blacks, feeding them the purest of canards so that they will remain a solid far left voting block.

The civil rights movement was once a moral imperative - one that has all but completely succeeded in this country. Today, anti-black racism doesn't even register on the scale of what now plagues black America - education, poverty, criminality, family. But the civil rights movement is now reduced to a cesspool in which only race hustlers dwell. And the poster child for that morphing of the movement is John Lewis.

In addressing the crowds at the fifty year celebration of MLK's speech, Lewis did not say word one about the problems facing black America. Instead, he chose to play the race card, claiming that the right of blacks to vote was under attack. What utter hore manure. And what an utter slime ball. If you are black, you ought to be far more outraged than I am.

If Lewis cared about the plight of black America, he would have been beating his chest over something like the recent decision of Obama's Justice Dept. to sue Louisiana in order to stop their school voucher program. That is a voucher program that primarily helps poor black children escape failing public schools. Education really is the "civil rights" issue of our time. But have no doubt, when it comes to a decision of whether to support poor black children or the Teachers Unions, blacks lose every time. It is an obscenity. As is, for that matter, John Lewis fifty years on.

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A Racial Picture Worth A Thousand Words (Updated)

Photo taken from American Digest

The expression that a picture is worth a thousand words just does not do justice to the above photo of a black woman in Chicago at a rally to have George Zimmerman lynched. The photo neatly sums up the state of race in America today. It puts into perspective not merely the history of the last half century of the civil rights movement, but also its state today, its success and failures, and the focus of the racial grievance industry on George Zimmerman at the complete expense of focusing on all of the real problems in the black community.

The History

The woman in the photo is holding up a sign decrying racism. We have been seeing pictures like that since the 1950's and 60's, when the movement for black civil rights was finally gaining unstoppable momentum. The movement was one of moral clarity and purity - nothing less than a demand that America finally and fully live up to its premise, that "all men are created equal," and its promise, that each person have a level playing field on which to pursue "life, liberty and happiness." Many of the blacks of that era felt themselves, as a group, victimized and denied that promise. Rightly so.

In many areas of 1950's America, racism, often violent, still held sway, and nowhere more so than in the Democrat controlled South. Lynching and violence were hardly rare. It was Mississippi of the era that gave America the brutal murders and subsequent justice denied in the cases of Emmett Till and Medger Evers. It was Alabama of the era where the name of Democrat Bull Connor became infamous. Martin Luther King Jr. shamed America with his brave, non-violent demand for full civil rights for blacks. MLK's goal for the movement was a colorblind society where each person would be "judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin." Amen.

Republicans and Northern Democrats both were deeply involved in pushing forward the civil rights movement in the 20th century. It was three white Republicans who gathered together to start the NAACP. The NAACP would later argue Brown v. Board of Education before a Republican dominated Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark legal decision that spelled the end of segregation. It was Democrat President Truman in 1948 who fully integrated the military. Republican President Eisenhower oversaw the passage of two major civil rights laws and faced down Alabama Democrats in the Little Rock Nine incident.

But then four critical things happened in the 1960's. One, Barry Goldwater, figurehead of the Republican conservative movement, decided to contest the 1964 Civil Rights Act because he believed it was beyond the bounds of federal commerce clause authority. He was right on the law but utterly on the wrong side of history. Republicans gave massive support to both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it didn't matter. Because of Goldwater's opposition, he, and ultimately all Republicans, were painted as the vile racists that Southern Democrats actually were.

The second critical event was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. With him died the purpose of the Civil Rights Movement as one for equality.

The third critical event was the rise of 1960's radicals. Steeped in neo-Marxist philosophy, they are the far left that now controls the Democrat Party. After the death of MLK, it was the far left that commandeered the civil rights movement, fundamentally altering its nature. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. It has had profound implications for blacks and our nation.

And the last critical event, following Goldwater's highly impolitic stand, was the creation of the single greatest monolithic voting block in our nation's history. Blacks, who had never before been monolithic with their votes, became and have since remained one for the Democrat Party. Indeed, that monolithic vote is utterly essential to the left - they would be politically massacred were it to stop today.

Race Currently

The woman in the picture decries racism that apparently even she admits does not seem to exist. She explains that away by claiming that racism today is just in hiding.

What happened over the half century since the 60's has been nothing short of revolutionary. The efforts undertaken by both right and left to combat racism bore fruit. For the right, racism became an object of utter scorn, not to be tolerated. For Democrats, the party of slavery, Jim Crow, separate but equal, the KKK and lynchings, the transformation from the font of racism to, ostensibly, champions of blacks was overnight once they saw the political and monetary benefits of such a change. But it was not a complete break with their racist past. What many on the left did was merely submerge their hard racism, substituting for it the soft racism of low expectation.

The success of the civil rights movement has been a problem for the far left - the group that controls the Democrat Party today. Keeping blacks as a monolithic voting block has required a lot of effort along three parallel lines. One, convince blacks that all non-lib whites are irredeemably racist. Two, meet any effort to contest a left wing policy or criticism of a black politician with charges of racism. Indeed, the use of that charge since 1965 has been so ubiquitous and successful that "playing the race card" has become the single most fundamental tactic of the left. And lastly, brutally punish any black who refuses to tow the line. Nothing will get you lynched in the square of public opinion by the left quicker than the crime of being black and questioning far left / race grievance industry dogma.

Keeping blacks convinced that our nation is, fifty years on, still Mississippi circa 1965, is increasingly hard. The "black community" receives a constant stream of messages that they are still, today, living in Biloxi of 1965 writ large. They are kept divided from society and taught to nurse their grievances. Major colleges have embraced this with Black studies programs - nothing more than intellectual training grounds for the race grievance industry. Those programs have given us such gems as Critical Race Theory and the theory of White Privilege while Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates makes ludicrous calls for all non-whites to pay reparations to all blacks for the original sin of slavery.

Yet as blacks have taken part in an ever more integrated society, they are ever more seeing the absence of racism in white middle class America. That is a real problem for the left's narrative. It is why the woman in the photo above claims that whites today "just be concealing" their racism. And it is why you have Prof. Gates pushing the utterly ludicrous and despicable theory of "color blind racism." When in 1960 the narrative expressed the reality of racism in America, the gap between the narrative and reality has steadily grown until today it is separated by yawning canyon. Almost as important, white guilt at past racism has receded with racism's ever shrinking presence in our society.

The Far Left / Racial Grievance Industry's Attempted Lynching Of George Zimmerman

Which brings us to Zimmerman. The racial grievance industry has locked onto the Zimmerman like a drowning man grabs onto a life preserver. That was understandable at the start since the optics initially promoted by the media seemed perfect for them. An innocent black child is profiled, stalked and murdered by a racist white. A racist judicial system then refused to even arrest or charge the killer. This was Emmett Till and Medger Evers. This was a God send, a chance for the race hustlers to reassert their narrative based on an anecdotal - but real - case.

But it has all gone bad. None of the narrative holds up in the light of day. Many of the facts have come out in a fair, televised trial. Others have made there way into the media.

To begin with, George Zimmerman was neither racist nor white. He was predominantly Hispanic with some white and black DNA tossed in - thus leading to the first canard of the Zimmerman narrative, the creation of a wholly new racial category - that of White Hispanic.

As to Zimmerman's racial attitudes, he was Mother Theresa. There was no hint of racial animus in his background. To the contrary, all indications were that he was color-blind. He tutored black children, he dated black girls, he befriended all in his community irrespective of race, and he launched a one man crusade in support of a homeless black man who had been beaten up by the white son of the local Chief of Police. An FBI investigation into his background searching for racial animus turned up, after more than 40 interviews, nothing.

As to racial profiling, when Zimmerman called the police on Trayvon Martin, he sited activities that were suspicious as the basis. He only identified Martin as possibly black when prompted by the 911 operator. And any inference of racial profiling goes out the window when you look at Zimmerman's other calls to police over a three year period. Two were to alert police to the presence of a black man wanted for burglary. One was to alert police to a black seven year old child wandering unsupervised in the road because of concern for the child's safety. Zimmerman placed three calls about black men acting suspiciously, one of which was Trayvon. He had previously made five calls about whites and hispanics acting suspiciously in the neighborhood. Listen to the calls and the descriptions of why Zimmerman was suspicious, and the inference is that Zimmerman acted reasonably and did not profile on the basis of race.

Evidence at trial suggests that Trayvon Martin could have, during a three to four minute interlude, simply gone to his home a stone's throw away. Instead, he ended up assaulting Zimmerman, battering him and leaving Zimmerman in extreme panic. The jurors found that Zimmerman acted in self defense, which means that Zimmerman acted in reasonable belief that he was in imminent danger of great bodily harm.

The racial grievance industry, outrageously supported in all of their assertions by President Obama, utterly refuses to acknowledge any of the facts that have been broadcast to the world. Just as the grievance industry is founded on the canard of rampant racism in society, so is their Zimmerman narrative founded on a complete ignoring of the facts. Indeed, to hold onto their narrative, the race baiters are agitating that Zimmerman be charged under federal law because he was motivated by race to kill Martin. They want a lynching - a sacrifice on the alter of race - in order to justify their narrative.

But there is some hope. Rev. Al Sharpton, the nation's most prominent race baiter, arranged for demonstrations in 100 cities last week to forward the narrative. It speaks volumes that the crowds were small indeed, with most being in the hundreds or lower, in double digits. I am hopeful that this is a sign that blacks are waking up to the fact that the left and their leaders in the race grievance industry are taking them for a ride, with the only winners being Al Sharpton and the Democrats.

Detroit, The Blue Social Model & Failed Education Systems

Detroit is a city intimately caught up in politics of the left into which racial politics are fully integrated. And today, Detroit has utterly failed, it is a city in ruins. It is a city that that has been run wholly by the left since the 60's, from whence its decline began. Today, it is bloated public sector union pensions and health care costs that have eventually caught up to the city's treasury.

Michael Barone grew up in Detroit and was a friend of Mayor Cavanaugh in the 1960's. He writes today:

[Detroit Mayor] Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.”

There are a thousand things to write about on Detroit, but the one that stands out for the purpose of this essay is the unholy alliance between public sector unions, local government and the education available to blacks.

Education is penultimately the key to giving black children a route out of poverty and into the mainstream of American life. Yet, in every city run by the left, public sector unions have a lock on public education. And inevitably, it is the education of students that suffer. Detroit is the poster child for this. Detroit's public education system has produced a population that is near 50% functionally illiterate. Those are third world numbers. And the people so afflicted, largely black, will never be able to fully compete in the American marketplace.

Blacks as a whole have not yet figured out that in the pantheon of the left, public sector unions are valued above the education and well being of black children. Unions hold the trump card - they are valued for the money that they pump into the Democrat Party while the left already has the monolithic vote of blacks in their pocket.

The clearest example of this pecking order comes from President Obama. When he first took office, Washington D.C., with the worst public schools in the nation, was running a voucher program to allow poor black D.C. students to attend the same private schools where Obama had enrolled his daughters. At the urging of the teachers unions, Obama ordered that program terminated.

The bottom line is that the Blue social model is failing. One important aspect of that model, the one that directly implicates blacks, is that the left embraces public sector unions at the expense of blacks. This is one of the reason the left keeps blacks firmly fixed on imaginary white racism.

The Black Community Today

In the photo at the top, the woman's sign reads "Racisms still alive. They just be concealing it." This really says it all about the lack of racism in society, the fact that many in the black community still wish to blame racism for their problems, and a demonstration of the failed education system to which many blacks have no other recourse.

The civil rights movement has had its great successes and its stunning failures. Chief among its successes has been in driving racism totally from acceptability in the public square. Racism has receded from the mainstream to the very fringes of society. That this has been accomplished in but a few decades is truly amazing. But it also speaks to the moral imperative of the civil rights movement for blacks. It is a reason for all people in our nation to take pride.

The most glaring failure of the civil rights movement is that the black community has been, and ever more continues to be, ill served by the left and its ally, the racial grievance community. While many blacks have been able to use the decades since the 60's to work themselves into the mainstream, it is a fair argument that such has been in spite of, not because of, left wing policies that have contributed to a horrible breakdown in the black family and left in its wake intractable problems of poverty, joblessness, poor education and criminality running rampant through a large strata of the black population.

The true disconnect here comes from the left and a racial grievance industry that lays these problems in the black community at the feet of imaginary racism. These intractable problems of the black community are inexcusable and obscene in the 21st century. Yet blacks in the grievance industry simply will not face these problems on their merits, nor will they tolerate any on the right raising these issues. That will bring out the race card at the speed of light. To do so threatens their power base.

Nothing has thrown this into such a harsh light as the Zimmerman case and its aftermath. Will it make any difference?

Update: O'Reilly gets it. Kudos to him for his Talking Points Memo tonight

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Stacey Dash, MLK Jr. & The Progressive Left

Stacey Dash is a gorgeous 46 year old actress, she is be black, and she recently tweeted that she supported Mitt Romney in the upcoming election. Progressives on the left have predictably reacted with all of the anger, hatred and vitriol of an Islamic mob in Cairo who just heard that, somewhere in the U.S., someone criticized their prophet. There is zero tolerance among progressives for any black who strays off the plantation.

Ms. Dash justified her decision to support Romney by using the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. - that she chose Romney over Obama "not based on the color of his skin, but the content of his character." My hat is off to her both for her courage in coming forward and her grasp of the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr, ideals every American should support.

In the video below, Ms. Dash discusses the hatred and vitriol that has been directed at her since she announced her support of Mitt Romney. She also notes that Paul Ryan called her to thank her for her support.



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MLK Day 2012: The Civil Rights Movement, The Left & The Legacy of MLK

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

The third Monday in January is annually set aside to honor the most towering figure of our nation's civil right's movement. And his most eloquent speech was given in 1963, I Have A Dream. That speech was a stirring call for true equality. After opening by noting the promise of our nation, that "all men are created equal," near his conclusion, he said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The full speech is in the video below. Do watch it. His moving appeal to equality as the basis for our nation rings as true today as in 1963.



And there is this via Hot Air today from MLK's niece, Dr. Alveda King who asserts in the interview below that had her uncle lived to see today, he’d be considered a pro-life, social conservative.



What follows is reposted and updated from 2008:

(2011 Update) Three years ago, I wrote a post on race in America, surveying our history and pointing out the far left's bastardization of MLK's dream of equality for all. It is appropriate to revisit that post today. I predicted at the time that, with the election of Obama, we would fall ever deeper, and perhaps irrevocably, into identity politics and multiculturalism, moving ever farther away from realizing MLK's goal of equality. I was wrong:
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Liberal African American NYT columnist Bob Herbert recently had this to say in extolling the virtues of the left:

Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.

Mr. Herbert pretty much sums up what has been the far left / liberal / progressive line for decades. But then how to explain all the vicious, ad hominem and unhinged Palin-bashing coming from the left? To take it one further, how to reconcile that Palin-bashing with the left's acceptance of people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a part of their stable? It seems quite the conundrum unless one knows a bit of history and can identify the massive deceits. Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) [was the last] member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was not a Republican. . . .

Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, their raison d'etre. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. JFK, Truman and FDR would recognize precious little of today's Democratic Party.

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anomaly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert, quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades.

We are either a melting pot wherein "all men are created equal" - the ideal of our Founders for which we have long laboured and are ever closer to succeeding - or we are to become a multicultural nation of pigeon-holed special interests. We are to become a nation where groups are encouraged to remain apart, defining themselves by their victim class before defining themselves as Americans. Multiculturalism is unworkable - we can see it destroying Europe and Britain - but that has not stopped the far left in America from their embrace of the concept. Nor has it slowed their efforts to weave multiculturalism irrevocably into the fabric of our society.

The far left has long pushed forward minorities and women to prove that they are the party of inclusiveness. On the right, the process has been slower. You had the percolation of minorities and women to major positions through the natural process of time and selection of the fittest. Only the most jaded would ever argue that Colin Powell and Condi Rice did not earn their positions solely on merit. And love her or hate her, Kristi Todd Whitman was both well qualified and a very good governor.

I have long been waiting for a self-made and accomplished woman or minority to rise to the very top in Republican politics. It is something that would intrinsically expose the incredibly damaging canard that the far left has pushed for near half a century. I had hoped Colin Powell would be that man a decade ago. As to Condi Rice, had things worked out differently for the Bush administration and had she not selected the Sec. of State slot (a killer for anyone with Pres. aspirations) I thought that perhaps she would have a good shot at running in 2008. I've been waiting for Thomas Sowell to run for any elected office for decades - and yes, I would consider him for beatification. These are people for whom neither their skin color nor their gender makes them a victim. These are people for whom what unites us in common as Americans is more important than what divides us into sub-groups. And these are people who earned their success by virtue of their excellence rather than the distortions of identity politics.

It is inevitable that one of the two concepts I earlier described - a melting pot of equals or a multicultural morass of victim groups - will gain ascendance in America. I have long felt that we are at a crossroads in our nation for precisely this reason, and that the ramifications of how we decide this issue will be existential. . . .
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When I wrote this post, I thought that electing Obama would take our nation irrevocably down the multicultural path, strengthening in America the victim class mentality that defines the left. I did not count on the rise of the Tea Party, nor that the left would go all out with the race card in a concerted and transparent attempt to delegitimize the message of that grass roots movement. Instead of strengthening the victim class mentality, all indications are that it has had a contrary effect, exposing the device to much of America. It is a tremendous irony that Obama, a man whose promise to lead us to racial equality was always without the barest hint of substance, may well inadvertently lead us to that promised land regardless. As the race card loses its ability to stigmatize the far left's political opponents, it spells the beginning of the end to the victim politics of the left. When the last vestiges of its toxin are banished from our land, then will come the day MLK's dream is fulfilled, and all of our children will "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Update (2011): NiceDeb has a round-up of MLK posts, linking not only to this post, but also to a fine post by Michelle Malkin, asking the left to give the race card a rest on MLK Day. In it, Malkin provides an exhaustive list of the times the left has used the race card in the recent past, concluding with an essay from Jerome Hudson that appears at Human Events:

Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.

I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.

At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.

“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”

One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?

I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”

As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.

Later, as Sharpton preached a divisive message void of actual solutions on how to “close the education and economic gap” in the “black community,” Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, invoked the spirit of her slain uncle proclaiming, “I too have a dream, that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God.”

Her comments on restoring the “foundation of the family” in America were met, not with boos, but with a thunderous applause.

(What bigots those white folks! Having the audacity to cheer Dr. King’s niece like that. Racists the whole lot of them!)

I was probably the only 24-year old black college student in the crowd. It’s hard to know, because we had over 300,000 people there. But that didn’t matter to me. As we all stood hand-in-hand, American shoulder to American shoulder, our myriad faces streaked with tears as we sang “Amazing Grace.” It was a moment I will be proud to tell my grandkids about one day.

What that moment taught me is this: Something profound is happening in America that runs far deeper than politics. The ground is shifting, and it’s in freedom’s direction.

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Update 2012:  It is a tragedy that the goal of MLK, a society where people are "measured by the content of their character and not the color of their skin," has been so distorted and hollowed out to be used as a political tool by the left. All of the most prominent voices of the black civil rights movement today - Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc. - invariably seem to be doing far more for themselves than for blacks as a group. Indeed, for but one example, there is Prof. Henry L. Gates who has made an entire, extremely well paying career at Harvard out of arguing for reparations from all whites to all blacks for the original sin of slavery in America. And as I pointed out in a post a few days ago, in taking stock of what the Civil Rights Movement and the Obama administration have achieved through today:

. . . Blacks should be waking up to a hard lesson - that the left wing promises sold to them, the separatism and victimhood, they are all empty. And on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right.

. . . The black middle class has been growing steadily since 1955. But that middle class is under full frontal assault from Obama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times, the median net worth for black families has plunged 83% under Obama. Black unemployment has risen to 16.2%, and only 56.9% of black men over the age of 20 remain in today's workforce. According to the Censsus Bureau, the poverty rate for black households in America today is at a staggering 27.4%. As the Sun-Timessummed this up:

Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”

Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”

And indeed, it should be noted that Obama's most recent decision to decimate Army ranks will likewise severely restrict another historic avenue for black advancement to the middle class. In the Army, 27.7% of the enlisted ranks are filled by blacks.

[The second way in which the modern civil rights movements has wholly failed the black community is in education, and particularly] the horrid state of public education in the inner cities. Is is, as Juan Williams has called it from the left, "the key civil rights issue of this generation." And as Thomas Sowell has opined from the right, "Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow.."

Both Williams and Sowell also agree that the single biggest hurdle to improving education in the inner cities is the power of teachers' unions. The left stands shoulder to shoulder with all public sector unions - teachers' unions in particular - because they provide much of the economic base for Democrats. And indeed, Exhibit one in trying to win the black vote on this issue is Obama who, at the start of his administration, ended the DC voucher program for DC's inner city youth, while at the same time he enrolled his children in the area's best private school.

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Civil Rights, The Left & The Legacy Of MLK

Two years ago, I wrote a post on race in America, surveying our history and pointing out the far left's bastardization of MLK's dream of equality for all. It is appropriate to revisit that post today. I predicted at the time that, with the election of Obama, we would fall ever deeper, and perhaps irrevocably, into identity politics and multiculturalism, moving ever farther away from realizing MLK's goal of equality. I was wrong:
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Liberal African American NYT columnist Bob Herbert recently had this to say in extolling the virtues of the left:

Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.

Mr. Herbert pretty much sums up what has been the far left / liberal / progressive line for decades. But then how to explain all the vicious, ad hominem and unhinged Palin-bashing coming from the left? To take it one further, how to reconcile that Palin-bashing with the left's acceptance of people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a part of their stable? It seems quite the conundrum unless one knows a bit of history and can identify the massive deceits. Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) [was the last] member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was not a Republican. . . .

Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, their raison d'etre. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. JFK, Truman and FDR would recognize precious little of today's Democratic Party.

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anomaly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert, quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades.

We are either a melting pot wherein "all men are created equal" - the ideal of our Founders for which we have long laboured and are ever closer to succeeding - or we are to become a multicultural nation of pigeon-holed special interests. We are to become a nation where groups are encouraged to remain apart, defining themselves by their victim class before defining themselves as Americans. Multiculturalism is unworkable - we can see it destroying Europe and Britain - but that has not stopped the far left in America from their embrace of the concept. Nor has it slowed their efforts to weave multiculturalism irrevocably into the fabric of our society.

The far left has long pushed forward minorities and women to prove that they are the party of inclusiveness. On the right, the process has been slower. You had the percolation of minorities and women to major positions through the natural process of time and selection of the fittest. Only the most jaded would ever argue that Colin Powell and Condi Rice did not earn their positions solely on merit. And love her or hate her, Kristi Todd Whitman was both well qualified and a very good governor.

I have long been waiting for a self-made and accomplished woman or minority to rise to the very top in Republican politics. It is something that would intrinsically expose the incredibly damaging canard that the far left has pushed for near half a century. I had hoped Colin Powell would be that man a decade ago. As to Condi Rice, had things worked out differently for the Bush administration and had she not selected the Sec. of State slot (a killer for anyone with Pres. aspirations) I thought that perhaps she would have a good shot at running in 2008. I've been waiting for Thomas Sowell to run for any elected office for decades - and yes, I would consider him for beatification. These are people for whom neither their skin color nor their gender makes them a victim. These are people for whom what unites us in common as Americans is more important than what divides us into sub-groups. And these are people who earned their success by virtue of their excellence rather than the distortions of identity politics.

It is inevitable that one of the two concepts I earlier described - a melting pot of equals or a multicultural morass of victim groups - will gain ascendance in America. I have long felt that we are at a crossroads in our nation for precisely this reason, and that the ramifications of how we decide this issue will be existential. . . .
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When I wrote this post, I thought that electing Obama would take our nation irrevocably down the multicultural path, strengthening in America the victim class mentality that defines the left. I did not count on the rise of the Tea Party, nor that the left would go all out with the race card in a concerted and transparent attempt to delegitimize the message of that grass roots movement. Instead of strengthening the victim class mentality, all indications are that it has had a contrary effect, exposing the device to much of America. It is a tremendous irony that Obama, a man whose promise to lead us to racial equality was always without the barest hint of substance, may well inadvertently lead us to that promised land regardless. As the race card loses its ability to stigmatize the far left's political opponents, it spells the beginning of the end to the victim politics of the left. When the last vestiges of its toxin are banished from our land, then will come the day MLK's dream is fulfilled, and all of our children will "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Update: NiceDeb has a round-up of MLK posts, linking not only to this post, but also to a fine post by Michelle Malkin, asking the left to give the race card a rest on MLK Day. In it, Malkin provides an exhaustive list of the times the left has used the race card in the recent past, concluding with an essay from Jerome Hudson that appears at Human Events:

Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.

I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.

At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.

“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”

One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?

I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”

As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.

Later, as Sharpton preached a divisive message void of actual solutions on how to “close the education and economic gap” in the “black community,” Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, invoked the spirit of her slain uncle proclaiming, “I too have a dream, that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God.”

Her comments on restoring the “foundation of the family” in America were met, not with boos, but with a thunderous applause.

(What bigots those white folks! Having the audacity to cheer Dr. King’s niece like that. Racists the whole lot of them!)

I was probably the only 24-year old black college student in the crowd. It’s hard to know, because we had over 300,000 people there. But that didn’t matter to me. As we all stood hand-in-hand, American shoulder to American shoulder, our myriad faces streaked with tears as we sang “Amazing Grace.” It was a moment I will be proud to tell my grandkids about one day.

What that moment taught me is this: Something profound is happening in America that runs far deeper than politics. The ground is shifting, and it’s in freedom’s direction.

Update: Welcome ALICU blog readers. Always nice to welcome people from the left side of the blogosphere. Please feel free to read, comment and argue. As to the blog mention from Roy Edroso, one, thanks, two - "honkeys in tricolor hats?" - lol, not too cutting edge there Roy. I haven't heard "honkey" used for 20 years. Let me guess - you're a child of the 60's who hasn't quite broken you're pot habit?

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