Liberal Blacks In Denial of Their Past: Fear Telling Truth

Controversial Ad Links MLK, GOP
Assertion About Civil Rights Leader Angers Liberals -- and Conservatives

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 19, 2006; Page A04

When a black conservative group ran a radio ad proclaiming that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, reaction was swift. "We've gotten some e-mails and telephone calls filled with vitriol," said Frances Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association. "They've called me Aunt Jemima, a sellout, a traitor to my race."

In the battle for the black electorate, liberals, who make up the overwhelming majority of black voters, have long disagreed with conservatives over ideology, public policy and economic strategies to better the lives of African Americans. But when conservatives placed the civil rights movement in a Republican context, black liberals said, they crossed a line.

"To suggest that Martin could identify with a party that affirms preemptive, predatory war, and whose religious partners hint that God affirms war and favors the rich at the expense of the poor, is to revile Martin," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which the slain civil rights leader helped establish.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who marched with King in the 1960s, called the ads an "insult to the legacy and the memory of Martin Luther King Jr." and "an affront to all that he stood for."

John Lewis, like most of the power whores who rule the media's portrayal of blacks, can't abide the truth. Nothing in the advertisment is false, not one word.

We are once more faced with the sad truth about Liberals, they cannot stand the truth. If you don't buy into their mythology then you are assaulted by them. The most outraged at blacks who defy the Democrat plantation owners are the Liberal white owners themselves. Nothing so outrages a white Liberal than a conservative African American who refuses to be made a victim. Liberals, both black and white, cannot stand an independent thinker. People like Justice Thomas, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, and Frances Rice are an intolerable reminder to liberals that they might just be wrong. It creates fear that maybe, just maybe blacks may be being suckered by Liberals, and that those who really offer a solution to the problems facing our African American citizens might just turn out to be republicans.

Eugene Robinson says that Condoleezza Rice is not "really an African American." Her crime? Being Republican and middle class. Truly black Americans are becoming equal in all things; one of which is that black Liberals are as intolerant of dissent from the Liberal mythology as are white Liberals.

It is true that former Congressmand and arch-conservative Bob Dornan marched side by side with Martin Luther King in Selma, as did Charlton Heston and many other conservatives of the period.

Examining this question on BlackNews.com, Earl Ofari Hutchinson makes the following statements:

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In countless speeches in the 1950s, he mingled the demand for civil rights, voting rights, and the government clampdown on racial violence, with a forceful call for blacks to practice thrift, self-help, King realized that government programs meant little if fathers weren’t in the home, and he railed against the peril of family breakdown. This was a major social problem that civil rights leaders either ignored or downplayed. King again strongly emphasized values training, discipline, hard work, and the reduction of family violence as the key to resolve the family crisis. That crisis increasingly caught the policy attention of liberal and conservative academics and government officials.

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While King can never be considered a political conservative, the snippets of conservative thinking in his musings on the black family, economic uplift, and religious values blend easily with the social conservatism of many blacks. In the decades after his murder, it has blended just as easily into the GOP’s prescription for black ills. And that evidently is more than enough for black Republicans to say he’d be a big player on the GOP team.

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There is no doubt that King was not a Conservative, favoring as he did socialism over capitalism and while it is true that many of the old Dixiecrats did become Republicans, many refused to, choosing to remain-as stated in the advertisement in question-yellow dog Democrats. Even today there remains in the South, especially among the older voters, a large but gradually shrinking number of voters who vote Democrat because their families have always voted Democrat.

As Mr. Hutchinson says in his very thoughtful article, the ad is not as much of a stretch as conventional Liberal wisdom would have you believe. Sometimes it pays to step outside the rhetoric and take a gander at the facts, they may just surprise you.

By the way, if is very difficult to claim that someone is distorting the meaning of such a clarion call as Reverend Doctor King made, and I quote:

"I have a dream (Well) 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. (My Lord) I have a dream today."

There is nothing ambiguous in those words, there is nothing there to be "misrepresented," or misinterpreted. Those who reject those words are disrespecting the legacy and vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, and I don't care if they were his assistants, his followers, or his children.

I don't and never have agreed with all that the Reverend Dr. King stood for then, nor all of the words he spoke. I am after all a very determined capitalist, but there is little to be doubted that those of his followers like Jesse Jackson and John Lewis have fallen far short of carrying the banner he left them. Unlike Dr. King, they have allowed their own egos and desires for power and profit to gain ascendency over the "better angels" that made Dr. King a selfless warrior for the embattled black people of the time.

Dr. King was certainly no saint, but compared to those who "lead" the blacks politically today, he walked on water.

What do you think?

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