Black Leaders to Move Against Conservative Attempt to Distort King Dream

National Correspondent

NEW YORK - Black Civil Rights leaders are furious that they will not be able to organize a march to commemorate the 47th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King's famed “I Have A Dream” speech at the location where it happened this year because infamous right wing Fox News personality and radio host Glenn Beck already booked the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28th to hold his own rally.

“We're going to get together because we are not going to let Glenn Beck own the symbolism of Aug. 28th, 2010,”


National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial said during a National Newspaper Publishers Association breakfast at NNPA’s 70th Anniversary Celebration at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers on Friday. “Someone said to me, ‘Maybe we shouldn't challenge him. Maybe we should just let him have it.

“I was like,’ Brother, where have you been? Where is your courage? Where is your sense of outrage?” We need to collaborate and bring together all people of good will, not just Black people, on Aug. 28 to send a message that Glenn Beck's vision of America is not our vision of America.

As both a solution and response to what the leaders perceive as an attack on the legacy of King, NAACP President Ben Jealous announced at the conference that a national march for jobs and justice will be held on October 2 instead.

“A group of White males wealthier than their peers called the Tea Party has risen up in the land,'' said Jealous. ''They say that they want to take the country back. And take it back they surely will. They will take it back to 1963 if we let them.”

Last week, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, the country's largest federation of labor unions, announced that they were going to endorse a march for jobs that Jealous will be co-leading in Washington on Oct. 2. Other national civil rights leaders and organizations are also endorsing the Oct. jobs march as a follow up to an Aug. 28 protest of Beck.

''We will be fighting Glenn Beck on Aug. 28th and we will be using that to leverage the second march,” Jealous said. “That march has to happen. Our people are dying right now, literally, from lack of access to jobs.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, who also spoke at the NNPA Convention, said Beck will distort King’s Legacy and his message.

“On the anniversary of the March on Washington, Glenn Beck is going to talk about the dream of Martin Luther King and how he was with them – not us. So, we’ve been traveling all over this country because there is no way in the world that I am going to allow him to have more people there than us. I hope every Black person in the country will help us to challenge this. Everybody’s got to be in Washington. We can’t let them high jack Dr. King’s dream.”

Morial called Beck's right wing conservative vision “intolerant”.

“His vision is of an America of the past,” Morial said. “Our vision is of an America that understands its past but is of the future. Too many times we have become spectators. Some people thought that since Mr. Obama became president that they could go back to their couch to sit down and watch. Look at what have we witnessed - the resurgent voice of extremism. The 14th amendment has been incorrectly interpreted. They are talking in code talking about that we have to save our country. This is our country too.”

Morial added, ''One of the things that is so curious to me is the way that groups on the right have been very, very observant and have begun to utilize the tactics of the civil rights movement- marching, organizing in churches, things that we're the backbone of civil rights advocacy in the 1950s and 1960s. Others have begun to use those techniques and use those tactics. It would be a mistake if we would treat it and didn't recognize that the people in our communities and people across the nation who believe as we do that the future of this nation has to be inclusive in a multi-racial fashion so that African-Americans are involved in the major things that take place in this country.''

Upon the 70th anniversary of NNPA and the upcoming 100th anniversary of the NUL, Morial also spoke about the need to craft a new Black agenda in a “time of great contradictions”, referencing the 2000 presidential election that was decided by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in favor of George W. Bush, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent economic recession that was one of the worst in U.S. history and very recently, the unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But he then countered with the historicity of this decade with the ascension of Black men as the president of the United States, as the head of the Department of Justice, and as Black chief executives of some the country's most powerful corporations such as Merrill Lynch, Xerox and American Express.

''Along the continuum of history, no one would have suggested or predicted that any of the above would occur in just a ten year period,'' Morial said. ''These are times when the history books are being written and re-
written. In 1999, Black America had a 7.2 percent unemployment rate, the lowest rate in the 50 years since kind of data have been recorded. And now, ten years plus later, our unemployment rate is twice as high and the real rate is even higher. Against this backdrop of difficult and tough times, that we have also witnessed, African-Americans achieve the highest places in American life. These are the times that you and I, as community and civic leaders, are bound to address the challenges.''

He rallied for a new period of Black activism. He coined it “intelligent activism”, which he described as changing the conversation by “not raising hollow, holy” hell but, rather, making a pointed case with common sense facts and arguments.

“We have to be driven by our objective,” Morial said. “Dr. King, Thurmond Marshall and all of the great leaders of the 1960s had an objective, which was to end segregation in American life. And they achieved that objective as a matter of law. Our objective needs to be to end disparities in American life to achieve economic parity in the 21st century.”

Morial said that African-Americans, because of their size, are a force to be reckoned with. There are an estimated 40 million Black people that account for $800 billion dollars in spending in the U.S, according to Morial. There are also ten thousand Black elected officials in various local, state and national offices.

“We are a community that has assets and power as much as we want to organize it and use it,” Morial said. “I want us to think of ourselves as a community of assets that brings something to the economic table of America, not as a community of deficits and problems, so that we are not coming looking with a handout. We are looking as an investor in the American dream.”

Blacks Still Support Obama: Jobs Is High Concern

Black voters, like those who lined up in the District to cast ballots for Obama in 2008, may be less enthusiastic about midterm elections. Many are concerned about persistently high unemployment.
(Marvin Joseph/the Washington Post)
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Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 11, 2010


KANSAS CITY, MO. -- Curtis Adams, who owns Curtis A's barbershop here and who is also the establishment's senior political analyst, is a close observer of President Obama. This is something of a full-time job itself at Curtis A's, a gathering place in a black neighborhood five miles from downtown. All day every day, men (and occasionally women) come for a trim and wind up lingering to argue about jobs and the oil spill and the war in Iraq.

But mostly jobs. "If Obama was in this chair right here, I would tell him to give me a job. That's what I would ask for," said customer E.J. Jones one recent afternoon. Jones has worked off and on since he was let go from an Army ammunition plant in 2008.

The recession was especially rough on Kansas City's black community, where unemployment is 15 percent, nearly three times the rate for whites. Adams pointed to the empty chairs in his shop. He's down 75 customers a week. Of Obama, he said: "That man has a hell of a workload, and Bush left a hell of a mess. I like what he's doing. But I can't feel it."

Despite his frustration with the slow pace of the recovery, Adams, who has portraits of the first family on the walls of his shop, doesn't think Obama bears the blame for his troubles. And neither do most black Americans. Just the opposite:


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Polls show that 90 percent of African Americans believe Obama is doing a good job, far higher than the president's overall 46 percent approval rating. Obama's popularity has dropped among nearly every segment of the population -- old, young, Republican, Democrat, white, Latino.

Yet blacks still overwhelmingly support him, even though they are among those who have lost the most since he was elected.


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"We understand the difficulty of being a black man in his position, because of our close proximity to race and how it affects our lives, so we are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt,"


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SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST

April 4th Martin L. King Jr. Assassination

AfroCentric Black History News Portal writes.....

I find it very easy for some of us in the Black community, to forget precious dates and events. It really aches my soul when great men like Martin especially, around his assassination...hardly a whispered. We really need to get a stronger hold on self and keep in rememberance our own people that have sacrificed their lives, so that We All could reap the benefits of their labor.
Every April 4th, should always be reverened by our community. Even more important than July 4th, or any other holiday.
Let's try to do better than we have.
Thank you Martin for your sacrifice.
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THE MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., ASSASSINATION

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee while lending support to a sanitation workers' strike. He was shot by James Earl Ray at approximately 7:05 P.M. Ray's bullet struck King as he was standing on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel; King died approximately one hour later. Although no television cameras were in the vicinity at the time of the assassination, television coverage of the event quickly followed.

News reports of King's wounding appeared first, but reporters remained consistent with the traditional news format, making early reports of the shooting seem both impersonal and inaccurate. The assassination took place at the same time as the evening news, and several anchormen received the information during their live broadcasts and because details of the shooting were not yet clear, inaccurate information was offered in several cases. Julian Barber of WTTG in Washington, D.C., for example, mistakenly reported that King had been shot while in his car. Following this presentation of incorrect details, Barber then proceeded to introduce the station's weatherman. The rest of the newscast followed a standard format with only minor interruptions providing information about King's condition.

Similarly, Kondrashov recalls that Walter Cronkite had almost finished delivering his report on The CBS Evening News when he received word of King's wounding. Visibly shaken, he announced the shooting. Moments after the announcement, however, the news program faded into commercial advertising. With little information available, the networks continued with their regularly scheduled programming and only later interrupted the programs with their station logos. At that point an anonymous voice announced that King was dead.

Having received word of King's death, all three networks interrupted programming with news programs. Awaiting President Lyndon Johnson's statement, all three featured anchormen discussing King's life and his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. The networks then broadcast President Johnson's statement in which he called for Americans to "reject the blind violence" which had killed the "apostle of nonviolence." In addition, the networks also covered Hubert Humphries' response, and presented footage of King's prophetic speech from 3 April in which he acknowledged the precarious stage of his life. Although the networks had reporters positioned in Memphis, there were no television reporters on the scene because an official curfew had been imposed on the city in an attempt to prevent violence.

According to McKnight, the immediacy of the television coverage prompted riots in over 60 American cities including Chicago, Denver, and Baltimore. Television coverage of King's death and the riots which it sparked continued for the next five days. King's life was featured on morning shows (e.g., NBC's The Today Show), evening news programs, and special programs. The riots themselves commanded extensive television coverage (e.g., CBS' News Nite special on the Riots). Carter suggests that the riots following King's assassination represent a significant shift from previous riotous activities, from responses dealing primarily with local issues to the national focus emerging in the wake of the King riots. National television coverage of the circumstances surrounding the King assassination may have contributed to this shift.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a significant moment in the history of the Civil Rights Movement as well as in the history of the United States. In death, as in life, Dr. King influenced millions of Americans. From the first reports of his shooting to the coverage of his funeral services on 9 April at the Ebenezer Church on the Morehouse College Campus, television closely followed his struggle. Even after his death, news coverage of King's legacy continued when, on 11 April President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill.

-Vidula Bal

FURTHER READING

Carter, G.L. "In the Narrows of the 1960's U.S. Black Rioting." Journal of Conflict Resolution (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 1986.

Kondrashov, S. and translated by Keith Hammond. The Life and Death of Martin Luther King. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981.

Lewis, D.L. King: A Biography . Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1970; 2nd edition 1978.

McKnight, G.D. "The 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike and the FBI: A Case Study in Urban Surveillance." South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham, North Carolina), 1984.