Posted on Fri, 04/04/2008 - 10:42 — by shays
Forty years.
Forty years ago tonight, Martin Luther King had his throat blown out by a sniper lying in ambush. Today, though he still has enemies and detractors (were he alive, Ronald Reagan would be near the top of the list), the majority of Americans have come to honor and respect a man who walked the talk and pursued an end to racism and injustice while seeking a path to equality and peace.
Martin Luther King Junior was despised and feared by many in this country while he lived. The FBI hounded and harassed him, angry white mobs spit on him and one trapped him and his followers inside a church until Robert Kennedy sent national guard troops to disperse the crowd, the press ignored or condemned everything he did or said not related to the small piece of social justice it gave him permission to speak about.
He spoke eloquently of the wrongs his people had suffered, but he spoke just as eloquently about the wrongs suffered by working-class whites and Vietnamese peasants. He articulated a vision of hope, when people could walk side-by-side regardless of the color of their skin, the number of possessions they had, the work they did, or the country they called home.
While he lived, he was villified aplenty. Ironically (or perhaps disturbingly) the attacks against Martin Luther King Junior ring amazingly parallel to the epithets and accusations hurled against the Reverend Wright or ... perhaps more fittingly ... against Barack Obama following his effort to address and reconcile racial tension in this country.
Barack Obama is not Martin Luther King, Junior. Few people are. But he certainly is the first powerful public figure with a reasonable chance of being elected to the highest office in the land who has shown a willingness to embrace the spirit of Dr. King ... at least since Robert Kennedy.
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Joined: Dec 2005
Posts: 321
Your the only one that I've heard of so far speak evil of Reagan. In another post you damed his soul. Be careful what you wish for, especially when your in a bong induced state of mind.
As for your wish list of racists, allow me to be fair and all inclusive in adding to the list the following: Robert KKK Byrd, David Pukes, Fred "F-ing" Phelps, Jesse Jackass, Al "Not Too Sharp" ton, Louis Farrakhrap, Ray "Chocolate City Nawlins"Nagin, Jeremiah Wrong, cracker leftist democrat politicians, congressional black militant caucus, la raza, Aryan Nation, Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, Ku Klux Krackers......well, you get the picture.
Behold.......
An Open Letter to the Democratic Party By Lt. Colonel Frances Rice,U.S. Army Retired: Contributor to the LHI
"We, African American citizens of the United States, declare and assert:
Whereas in the early 1600's 20 African men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship as slaves and from that tiny seed grew the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery which shaped the course of American development,
Whereas reconciliation and healing always begin with an apology and an effort to repay those who have been wronged,
Whereas the Democratic Party has never apologized for their horrific atrocities and racist practices committed against African Americans during the past two hundred years, nor for the residual impact that those atrocities and practices and current soft bigotry of low expectations are having on us today,
Whereas the Democratic Party fought to expand slavery and, after the Civil War, established Jim Crow Laws, Black Codes and other repressive legislation that were designed to disenfranchise African Americans,
Whereas the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, and their primary goal was to intimidate and terrorize African American voters, Republicans who moved South to protect African Americans and any other whites who supported them,
Whereas, according to leading historians (both black and white), the horrific atrocities committed against African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction were financed, sponsored, and promoted by the Democratic Party and their Ku Klux Klan supporters,
Whereas from 1870 to 1930, in an effort to deny African Americans their civil rights and to keep African Americans from voting Republican, thousands of African Americans were shot, beaten, lynched, mutilated, and burned to death by Ku Klux Klan terrorists from the Democratic Party,
Whereas Democratic Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman rejected anti-lynching laws and efforts to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission,
Whereas the Democratic party has used racist demagoguery to deceive African Americans about the history of the Republican Party that: (a) started as the anti-slavery party in 1854, (b) fought to free African Americans from slavery, (c) designed Reconstruction, a ten-year period of unprecedented political power for African Americans, (d) passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting African Americans freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote, (e) passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting African Americans protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, (f) passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 granting African Americans protection from the Jim Crow laws, (g) established Affirmative Action programs to help African Americans proper with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan that set the first goals and timetables and his 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act that made Affirmative Action Programs the law of our nation, and (h) never sponsored or launched a program, passed laws, or engaged in practices that resulted in the death of millions of African Americans,
Whereas Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (a 1954 decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower) was a landmark civil rights case that was designed to overturn the racist practices that were established by the Democratic Party,
Whereas after Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the vote of African Americans, he banned African American newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists,
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law, opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was later criticized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for ignoring civil rights issues.
Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist,
Whereas Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, made a 14-hour filibuster speech in the Senate in June 1964 in an unsuccessful effort to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was heralded in April 2004 by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd as a senator who would have been a great leader during the Civil War,
Whereas when the 1964 Civil Rights Act came up for vote, Senator Al Gore, Sr. and the rest of the Southern Democrats voted against the bill,
Whereas in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans,
Whereas Democratic President Bill Clinton sent troops to Europe to protect the citizens of Bosnia and Kosovo while allowing an estimated 800,000 black Rwandans to be massacred in Africa, vetoed the welfare reform law twice before signing it, and refused to comply with a court order to have shipping companies develop an Affirmative Action Plan,
Whereas Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore created harmful racial division when he falsely claimed that the 2000 presidential election was "stolen" from him and that African Americans in Florida were disenfranchised, even though a second recount of Florida votes by the "Miami Herald" and a consortium of major news organizations confirmed that he lost the election, and a ruling by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission declared that African Americans were not denied the right to vote,
Whereas the Democratic Party's soft bigotry of low expectations and social promotions have consigned African Americans to economic bondage and created a culture of dependency on government social programs,
Whereas the Democratic Party's use of deception and fear to block welfare reform, the faith-based initiative and school choice that would help African Americans prosper is consistent with the Democratic Party's heritage of racism that included sanctioning of slavery and kukluxery, a perversion of moral sentiment among leaders of the Democratic Party whose racist legacy bode ill until this generation of African Americans,
Now, therefore, for the above and other documented atrocities and accumulated wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, we demand a formal written apology and other appropriate remuneration from the leadership of the Democratic party.
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 821
Poser ...
You don't have a rational argument to rebut me, do you? You can call people names and make baseless accusations regarding their behaviors, but you don't have a leg to stand on, do you? As Clayton points out in a couple of other threads on this bulletin board, you have the right to post whatever senseless gibberish you want and (as he/she also implies) if I can't stand the heat, then I better get out of the kitchen. Well, I have been accused of worse by people who actually know me, so your childish name-calling bounces off me like mouse droppings on an elephant's foot.
I also notice, though, that both you and Clayton violate the high road that at least he/she advocates that everyone else must follow when it comes to addressing the points raised by others ... in several different topics all at once! Guess neither of you has to walk your own talk, suggesting with your own words and actions that the two of you are nothing more than over-inflated gas bags.
Finally, I support individual candidates, not parties. I am a registered Democrat, but only for sake of convenience in primaries and because Dems come a little closer to my political point of view than Republicans ever will. Most everything your retired Lt. Colonel says about the Democratic Party has an element of truth in it (and represents one of three reasons why I do not support the "Party"), but the Democratic Party is much more complex than his narrow historical diatribe admits to. His diatribe also conveniently leaves out the fact that the compacts BOTH parties have signed on to with people in the south are disgusting examples of political expediency ... and if you don't think the "Southern Strategy" of appealing to racial fears among southern Democrats who felt betrayed by Lyndon Johnson, first by Nixon but most effectively by the biggest poser of them all, does not represent such a compact, then you are either more blind than you let, or a bigger hypocrite than you have so far revealed. Jim Crow IS a product of southern Democrats; but this astounding notion that white people are being discriminated against in the same way as Blacks (and Native Americans, and Hispanics, and Puerto Ricans, and Italians, and Poles, and the Irish, and the Japanese, and the Chinese) is purely a product of Republican policies and attitudes. Which is why I am leary and suspicious of BOTH parties, and support efforts to find ways to roll back their power and rein them in a little tighter (i.e., they should not be allowed to draw district borders).
I will return to Ronald Reagan's mortality (as opposed to the pagan idolatrous status he has assumed amongst the brain dead) at a later time.
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 16
I could never be a "Democrat". I'm not a lying, racist bigot, which is a requirement for membership.
re: whites discriminated against. "Affirmative Action" is nothing more than state-sanctioned prejudice. It may have had a raison d'etre' 40 years ago, but it has long out-lived its usefulness. Even the minorities that it was aimed at are beginning to realize this.
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 821
Guess there is not much I can say to convince you that Democrats are people, too. The characteristics you attribute to Democrats are shared pretty equally by people of all political, social and economic persuasion. Affirmative action certainly has its flaws, but the fact that it favors a poor person or a person of color over the long-favored majority is just a price we must pay for the sins of our fathers (much as our children ... and probably grandchildren ... will be paying for our sins of arrogance and self-proclaimed superiority, today). We can talk about how to equalize some of the more egregious flaws in affirmative action ... but until we fix the income, employment, education, incarceration, housing, hunger, and health-care gaps that exist between peoples of color and the majority population, we will never end the defacto racism, segregation, and apartheid that exists in this country. Even if it were true that we all start the race from the same place and run the same course (which is not the case), until we find a way to level the playing field and make it possible for black inner-city five-year olds to have the same dreams and aspirations (and opportunity to actually meet them as a white, suburban or gated community five-tear old, it certainly is not going to right itself.