“The GOP Goes MIA”: Where Were the Republicans At The MLK March On Washington Anniversary?
The 50th anniversary march and speeches to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech were inspiring in the sheer variety of people present and the breadth of issues discussed. It wasn’t just about blacks seeking justice in a white-dominated country. It was about justice and equality for everyone – black, white, make, female, gay, straight, with or without disabilities. Yes, we have a ways to go in reaching true equality, but the very scene – featuring so many people of different races, ethnicities and age – was a sign of how successful a culture can be, even with the natural tumult that comes form quickly changing demographics.
That’s why it was all the more disappointing – and truly baffling, from a pure political perspective – that there were no Republican speakers.
Both former presidents Bush were invited, and declined, citing health reasons. That makes sense; the elder President Bush has been ailing on and off over the last year, and the younger former president recently had a procedure done on his heart. He sent a lovely and gracious statement to mark the day. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush declined to take the place of his family members, and we can’t blame him for that. However sincere and well-intentioned he might be, and however apolitical his remarks might have been, it’s a certainty that many reporters and pundits would interpret his presence as some sort of kick-off for the 2016 campaign. That would not only have been terribly unfair, but it would have detracted from the purpose of the day. Jeb Bush was actually displaying his respect for the memory of Martin Luther King by staying away and keeping 2016 talk out of the story.
But why weren’t House Speaker John Boehner or House Majority Leader Eric Cantor there? Both were invited, and both declined, citing scheduling conflicts. But this wasn’t some last-minute party; this was a long-anticipated event. And even if the formal invitation came only weeks ago, both should have made time. So why didn’t they?
It might be tempting for some on the left to presume that neither man cares about civil rights, or that they hate African-Americans, but those ideas are absurd. Cantor in particular has talked about the importance of fixing the Voting Rights Act (as directed by the Supreme Court) in order to save it, and has also talked very poignantly about his trip with Rep. John Lewis to Selma, Alabama, the locale of the iconic freedom march. It’s ridiculous to interpret Boehner and Cantor’s absence as a rejection of King’s legacy or civil rights.
Tragically, the answer may be much simpler and arguably more disturbing. Is it just that Republicans, some of whom are facing Tea party challenges in primaries, are reluctant to even be on the same stage as President Obama? We have seen cases where very conservative lawmakers – sincere conservatives, not people who define conservatism as the refusal to talk to anyone who disagrees with them – are being criticized by malcontents in their districts for even talking to Obama or other leading Democrats, let alone negotiating with them.
This group treats Obama like he’s some sort of brutal, third-world dictator – or maybe just Satan – and punishes anyone who gets near him. It used to be considered an honor to meet the president and be photographed with him, even if you didn’t vote for him. He’s the president, after all. But for the irrationally hateful segment of the population, having a photo with Obama is like being in the background of a picture of mobsters at a restaurant, knowing that photo is in an FBI file somewhere.
The remarkable thing is that the GOP, on paper, at least (having done a comprehensive study of itself earlier this year) seems to understand that the party has to reach out beyond white America if it ever wants to win another national election. Winning a statewide election is also getting harder and harder to do without support from African-Americans, Latinos and other (for the moment) minority groups. True, Boehner and other Republicans have spoken at other events marking the 50th anniversary, but those events just underscore the problem. In commemorating a pivotal moment in American history and civil rights, the GOP perversely chose to make the events separate but equal.
Abe Lincoln was a Republican, and he freed the slaves. The GOP grew out of a coalition of anti-slavery “Conscience Whigs.” It’s time for the leaders of the Republican party to take their party back.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, August 29, 2013
“Journalistic Malpractice”: An Overlooked Dream, Now Remembered
The city of Washington had been on edge for days. Fearing a riot, mayhem or lord knows what, many left town to avoid the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The organizers predicted a crowd of more than 100,000 protesting Negroes, as we called black people then. Just the idea of such a horde seemed to scare the white residents of what was still a southern town.
There was no rush-hour traffic on Aug. 28, 1963; almost no one went to work. Downtown, the sidewalks were empty and businesses were closed. But at Union Station, the joint was jumping. So was the Greyhound bus station on New York Avenue. Scores of thousands — mostly black but about a third white — streamed out of trains and buses and began to march along the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial.
I was a Post summer intern — a kid reporter on his first big story — and one of 60 staffers the paper deployed that day. This was a tiny fraction of the number of National Guardsmen and police on the streets but a veritable army for what was then still a provincial daily paper. Ben Gilbert, the imperious city editor, had spent weeks planning the coverage. With help from colleagues, he was about to make one of the biggest goofs of his long career.
I missed the first part of the march. I was sent to watch celebrities arrive at National Airport, where I attended a news conference by Marlon Brando, who wanted to be sure his presence was not misunderstood. Yes, Negroes were treated badly in the United States, Brando said, but “don’t forget the Indian problem.” As soon as the march was over, he promised, he would again be fighting to resolve “the Indian problem.”
I was then dispatched to the corner of Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Post reporters were stationed on every block of Constitution and throughout the Mall to cover any untoward incident. A sea of good-natured, well-dressed humanity paraded before me. The marchers carried signs but shouted no slogans. There was no hint of “trouble,” only the good news of a polite, orderly crowd.
But I was afraid of Gilbert, so I stayed at my post for several hours. Eventually I wandered toward the Lincoln Memorial, where the speeches had been delivered. It was a beautiful August afternoon, and everyone was having a fine time.
I was too late to hear the speeches but soon heard about them, particularly the address by John Lewis, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This is the same John Lewis we know today as an avuncular Georgia representative, a gentle though forceful agitator for the rights of African Americans and the poor. In 1963, Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department considered him a dangerous radical. So he got a disproportionate share of attention from reporters and officials.
The Post’s courtly civil rights reporter, Robert E. Lee Baker — he used Robert E. Baker as a less-provocative byline — reported: “Lewis had intended to scorch the Kennedy Administration and Congress and ‘cheap politicians’ in a highly emotional speech.” But, Baker wrote, “he toned it down.” No one got scorched.
The Post, however, got embarrassed. The main event that day was what we now call the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most important speeches in U.S. history. But on the day it was given, The Post didn’t think so. We nearly failed to mention it at all.
We were poised and ready for a riot, for trouble, for unexpected events — but not for history to be made. Baker’s 1,300-word lead story, which began under a banner headline on the front page and summarized the events of the day, did not mention King’s name or his speech. It did note that the crowd easily exceeded 200,000, the biggest assemblage in Washington “within memory” — and they all remained “orderly.”
In that paper of Aug. 29, 1963, The Post published two dozen stories about the march. Every one missed the importance of King’s address. The words “I have a dream” appeared in only one, a wrap-up of the day’s rhetoric on Page A15 — in the fifth paragraph. We also printed brief excerpts from the speeches, but the three paragraphs chosen from King’s speech did not include “I have a dream.”
I’ve never seen anyone call us on this bit of journalistic malpractice. Perhaps this anniversary provides a good moment to cop a plea. We blew it.
By: Robert G. Kaiser, Associate Editor, The Washington Post, August 25, 2013
“A Symbolism Of Pure Hate And Violence”: The Despicable Laura Ingraham Outdoes Herself
We can’t be surprised by the right-wing ignorance about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the politics of the 1963 March on Washington. Today’s conservative leaders are the political descendants of the forces who fought the civil rights movement as a radical, most likely Communist plot. When the movement turned out to be wholesome and all-American, when a quarter of a million marchers descended on the capital without riots or violence 50 years ago, well, then, it had to be co-opted, it had to prove that America was living up to its highest principles, that those noble people were satisfied with what the system gave them — a Civil Rights bill and a Voting Rights bill — and they went home, and marched no more. Dr. King’s assassination five years later made it easier for them to do that.
There are so many ignorant right-wing reactions to this anniversary to talk about, but the award for the most vicious and stupid has to go to radio host Laura Ingraham, who insists that those of us who are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the march this week are trying “to co-opt the legacy of Martin Luther King into a modern-day liberal agenda.”
Actually, Ingraham is so wrong, she’s sort of right. Liberals did co-opt King’s radical, anti-corporate and antiwar agenda long ago. The King we commemorate today is a friendly shadow of his challenging, radical, visionary self. (Read Harold Meyerson on “The Socialists Who Made the March on Washington,” for a necessary corrective.)
But that’s not what the ignorant and vicious Ingraham was saying. She’s pretending King was some kind of conservative hero whose message of colorblindness – and that wasn’t his message at all – has been co-opted by liberal race-baiters and whiners and malcontents, who just won’t accept that Bobby Jindal is right when he talks about the “end of race,” because a first-generation Indian immigrant’s experience of racism is identical to that of people who were enslaved for hundreds of years, and he gets to decide when racism is over. Ingraham’s co-opting comment was just dumb. Typically dumb. What was unusually vicious, even for the often nasty radio host, was that she decided to interrupt an audio clip of the heroic Rep. John Lewis, the youngest person to speak at the march 50 years ago, speaking on Saturday, with the sound of a crackling gunshot.
A gunshot. After the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, after the gunning down of so many civil rights workers over the years, Ingraham thought it was funny, or clever, or provocative, to “symbolically” cut off Lewis’ speech with the sound of a gun. The civil rights hero, who had his skull fractured on the first 1965 Selma march, falls silent in mid-sentence, as though he’d been hit by a sniper while addressing the crowd. (Listen to it on Media Matters; it’s more disturbing than you can imagine just reading about it.)
Lewis is in mid-speech, talking about the unfinished business of civil rights in America. “We must say to the Congress: fix the Voting Rights Act. We must say to the Congress: Pass comprehensive immigration reform. It doesn’t make sense that millions of our people …”
And then a shot rings out. Ingraham picks up what Lewis was saying. “OK. ‘It doesn’t make sense that millions of our people … are living in the shadows.’ They’re not only not living in the shadows, they’re appearing at the State of the Union speech. They’re actually visiting with the president in the White House. I think we have to drop that ‘living in the shadows’ thing. They might be standing on the street corner, but they’re not living in the shadows.”
Ingraham’s entitled to her opinion on immigration reform – she’s implacably against it, with her nativist buddy Pat Buchanan, who also appeared on the show – but I have to wonder why she chose to silence Lewis, symbolically at least, with a gunshot. It’s no coincidence she’s also an NRA mouthpiece whipping up fear that the government is coming for our guns. All of the white-grievance mongers are getting angrier, and their brew of pro-gun paranoia and white racial resentment is toxic. Ingraham should be ashamed of herself, but she’s just another rodeo clown, and she has no shame.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 27, 2013
“The Opiate Of Delay Persists”: Lest We Forget, Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream Still Echoes Today
The things we forget about the March on Washington are the things we most need to remember 50 years on.
We forget that the majestically peaceful assemblage that moved a nation came in the wake of brutal resistance to civil rights and equality. And that there would be more to come.
A young organizer named John Lewis spoke at the march of living “in constant fear of a police state.” He would suffer more. On March 7, 1965, Lewis and his colleague Hosea Williams led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. They were met by mounted state troopers who would fracture Lewis’s skull. As we celebrate Lewis’s ultimate triumph and his distinguished career in the House of Representatives, we should never lose sight of all it took for him to get there.
We forget that the formal name of the great gathering before the Lincoln Memorial was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jobs came first, an acknowledgement that the ability to enjoy liberty depends upon having the economic wherewithal to exercise our rights. The organizing manual for the march, as Michele Norris pointed out in Time magazine, spoke of demands that included “dignified jobs at decent wages.” It is a demand as relevant as ever.
We forget that many who were called moderate — including good people who supported civil rights — kept counseling patience and worried that the march might unleash violence.
Martin Luther King Jr. answered them in the oration that would introduce tens of millions of white Americans to the moral rhythms and scriptural poetry that define the African American pulpit.
“We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” King declared. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” How often has the opiate of delay been prescribed to scuttle social change?
King’s dream speech was partly planned and partly improvised, as Taylor Branch reported in “Parting the Waters,” his book on the early King years. One reviewer of the speech, a principal target of King’s persuasion, pronounced it a success. “He’s damn good,” President John F. Kennedy told his aides in the White House.
He was. King’s genius lay in striking a precise balance between comforting his fellow citizens and challenging them. Like Lincoln before him, King discovered the call for justice in the promises of our founders.
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King said. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” King’s dream was the latest chapter in our story. “It is a dream,” he insisted, “deeply rooted in the American Dream.”
We also remember how profoundly colorblind King’s dream was. He looked to a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls.”
We forget that the passage immediately preceding his description of those happy children was a sharp rebuke to the state of “Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification.’ ” He was referencing discredited states’-rights notions invoked to deny the rights of Americans of color. I intend no offense here toward Alabama. But we should recognize the origins of slogans still widely used today to thwart the advance of equal rights.
And at a moment when voting rights are again under threat, the historian Gary May’s new book on the Voting Rights Act, “Bending Toward Justice,” reminds us of what King said in 1957, at another Lincoln Memorial rally. Without the right to cast a ballot, King said, “I cannot make up my own mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.” Are we turning back to such a time?
King called our country forward on that beautiful day in 1963, but he also called out our failings. He told us there could be no peace without justice, and no justice without struggle. We honor him best by sharing not only his hope but also his impatience and his resolve.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 21, 2013
“Echos Of The Past”: Civil Rights Assaulted By Supreme Court
Last week was bittersweet for the cause of human dignity.
On one hand, the Supreme Court gave us reason for applause, striking down barriers against the full citizenship of gay men and lesbians. On the other, it gave us reason for dread, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 decision was stunning and despicable, but not unexpected. The country has been moving in this direction for years.
The act is sometimes called the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was even more than that: the most important piece of legislation in the cause of African-American freedom since Reconstruction. And in shredding it, the court commits its gravest crime against that freedom since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
That decision ratified segregation, capping a 30-year campaign by conservative Southern Democrats to overturn the results of the Civil War. Given that the Voting Rights Act now lies in tatters even as Republicans embrace Voter ID schemes to suppress the black vote, given that GOP star Rand Paul has questioned the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one has to wonder if the results of the Civil Rights Movement do not face a similar fate.
Or, as Georgia Rep. John Lewis put it when I spoke with him Monday, “Can history repeat itself?”
Lewis was the great hero of the battle for voting rights, a then-25-year-old activist who had his skull broken by Alabama state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL while leading a march against the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, morals tests, economic intimidation, clubs, guns and bombs to deny black people the ballot. The law he helped enact required states and counties with histories of voting discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their voting procedures. (Those that behaved themselves for a decade could be released from that requirement.)
The court struck down the formula the law uses to determine where discrimination lives (and therefore, which jurisdictions should be covered), saying the dates are too old to be reliable. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in writing for the majority, the country has changed dramatically since that era. African-American electoral participation is at levels undreamt of in 1965.
And so it is. Because. The Act. Worked.
Using that success as an excuse to cripple it, noted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, is like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Indeed, had the nation not changed dramatically since 1965, would that not have been cited as evidence of the Act’s failure? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, then: The Voting Rights Act never had a chance.
This court, said Lewis, “plunged a dagger in the heart” of the freedom movement. Nor is it lost on him that the majority which struck down this bedrock of black freedom included a black jurist: Clarence Thomas. “The brother on the court,” said Lewis, “I think he’s lost his way.”
So what now? Lewis says we must push Congress for legislation to “put teeth back in the Voting Rights Act.” Given that this Congress is notorious for its adamantine uselessness, that seems farfetched, but Lewis insists bipartisan discussion is already under way.
Fine. Let us demand that bickering, dysfunctional body do what is needed. But let us — African-Americans and all believers in freedom — also serve notice that, whatever lawmakers do, we will not stand placidly by as history repeats and citizenship is repealed, but that we will energetically resist by every moral means.
Saying that, I hear the ghostly echo of those who, once upon a generation, marched into Southern jails, singing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” It is an ancient song of defiance that feels freshly — sadly — relevant to our times.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, July 3, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 