What Black leaders must do to fulfill King’s dream

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As we honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with programs, pageantry and celebrations for a man who shared a powerful dream in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that dream remains largely unfulfilled.

King’s dream was a colorblind society; he challenged America to live up to its founding promises of freedom, equality and justice for all. But in spite of a record 62 Black members serving in Congress and Black mayors leading major cities — Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia — Black Americans today face inequalities in education, criminal justice, health care, economics and contracting.

What’s worse is that many state legislatures have passed laws removing Black history from schools and regulating how teachers can discuss race in the classroom, a blatant attempt to rewrite history.

King’s dream can be realized if Black elected leaders use their power and prestige to bring about equity. For the first time in history, there are a record seven Black statehouse speakers: Emanuel “Chris” Welch in Illinois; Joanna McClinton, Pennsylvania; Adrienne Jones, Maryland; Joe Tate, Michigan; Carl Heastie, New York; Rachel Talbot Ross, Maine; and Don Scott Jr., Virginia. The minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives is Hakeem Jeffries, a Black man. The collective power of Black elected leaders is unparalleled at this moment.

Yet what good is that power if it is not being used to right the wrongs of the past and present? Black elected leaders must be bold in their policies to end generational poverty and provide hope for communities that have been left behind. They must not be content with the trappings of power.

The Black community needs equity in housing, health care, education, jobs and contracting. In King’s beloved Chicago, a place he once called home, homelessness, hopelessness, drug addiction and mental illness abound. Homeless encampments in public parks and tent cities along expressways underscore the necessity for public policy around affordable and fair housing.

In 1966, King moved his family to the North Lawndale neighborhood to highlight awful living conditions for Black people and fight for fair housing. Those conditions have worsened. King likely would be shocked to see the dehumanization of the dispossessed and disinherited and wonder if his protesting were in vain. I think he would be appalled to know that Madison Street on the West Side looks much like it did after the 1968 riots.

When King led a protest in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood, he was primarily fighting against a white supremacist establishment that wanted to maintain the status quo. King declared, “I have never in my life seen such hate … not in Mississippi or Alabama.” I wonder what King would say today — with Black people serving as major political leaders in Congress, state legislatures and big cities. And yet Black people remain at the bottom of the economic and social ladder.

We continue to grapple with persistent health disparities. King said: “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.”

Our elected leaders matter because government has an impact. Government leaders’ arrogance and perpetuation of inequality can be seen in their response to the migrant crisis. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle are diverting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to provide for migrants. A government that fails to prioritize, protect and provide for its citizens is morally bankrupt.

The following are suggestions to make King’s dream a reality:

Black elected leaders at the federal, state and local levels must unite and use their collective voice to present bold policy initiatives and resources to close racial disparities.

Business and government leaders should fund think tanks at historically Black colleges and universities to measure progress regarding generational issues affecting Black communities.

Citizens must vote and hold elected officials accountable for improving their quality of life.

I write this commentary to make those comfortable with promoting inequality and injustice uncomfortable.

Willie Wilson is a Chicago business owner. This article first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

Local View: Economic empowerment central to Dr. King’s message

Last year was tough. It is no secret that people are struggling, people are angry, and people are surviving and not thriving. Our community and our people are not only getting priced out of their neighborhoods, they are getting priced out of groceries, health care, and more. As a community, we can enhance support for those in need by fostering a culture of empathy and collaboration and by making bold decisions that are divergent from the status quo. Encouraging volunteerism and organizing community events that promote inclusivity and understanding can strengthen the social fabric. We can prioritize people.

It all sounds good, but how can you get started in this effort?

For starters, as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I ask you to think about a core message of his that is often overlooked. In his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King did not just call for the equal rights of Black Americans or the end of Jim Crow laws. More importantly, he demanded equal access to economic opportunity, resources, and power for Black people and communities of color.

Let’s face it, without economic power, there is no true equal opportunity for historically disadvantaged people. As the economies of Duluth and surrounding communities continue to grow, the Duluth Branch NAACP is committed to making sure Black and Brown people are not left behind.

To help ensure economic prosperity for all people in our community, the Duluth Branch NAACP is launching the Ignite Empower Transform (IET) Foundation. The goal is to create and sustain an Economic Empowerment Center. The center would cultivate economic safe spaces and provide services that help ignite generational success and wealth, leading to the empowerment and transformation of the African American and African Heritage community. In order to work toward this end, the IET Foundation aims to raise $50,000 of additional seed money toward a broader goal for 2024.

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To launch this fundraising effort, the branch will host its annual Freedom Fund Dinner on Feb. 10 from 5-11 p.m. at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center. The event is to raise awareness about the IET Foundation and support its fundraising efforts. The event will feature nationally recognized keynote speaker Conscious Lee and music by The Gemstones and Nur-D.

On MLK Day, followed by Black History Month, I implore you to get involved. Honoring Dr. King’s legacy requires more than just showing up for breakfast or a rally. It means giving your time and money year round to help shift the unequal balance of power that exists. It means standing up and using your power to empower others. It means getting out of your comfort zone and into the fight for our freedoms.

Our organization and our community need your support, and we need it today and every day. To find out more about our MLK Day events, visit duluthnaacp.org/mlk . To buy tickets to the Freedom Fund Dinner or to become a sponsor of the event, visit duluthnaacp.org/freedomfund . Thank you for your support.

Classie Dudley is president of the Duluth Branch NAACP.

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Classie Dudley

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… of war, poverty, and racism at the 1967 National Conference … his insights on poverty and racism note that “capitalism was … the people to oppress the African American community.” He begged them … the generation that dismantles systemic racism once and for all.” … RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News

New interim director of Nebraska African American commission sees pace picking up after turnovers

LINCOLN — A state agency charged with advocating for Nebraska’s African Americans has cycled through two executive directors in the three years since it launched.

Each stayed less than a year before resigning. A trio of spots on the governing board also are vacant as the Nebraska Commission on African American Affairs continues to find its bearings.

John Carter is chair of the Nebraska Commission on African American Affairs and, as of November, its interim executive director. (Courtesy of John Carter)

But a founding commissioner who is now filling in as interim director expects the commission to step up activity this year and amplify the voice of Nebraska’s roughly 92,000 African Americans in towns small, big, rural and urban.

Indeed, John Carter of Benkelman said he’d like the 14-member commission to go as far as to assume oversight of certain state economic development funds to help ensure that dollars intended for Black populations reach and impact them.

“If you’re going to have a legislatively mandated commission, it needs to have relevance. It needs to matter,” said Carter. “We’re hitting the ground running to identify and address the issues.”

Meetings this week to set a new  pace

A pair of meetings scheduled this week should help set a new pace, said Carter and others familiar with the commission. 

On Wednesday, the commission will hold a quarterly public meeting at 9 a.m. at the State Office Building in Lincoln. Among items to be discussed is a “lack of response” from Gov. Jim Pillen’s Office.

Carter said the governor’s staff hadn’t returned recent phone calls, email or meeting invites from the commission and said that was a barrier to filling board vacancies and moving forward in general.

A spokeswoman for Pillen, in response to a reporter’s query, said the commission is not a “code agency” and therefore is not subject to the governor’s direct control. But Pillen supports the commission’s statutory mission, Laura Strimple said, and has “demonstrated a strong commitment to expanding opportunities for Nebraska’s African American community.” 

Gov. Jim Pillen met in July with members of the Nebraska Commission on African American Affairs. The governor’s spokeswoman described the meeting as extremely positive. The commission’s quarterly meeting on Wednesday carves out time to discuss “lack of response” from the Governor’s Office. (Courtesy of Nebraska Governor’s Office)

Strimple noted that the governor met with commission members in July, and she said he has been in contact with them through other state agencies such as the Department of Administrative Services.

Turnover at the commission has contributed to some communications delay that, Strimple said, “has been cleared up.”

Carter, who also is chair of the commission, said he hopes to see the commission this year take its place as a “true liaison” between the Black community, the state and the Legislature. 

On Saturday, the commission plans its first community-based public meeting since a meet-and-greet session early on. It is to be held at 10 a.m. at North Omaha’s Malcolm X Center. 

A key topic, commissioners said, is the industrial business park and multipurpose sports center planned in North Omaha — and how the state commission and community members can work together to have more influence on such high-dollar projects.

Commissioner Gwendolyn Easter of Omaha said she and others are concerned also because elected leaders of North Omaha were not invited to be part of the dignitary lineup that last week announced recipients of nearly $125 million in public funds for the business park and sports center.

More input in economic development

Carter said a goal is to see the commission become as or more involved than the Nebraska Department of Economic Development in such matters that involve economic growth projects in the Black community.

According to the 2020 legislation that created the commission, its functions include coordinating programs relating to the African American community and economic development.

Too often, said Easter, longtime African-American businesses and residents are overlooked and livelihoods are hurt in the name of bigger development. Changes in the North Omaha child care industry are an example, she said.

As larger early childhood education institutions entered the market with support from institutional leaders, she said, smaller and older businesses such as her Safe Haven preschool academy suffered.

“At one time that was our leading business that Black people thrived in,” she said of home-based and smaller day care settings. She advocates for more discussion and brainstorming with established residents and businesses. 

If the aim of public dollars is to help bring change to a historically neglected community, Carter said, locals should be provided with more assurance that “indigenous” families and workers will benefit. He pointed to the planned North Omaha business park: “Will it support people or just be an extension of the airport?”

More town halls

State Sen. Terrell McKinney (Zach Wendling/Nebraska Examiner)

State Sen. Terrell McKinney, one of two African Americans in the Legislature, said the turnover of executive directors at the commission has not been “a good sign.” He said he is hopeful the commission will elevate its profile and connection to his North Omaha district, and believes the commission could become an effective ally.

“I welcome that,” he said. “There are not too many of us down there, and the commission can be a vital resource and ally to try and change things.”

Carter, a retired Dundy County sheriff’s deputy and former assistant police chief in Tekamah, said he envisions more commission-hosted town hall meetings across the state to hear how African Americans are faring. 

From left, Commissioners Gwendolyn Easter, LaShawn Young and Connie Edmond at the State Capitol last year after testifying on legislation. (Courtesy of Gwendolyn Easter)

Individual commissioners already are expected to listen to people in their respective areas of the state and convey needs and progress to the larger commission.

But Carter plans to seek more funding so the commission can increase staffing and programming — “to do a better job of integrating African Americans into everyday life of Nebraska.” 

He sees now as a “great time” for the state commission to raise the volume in relaying “community perspective” especially on economic empowerment.

He cited concern, for example, over the recent loss of key state cabinet-level African American officials including heads of the DED and Department of Health and Human Services. He also referred to the departure of an African American woman as CEO of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce.

Opportunities and treatment of Nebraskans are not equal — and “depend on the color of your skin and where you live,” Carter said.

At least one way to make positive inroads, he said, is for commission representatives to visit towns across the state. He cited a Juneteenth celebration that he helped organize in McCook, Nebraska, a few years back.

Most who attended were white, Carter said. But information and soul food were shared, and he felt that many left with a greater understanding of African American history and struggles.

“What I’ve learned is if you go into communities, share experiences and stories … it can change minds and build relationships.”

How Best To Fulfill King’s Aspirations

In 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Had a Dream” speech.  At the time, racist barriers substantially impacted the life chances of blacks, the parents and grandparents of today’s black youths. Structural racism in American society was clearly evidenced in arrest statistics, housing availability, educational funding, and hiring decisions.

Most importantly, we must find ways to strengthen black families.

But in the last few decades, many if not most of these structural barriers have been decisively reduced, not irradicated mind you, but significantly statistically reduced. Increased educational opportunity, improved educational training of supervisory personnel, the expansion of human resource departments, and evolving white attitudes have all had positive impacts on urban policing, the criminal justice system, public schools, universities, and private corporations. Despite these obvious, evident, and calculable changes over the last few decades, social justice advocates nevertheless often interweaved widespread discriminatory policies from the past with anecdotal examples of racist actions in the present in order to claim there is an unbending and unending reign of systemic racism. (READ MORE from Robert Cherry: Demands for Reparations Hide Liberal Failures)

In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Barak Obama did briefly embrace color-blind, meritocratic reforms during the first years of his presidency.  He signaled his approach in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech:

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation … Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Like King, Obama sought to use government initiatives to strengthen black individual efforts to become successful.  However, his policies to improve fatherhood, increase occupational successes, and to distinguish between violent and nonviolent crimes were never supported by the left wing of the Democratic Party and were ultimately abandoned.  There was a return to the race-centric policies that stressed black victimization due to continued structural racism.  As a result, the focus on “bias,” with its narrative of racial victimization, continues today to reign supreme among social justice advocates rather than efforts to strengthen individual agency.

Two generations ago, this emphasis made sense. Today, however, investments in human development of black Americans must be given at least equal weight. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear that the real lives of millions of black people hang in the balance. To tell black people that all their woes stem from a failure of whites to treat them equally while avoiding helping black people become more effective, productive, and virtuous members of society, is to take the easy path. While comforting, it is nonetheless tragically misleading. For young black men, it is hard not to be demoralized by what seem to be incessant stories of black victimization, most notably the specter of unarmed black men being killed by police. While these examples are increasingly atypical, they serve to deflect attention away from the personal deficits that have a much more profound impact on black wellbeing. (READ MORE: Declining Black Voter Turnout: Apathy, Not Voter Suppression)

Here we are, more than a half century past the heyday of the civil rights movement, and the self-appointed guardians of the interests of black America have no realistic programs to move more poor blacks to the stable middle class. Instead, they decry “white supremacy” and offer a snarl, a scold, or a bill of indictments.  No meaningful policies to improve the educational skills or behaviors of ten-year-old black children.  No meaningful policies to stem the gun culture among disconnected urban black youth.

In contrast, black immigrant communities have been more successful with incomes substantially higher than the black community that descended from slavery.  Many of the groups, particularly Nigerian immigrants, have family incomes comparable if not superior to white Americans.  Though only 10 percent of the black population, immigrant youth comprise 40 percent of Ivy League blacks.  These outcomes strongly suggest that factors other than contemporary racism explain the weak performance on a host of measures of black descendants of American slavery.

Most importantly, we must find ways to strengthen black families.  This includes stressing the success sequence among young blacks: first finishing school, then gaining fulltime employment, then marrying, and only then having children. (READ MORE: Contrary to Kanye West’s Claims, Jewish Organizations Actively Helped Black Artists)

We must also bring resources into the black family.  Visiting nursing programs offer support and guidance to new mothers; and subsequent in-house programs help develop school readiness among their toddlers.  Once in school, house visits can help reduce the excessive absenteeism that has become a major problem in urban schools.  In addition, President Obama’s training initiatives should be a centerpiece of educational offerings rather than the disastrous four-year college-for-all strategy promoted by liberals.  Stackable certificate programs may be the best alternative for many high school students by providing them educational successes that they can build upon.  These are the necessary approaches if we are to fulfill King’s aspirations for black communities.

Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of The State of the Black Family: Sixty Years of Tragedy and Failures – And New Initiatives Offering Hope.

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Martin Luther King, Critical Race Theorist



Activism


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January 15, 2024

Republicans may claim otherwise, but the civil rights hero was no color-blind conservative.

Civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. relaxes at home in May 1956 in Montgomery, Ala. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

Three years ago, Donald Trump celebrated the final Martin Luther King Jr. Day of his presidency by publishing the “1776 Report,” a manifesto for “patriotic education” intended to counter the “toxic propaganda” of “critical race theory.” A few months earlier, Trump had warned that CRT was “a Marxist doctrine that rejects the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.”—worse, it was “child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”

Republicans in several states quickly began to treat it as such, and an anti-CRT moral panic swept the nation. Prominent Republicans predictably followed Trump’s lead: In 2021, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy declared, “Critical race theory goes against everything Martin Luther King Jr. taught us,” and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis invoked King when he introduced the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that reenforced his earlier prohibition of CRT in public schools, which compared the view that systemic racism exists in the United States to Holocaust denial.

It’s not just the far right—self-styled liberal pundits have repeated these talking points. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Bill Maher argued that King believed people should “not see race at all, anywhere, for any reason,” then compared “the woke” to the Ku Klux Klan.

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The logic behind these misinterpretations of King is easy to understand: Because King dreamed of a nation in which people would “be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he would, if he were still alive, denounce race-conscious policies like affirmative action. Because he was a champion of civil rights, proponents of a color-blind King infer that he would have rejected CRT’s central premise that the marquee legal victories of the civil rights era, like the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board, were insufficient in bringing about true racial equality in America.

There are, however, two major problems with this reasoning. The first is that it ignores an elementary distinction between means and ends: It is perfectly consistent to dream of a world in which racial differences no longer hold social weight while insisting, as King often did, that such a world cannot come into being without race-conscious reparative policies.

The second, more substantive problem with this interpretation of King is that it’s just not true. It is explicitly contradicted by many of King’s most acclaimed writings and speeches. It is possible that those who celebrate King as some kind of antidote to wokeness do not know this; maybe they think he sprang into existence in 1963, uttered a few sentences about his dreams at the March on Washington, and then disappeared from the political scene, having magically eliminated racism from America forever. But it’s equally possible that many of the politicians and pundits who venerate a reactionary doppelgänger of King are counting on us not to read his writings for ourselves.

In the final chapter of his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait, King endorsed race-conscious reparations “in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures.… The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery.” King reinforced this position in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? in 1967: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.”

Furthermore, King insisted that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was significant but insufficient for racial equality—an idea we now recognize as a pillar of CRT scholarship. He wrote in 1968, “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.… Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care—each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct.”

And as we celebrate King on his 95th birthday this year, we confront a bitter irony: The conservatives co-opting King’s racial justice activism while demonizing CRT as a “Marxist doctrine” are reproducing the rhetoric of white segregationists. In Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the American South, 1948–1968, historian Jeff Woods chronicles Southern segregationists’ “huge legal, political, and public-relations effort” over two decades to “discredit the civil rights movement by associating it with the nation’s greatest enemy, Communism.” The official newspaper of the White Citizens’ Councils, which King described as “a new modern form of the Ku Klux Klan,” ran innumerable stories vilifying King and other civil rights leaders as pawns of the Communist menace. The notorious John Birch Society funded billboards depicting King sitting in a desk at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee with the caption king at communist training school, and sponsored a 1966 propaganda film depicting King as a Communist agent, which concludes that “the civil rights movement, as we know it today, is simply part of a worldwide movement, organized and directed by Communists, to enslave all mankind.”

The parallels to the anti-CRT moral panic are uncanny. After conservative activist Christopher Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight in September 2020, calling CRT “an existential threat to the United States” and demanding that Trump “immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government,” Trump brought Rufo to Washington, D.C., to help write that executive order. While Rufo has since aligned himself with DeSantis, Trump’s anti-CRT diatribes have only become more extreme. At a South Carolina rally in 2022, Trump told his audience that the fight against CRT was “a matter of national survival” and that “the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down—and they must do this—lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or protect our great country or its freedom.”

Following in Trump’s footsteps and in line with language prescribed by Rufo, virtually every Republican presidential candidate has condemned CRT as some version of “race-based Marxism.” DeSantis, who last year appointed Rufo to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, described CRT as “a race-based version of a Marxist-type ideology.” Nikki Haley, recently embroiled in controversy for omitting slavery in her response to a question about the cause of the Civil War, has decried CRT as racist and “un-American” and “based on Marxist teachings.” On his campaign’s podcast, Vivek Ramaswamy discusses CRT with James Lindsay, a prominent conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed “world-level expert in critical race theory” whom Ramaswamy sees as a friend and intellectual ally whose “insight remains at the bleeding edge”; Lindsay’s book Race Marxism, which reached number 14 on Amazon’s bestseller list, likens CRT to the ideology of Nazi Germany and suggests that CRT calls for genocidal violence against white people—a claim Rufo has repeatedly endorsed on Fox News and social media.

For the past three years, the right has used CRT an excuse for authoritarian crackdowns on public education. Oklahoma now prohibits teachers from including in a course the concept that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” Georgia forbids teachers from ever “assigning fault or blame to a race.” These bills would seem to outlaw classroom instruction on Where Do We Go from Here, in which King argued that “white America must assume the guilt for the black man’s inferior status.” The GOP’s anti-CRT campaign, purportedly based on King’s vision of racial justice, has led to attempts to ban books about King’s activism from school curricula.

The point isn’t that King would have agreed with every critical race theorist on every issue. And the point isn’t that America has made no progress toward racial equality in the decades since King was assassinated. As King often said, racial progress in the United States has come a long way but has a long way to go still. The point is that King’s intellectual and political legacy has been manipulated by those who fundamentally disagree with him, distorting his image to sanitize their attacks on the very ideas for which he lived and died. If that weren’t bad enough, their arguments co-opting King to attack CRT follow the exact same playbook white segregationists used against King to attack the civil rights movement.

By the end of his life, King was describing the civil rights movement in revolutionary terms. Under his leadership, the Black freedom struggle was “exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society,” revealing “systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggesting that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” Because he understood our nation’s “triple evils” of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation as interconnected, his vision of racial justice was coextensive with economic justice; in his final book, King championed the idea of an economic bill of rights aimed at “the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

If we are serious about turning this dream into reality, we must first understand what equality and justice meant to him. At the very least, we must read King for ourselves, so that each January our celebrations of the man and all that he stood for are based not on a misleading image, but on reality.

Sam Hoadley-Brill

Sam Hoadley-Brill is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and a research and writing fellow at the African American Policy Forum.