The Case For Reparations: 40 Acres and a Mule Would Cost America at Least $6.4 Trillion Today

(Atlanta Blackstar)  If you were to guess how much the United States owes Black people in economic damages for slavery, how much would it be?

In the part of the “I Have A Dream” speech that no one seems to remember, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

While some people would conclude that no dollar amount can make up for the centuries that Black people were kidnapped, enslaved and forced to work without pay, the fact remains that our misfortune made America wealthy. Slavery built the system of U.S. capitalism. Moreover, some people have estimated what the nation actually owes Black people.

Philadelphia Congregations Lead in the Struggle for Social Justice

(HuffPost Black Voices)  The recent events in Baltimore -- including the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody, and the protests and unrest that followed -- point to the need for community-based movement building. Baltimore, like many other cities in America, is hurting, and black people in particular are feeling the pain.

Meanwhile, a little over 100 miles to the north, Philadelphia -- the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection -- is offering a model for communities of faith to seek justice and transform the place in which they live. POWER (Philadelphians Organized to Witness Power and Rebuild) is a grassroots interfaith coalition of congregations across the city. Part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, they are dedicated to bringing people together around social justice issues such as jobs with a living wage, fair funding and democratic, local control of the public schools and an end to police practices such as "stop and frisk."

POWER is an example of the type of coalition building that cities need.

When it comes to Dr. King’s dream, America still disappoints

(theGrio)  If Martin Luther King were alive today, he would be 86 years old, with a full 50 years since his historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for voting rights. Surely there are a number of signs of progress made since King’s assassination. After all, in many ways, America is a different place. And yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

If the best way to remember someone is to do as he would do, then Dr. King would be disappointed with what we have done with his legacy and the manner in which we have squandered the progress he helped to bring about.

Towards the end of his life, a radicalized King spoke of America’s triple evils of racism, militarism (violence and war) and economic exploitation (poverty). Perhaps these are the best benchmarks to judge what has become of the man’s legacy. Sadly, on some levels, things have become even worse.

The Republican Party Takes a Stand For Jim Crow

In the South, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu angered Republicans when she pointed out the obvious, which is that President Obama’s unpopularity in the South is tied to the problem of race.

“I'll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans,” Landrieu said. “It's been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader."

In response, Governor Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana) called Landrieu’s statement “remarkably divisive.” Meanwhile, state Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere said her remarks were “insulting to me and to every other Louisianian,” adding “Louisiana deserves better than a senator who denigrates her own people by questioning and projecting insidious motives on the very people she claims to represent.”

In theGrio this week: Holder on sentencing reform, and civil rights families in shambles

Check out my two contributions to theGrio this week, including a report on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement on sentencing reform for low-level drug offenses, and a commentary on the sad state of affairs with the children of civil rights families.

Violence Begets Violence in America

So, what do you make of a country where a third grader brings a gun to school to ward off bullies?

In Inkster, Michigan an 8-year old boy brought a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun to his elementary school two days in a row for protection, and to scare off three girls who were bullying him. The weapon was in the boy’s backpack and belonged to a relative. And surely somewhere in this nation of unacceptable levels of violence and gun worship, there are those who think that is a good thing, to arm children to protect themselves. More guns will make us all safer, right?

After the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, America, it seems, is waking up to the need to stem the tide of violence in this country. But there is nothing new here. Whether we look at the shooting sprees and mass murder of young white men in the affluent suburbs or rural areas, or the epidemic of gun violence in communities of color in Chicago and elsewhere, violence is part of the fabric of America. 

From the beginning, this country has used violence to solve its problems. Years of dehumanization of others will do that to you. And this was always the case, from the enslavement of Africans to the genocide of the indigenous population, and from the regime of lynching in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, to the acts of terror waged against civil rights workers, antiwar protestors and organized labor.

Speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin Luther King said “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” Dr. King’s words are even more relevant today than when he spoke over four decades ago.

The U.S. has the most powerful army, accounting for 58 percent of the military expenditures made by the top 10 military powers. With high gun accessibility and the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, America leads in deadly gun violence. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. homicides are committed with guns, and 70 percent of the weapons seized in drug war-ravaged Mexico are traced back to the U.S. Gun proliferation is bolstered by an anachronistic and obsolete Second Amendment, and promoted by gun manufacturers, who bribe lawmakers and hold the public hostage in the process.

Further, America’s love affair with violence extends to its overly-punitive, disproportionate system of justice. With one quarter of the world’s prisoners, the U.S. is the largest jailer in the world. Prisons are the largest repository for the mentally ill, with more people receiving mental health treatment behind bars than in hospitals or treatment centers. As budgets for education and social services are slashed and jobs are scarce, the American way is to lock up and even kill our perceived problems rather than to build up people and rehabilitate them.

Moreover, our continued reliance on the death penalty in the U.S. is a prime example of what happens when a society perpetuates a vicious circle of violence. While capital punishment was long cast aside in Europe,Canada, Australia and elsewhere, the barbaric practice still finds a welcome home in America - at least for now. The U.S. is part of an unsavory alliance of nations who lead the world in executions - including China, Iran,Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. But the winds of change are blowing.

For a nation conditioned by violence, it is hard to break extremely old and equally bad habits. After all, people are comfortable with what they know, comfortable with what they were raised on. America can break the cycle of violence - however normalized it has become - and yet it must if it wants to break from its troubling past and become better than it was.

Slavery, civil rights and gun control

From theGrio:

Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover has created controversy for comments he made on the Second Amendment.  Speaking at a recent event at Texas A&M University, Glover said the purpose of the amendment was to preserve slavery and keep down Native Americans.

“I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms,” Glover said during his campus visit. “The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their land, or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.”

Similarly, responding to the argument that a gun control measure lacks the votes to pass through Congress, Fox News’ Shepard Smith compared guns and slavery.  Smith offered, “If we stuck with the polls, though, we’d have had slavery a lot longer than we did.”

Glover and Smith are not the only people to make a comparison between gun control and social movements such as the struggle to abolish slavery.  For example, others have made references to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  Whether appropriate or not, slavery and civil rights have become part of the debate over gun control.

With regard to slavery, there is evidence that the Founding Fathers had that institution in mind when drafting the Second Amendment.

Go HERE for more

Dr. King's Stance Against the Death Penalty

As the U.S. observes the eighty-third birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this is a perfect time to reflect on the slain civil rights leader, Nobel laureate and death penalty opponent.

Much is known of the Montgomery bus boycott that he led in the 1950s. He fought for economic justice and the plight of the poor, and supported Memphis sanitation workers before he was assassinated. And he opposed the war in Vietnam. But rarely do we hear about his position against capital punishment.

"I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime, rape and murder included," King said. "Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God."

King's words are just as relevant now in the twenty-first century, over four decades after his death.

America has reached a turning point in its application of capital punishment. Last year, Illinois abolished the death penalty over concerns of wrongful convictions and executing the innocent. This came following historic decisions to end the practice in New Mexico and New Jersey. Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber recently placed a moratorium on all executions, stating that the death penalty fails "basic standards of justice."

In addition, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Senate voted to review the death penalty, in light of questions of racial, ethnic and gender bias, high costs, and a lack of a deterrent effect. And a ballot initiative in California this year will allow voters to give an up or down vote to state-sponsored killing.

Across the nation, the death penalty is an emerging civil rights issue. The execution of Troy Davis last September--an African-American man who was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of a white police officer in Savannah, Georgia-- has awoken many to the inherent injustices of capital punishment. That the state could execute a man despite strong evidence of his innocence, including seven of the nine trial witnesses recanting or changing their testimony, was an indication that the death penalty has little to do with guilt or innocence.

Rather, executions in the U.S. are part of a racially-coded system of retribution. Poor people and members of racial minorities are more likely to receive a death sentence, as are those who are charged with murdering a white victim.

In North Carolina, where defendants in cases with white victims are 3.5 times more likely to receive a death sentence, the state legislature voted to repeal the state's Racial Justice Act, which Gov. Bev Perdue signed into law in 2009. The Act allows people facing a death sentence to present statistics and other evidence of racial bias in court. Gov. Bev Perdue vetoed the repeal legislation supported by prosecutors and Republican lawmakers. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP and People of Faith Against the Death Penalty fought the repeal.

State-sponsored executions are part of an American culture of violence. Perhaps it is no accident that the former Confederate states, with their history of dehumanization through slavery and segregation, and the meting out of mob justice through lynching, are among the more enthusiastic practitioners of death.

And the late Coretta Scott King--whose husband and mother-in-law both were assassinated--spoke out against the practice. "An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation," Dr. King's widow proclaimed. "Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder".

Further, the death penalty is an international human rights issue as well. The European Union, which forbids the practice among its member nations, has imposed new restrictions on the importation of anesthetics used to execute people in the U.S.

Sadly, some would dilute Dr. King's human rights message, including his "radical revolution of values," in which he urged America to begin the necessary shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. Meanwhile, the "drum major for justice, peace and righteousness" as the inscription reads on his memorial--stands on the National Mall as a reminder of his dedication to human rights, including opposition to the death penalty.

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy," King said. "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

If America truly wants to follow the teachings of Martin Luther King, we should end all executions now.

Rick Perry compares the civil rights movement to the GOP's fight for lower taxes for the rich

During the week that the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial opens to the public on the National Mall in Washington, Texas Governor Rick Perry finds a way to insult the legacy civil rights movement, and by extension, black people. It's all in the timing.

The newly minted presidential candidate was on the campaign trail in Rock Hill, South Carolina. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the historic Rock Hill lunch counter sit-in, when studentsfrom Friendship Junior College vowed to engage in civil disobedience and go to jail in the process. A reporter mentioned to Perry, "This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Friendship Nine sit-in."

"Listen, America's gone a long way from the standpoint of civil rights and thank God we have," the governor responded.

"We've gone from a country that made great strides in issues of civil rights, I think we all can be proud of that. And as we go forward, America needs to be about freedom," Perry added. "It needs to be about freedom from overtaxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. And Americans, regardless of what their cultural or ethnic background is, they need to know that they can come to America and you got a chance to have any dream come true because the economic climate is gonna be improved."

For the rest of my take on Perry, follow the link at theGrio.

Dr. King Is Needed In China, Though His Work Isn't Done in America

At first glance, Martin Luther King and China don't appear to belong together in the same sentence. For myself -- as a student of Asia, civil rights and international human rights -- the combination makes perfect sense. And if you look more closely, it should become obvious to you as well.

As America awaits the August 28 opening of the King National Memorial in Washington, D.C., this is a perfect time to reflect on the leader's accomplishments, legacy, and commitment to justice, equality and nonviolent social change. And lest we continue to run the risk of turning the man into a two-dimensional cutout stereotype, it is important to remember that the "dreamer" was far more -- a staunch antiwar activist who called for a radical revolution of American values.

A new documentary from award-winning journalist and filmmaker Kevin McKiernan takes a look an effort to bring Dr. King's message to China. The film, Bringing King to China, examines efforts by his daughter, Cáitrín -- who studied and taught in Beijing under a Fulbright after attending Stanford -- to introduce a play about Dr. King to a Chinese audience. The play, called Passages of Martin Luther King, was written by Clayborne Carson, a leading King scholar and Cáitrín's teacher at Stanford. Carson based his play on King's speeches and letters, even love letters from King to his wife.

From the beginning, the film almost begs us to ask the question: What can a twenty-something white woman teach the Chinese about the preeminent African-American civil rights leader? The answer is, apparently a great deal. China, now an emerging superpower and the world's second largest economy after the U.S., was already open to Dr. King's words. Video footage of lynchings and the police brutality of the Jim Crow South showed China what black people were up against. And following King's assassination, Mao Tse Tung gave a speech in Tiananmen Square praising the fallen leader. Some Chinese have tried to compare the two men, however problematic, given Mao's support of violence, and the ruthlessness of the Cultural Revolution.

Today, the communist-turned-hyper-capitalist nation is beating the U.S. at its own game of making money, and may someday eclipse its trading partner and debtor. And yet, while the official line in China is that racism doesn't exist there, the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, Tibetans and other minority groups tells a different story. And the popularity of Darlie or "Black Man Toothpaste," formerly known as Darkie, suggests a little education about black folks wouldn't hurt. Then there's the issue of freedom of speech and political repression in China.

Surprisingly, the play, which was performed by the National Theater Company of China, emerged unscathed from the Chinese government's censors. But that doesn't mean that the participants in the play did not self-censor, or at least second guess themselves and question whether their production would succeed and pass muster. The production marked the first time that a Chinese and African-American cast performed together in China. A Chinese man even played the role of King. And the theater company traveled to the U.S. to visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and learn more about the man and the movement they would so ambitiously undertake to portray.

Bringing King to China is really several stories in one. Aside from chronicling the process of adapting Carson's work for a Chinese audience, the documentary is about bridging cultures. Americans and Chinese need to talk, figure things out and understand each other, much the way that the U.S. and Japan began a similar dialogue decades earlier. As the film pointed out, each culture has its own interpretation of reality. For example, while Americans might have viewed the 1989 image of a Chinese protestor walking in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square as the ultimate form of protest, a Chinese interpretation of that scene may have been one of government self-restraint. The film is also about the complexity of the civil rights movement, and the presence alongside King of important figures such as Stokely Carmichael, who preferred a more militant "black power" approach as an alternative to nonviolent civil disobedience.

But the documentary also tells the story of a father-daughter relationship, as well as the horrors of war. Kevin McKiernan was on assignment in war-torn Iraq in 2006 when Cáitrín mistakenly received news that her father had been killed by a suicide bomber in Northern Iraq. This happened at a time when China began to question America's presence in the Arab nation. The film's focus on Cáitrín's traumatic wartime experience is appropriate for a documentary about Martin Luther King, a pacifist who spoke out against the deadly and atrocious U.S. war in Vietnam.

Four years in the making, Bringing King to China does a laudable job of shedding a new light on the man by introducing him to a new audience. And in the process, it reveals glimmers of hope for the future, even as it exposes the shortcomings of China and the U.S., and the progress that has yet to be made in both countries.

A Chinese crew member in the film suggested that King is needed back in the America. I thought that was a profound statement, perhaps the most poignant throughout the documentary for its truth and clarity. Without question, King's work is undone in the States, and for proof of that one need only look at the protracted nature of King's three evils of racism, militarism and economic exploitation. This country's lingering wars, its coldhearted Tea Party austerity policies, its economic inequality and entrenched corporate power mean that the U.S. has not fully learned the lessons left by the man we will soon memorialize on the National Mall -- with a statue designed by a Chinese sculptor, no less. At the same time, King is needed in China, in Palestine and Israel, and in other places around the world.

The Bishop Has No Clothes

Just about everyone knows about the problems facing Bishop Eddie Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Specifically, there are the four young men who allege that the prominent Atlanta-area pastor coerced them into a sexual relationship, and possibly more waiting in the wings. They claim that Long used his status to seduce them with money, clothes, bling, cars, foreign trips, access to celebrities and the like. The men allege that they called Long "dad" or "daddy," which sounds awfully cultish. One of the plaintiffs even claims that he was 14 when his relationship with Long started, which brings up issues of child abuse and statutory rape.

These accusations will be addressed in court, and who knows, maybe there will be a quiet out-of-court settlement. To be sure, this is not the first religious leader to face accusations of sexual and professional misconduct and abuse of authority, nor the last. Similarly, the Bishop is not the first homophobic preacher to be outed as a gay man.

But Bishop Long's sexual orientation ultimately is not the subject of this commentary, although it provides some valuable context. Now, if these accusations are true, then Bishop Long is at least guilty of hypocrisy and self-hatred. And if the charges are not true, he is still an anti-gay minister who has damaged many people. Either way, he is a prosperity preacher who preys on the black community and shames the legacy of the civil rights movement. And that's most of what we need to know.

When the Southern Poverty Law Center decides to write an intelligence report about you, you know you've done something wrong. SPLC calls Bishop Long "one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement." In one sermon, he says to gays and lesbians, "God says you deserve death!" The message of "hate the sin and the sinner" are strong words in a religion that is supposed to teach love, healing and redemption.

Long believes that homosexuality is spiritual abortion, "a manifestation of a fallen man." He believes that if black gays and lesbians feel alienated and abandoned by the black church, the problem is not intolerance against them but their own sins. But before these people go to Hell as he contends they are, Long is trying to cure gays and lesbians (except himself, we can assume). And his church bookstore sells the works of authors such as the homophobic James Dobson of Focus on the Family -- no friend of the black community.

And Long's misappropriation of the King legacy is shameful. Coretta Scott King's funeral was held at New Birth in 2006 rather than at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King family's church. Civil rights giants Harry Belafonte and then-NAACP-chair Julian Bond were so mortified by this fact that they boycotted the funeral. After all, Mrs. King was a supporter of gay marriage, and she called it a civil rights issue. The late Yolanda King, the oldest child, took after her mother in that regard, but Bernice King, the youngest child in the King family, called Long her "new father" and symbolically passed a torch to him.

To add to the insult, Bernice King and Long participated in a march to Dr. King's gravesite to support a national constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. In 2004, Long and others successfully pushed for a similar amendment to the Georgia state constitution. And it should be noted that Alveda King, Dr. King's niece, is herself a homophobic minister who exploited her uncle's name at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, an event replete with aggrieved white supremacists, Obama-haters and gun-enthusiasts. "Homosexuality cannot be elevated to the civil rights issue," Alveda King said in a 1998 speech. "The civil rights movement was born from the Bible. God hates homosexuality."

Bishop Eddie Long is a prosperity-oriented minister, adhering to a theology that essentially says God will financially hook up the believers. Some would call it a false gospel, given Jesus' targeting of the money changers, and his proclamation that it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Others would call it pimping.

Long's New Birth megachurch has a membership of about 25,000 and sits on 240 acres in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, Georgia. The nonprofit religious "charity" he started in 1997 has served him well -- a $1.4-million, 20-acre home with nine bathrooms, a $350,000 Bentley, and a $3 million salary over three years, not to mention all of the expensive jewelry. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) launched an investigation into the finances and tax-exempt status of six megachurches, including New Birth, and Creflo Dollar's World Changers International Church. Due to the recession, New Birth had to cut back on its $250,000 Easter Sunday service last year, and that is not a misprint. Tithes and membership dropped 20 percent, given that it is hard to be about prosperity when you are poor and hurting, and black folks have been hit harder than most in this recession.

And as Wall Street bankers, megachurch preachers and other prosperity pimps live like lottery winners, people in America are suffering. The Census Bureau recently reported that poverty is higher than it was 10 years ago, with nearly 15 percent of Americans in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has tripled in three decades, and is the highest it has been since the 1920s. Meanwhile, unemployment is entrenched and not going anywhere anytime soon.

Surely, Bishop Long and his supporters would maintain that his reputation is being dragged through the mud. But his reputation was already muddied via his homophobia and corrupt bling theology. Rather, Long should worry far more about what Dr. King would say about him.

Although King fought against and even disobeyed unjust laws, Long supports them. Dr. King decried the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism, and called for a radical revolution of values, from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. Figures such as King and Malcolm X walked the talk by fighting for the people -- and for causes greater than their personal bank account -- through great personal sacrifice and a modest existence. Remember that Dr. King donated all of his $54,000 Nobel Peace Prize money to the civil rights movement. I dare say it would be hard to find many leaders today -- black or otherwise -- who would follow in the footsteps of this great man. How many of them would lift a finger to help the downtrodden?

Meanwhile, Bishop Eddie Long just wants to get paid and beat the case.

What In The Sam Hill Is Wrong With Arizona?

Let's start out by saying that Arizona's new anti-immigrant law is unconstitutional and cannot stand in any reasonable society. The worst in the nation, the law allows police to stop anyone suspected of being undocumented, and demand proof of citizenship. Those unable to produce documents showing they are "legal" can be arrested, fined $2,500 and locked up for up to 6 months. The law makes it a crime under state law to be in the U.S. illegally, whatever illegal means.

It is a wretched and regressive piece of legislation, to be sure, in a state that will become majority of color in ten to fifteen years, and in a nation that is browning by the day. After all, the reality that a majority of the babies born in this nation will soon be of a darker hue unsettles some people.

No doubt, Gov. Jan Brewer has scored some points among the shrinking base that remains the party faithful, not to mention the anti-immigrant hate groups such as the nativist Minutemen that harass and beat "suspected" immigrants, a.k.a. Latinos. Just looking at it from a purely common sense point of view, it is utter political suicide to spit in the face of a soon-to-be majority of your state, in order to garner the support of an increasingly unhinged, extremist base. And yet, apparently this is what it takes to shine in the GOP these days.

The governor has assured us that there will be no racial profiling permitted under this law. That assertion is utter foolishness. This law is nothing more and nothing less than an expression of hate, a codification of xenophobia and the legalization of racial profiling. Taking it a step further, this is the criminalization of Latinos and presumed Latinos. To take the racial profiling out of a racial profiling law is to accomplish the impossible. That's like trying to take the racial profiling out of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, or extract the "unequal" from Jim Crow laws. That's the whole point of it, after all. You can't have it both ways when you dabble in racist policies. Someone, apparently a supporter of the new law, decorated the Arizona capitol steps with a swastika made of refried beans. And South Carolina's lieutenant governor blamed a lazy workforce for allowing illegal immigrants to thrive in his state. That is what you'd expect in this environment. This is what we're dealing here.

I don't know what it is exactly about Arizona, but I do know that the state needs to be boycotted like a Montgomery bus. That state must realize that you cannot treat any group of people as lesser than the rest, nor can you disrespect the country's largest minority group and expect to emerge unscathed. There must be a price to pay this time, and what better place to start than with the Arizona economy? When an Arizona lawmaker wants to boycott his own state, you know how bad it is.

I had to google my brain to retrieve some information on another controversial, racially-tinged episode in Arizona political history. I came up with the 1980s and the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday. In 1987, then-newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham - who defended his use of the term "pickaninnies" for blacks - rescinded the King holiday in Arizona. John McCain, who himself had voted against the holiday in 1983, defended the governor's decision to rescind the holiday on the grounds that it was an imposition on states' rights. Not unlike today with his support of the horrid immigration law, McCain was dabbling in racial politics and shoring up his mavericky rightwing bonafides.

I wonder what Dr. King would have said about Arizona's racial profiling law. Certainly, he would have called it an unjust law, one which is "out of harmony with the moral law," and "degrades human personality". As King articulated in Letter from Birmingham Jail, "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"

And indeed, the Arizona law is an unjust law not even worth the paper on which it was written. Certainly, this is not the first anti-immigration law, and sadly it likely won't be the last, in this nation with a long history of thriving on both immigrants and jingoism. But we must not participate in the madness, and we must not let the promulgators of such junk think they can get away with it.

America Needs A True Revolution Of Values

As you probably heard, the Values Voters Summit was recently held in Washington, DC. What exactly is a values voter, and who exactly decides on the definition of a values voter?

In the Orwellian world of conservative-Republican-Christian-fringe doublespeak, the goal is to confuse, obfuscate, distort and deceive. Concepts are intentionally misnamed to suggest a completely opposite meaning. So, universal health care is characterized as “fascism”. Disdain for women’s reproductive rights is called “pro-life”. Denial of rights to same-sex couples becomes “the protection of marriage”. And rejection of evolution and the teaching of creationism in public schools fall under “religious liberty”. Given these twisted definitions of reality coming from the Far Right, it stands to reason that I am skeptical of their definition of values - presumably “family” values - or values voters for that matter.

The list of confirmed and invited guest speakers at the summit reads like a who’s who of the usual tea partying suspects: opportunistic, empty-suit G.O.P. politicians, and washed-up and recycled “rising stars” holding their finger to the wind; secessionist sympathizers and bellicose, blowhard news entertainers; immigrant haters and Obama haters; homophobic ex-beauty pageant contestants and the Bible-thumping, self-righteous moralizers and demonizers, and the like.

And who made Carrie Prejean and Mike Huckabee the experts on values? What can Sen. Jim DeMint, Bill O’Reilly or Rep. Michele Bachmann teach me on the subject of values, or anything of any importance for that matter? I’m not sure. I shall search elsewhere for my values, thank you very much.

One person I will consult is Martin Luther King. The angry mobs of his day labeled him a communist. He talked about the need for a revolution of values. Specifically, he said:

…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

In today’s post-bubble reality called the Great Recession, Dr. King’s words resonate more than ever. As a rabbi reminded me recently in her Rosh Hashanah sermon, these days we have been forced to live with less, to make our lives fuller with less. For many Americans, it was a summer of stay-at-home vacations. People now have to dig deep within, to give more of themselves to their communities and the institutions that matter to them.

Yet during the times of plenty, although many more people were happy, empty values were allowed to thrive. Before the recession hit, Gordon Gekko and his philosophy of “greed is good” were provided a safe haven. The people who could steal the most were hailed as heroes - the best and the brightest, standard-bearers of the American Dream, the people we wanted to become. And surely, someone out there believed that they needed a fifth mansion, yacht or car to make them even happier than their first four.

Yet, in those times of empty economic calories, of massive profits extracted through paper shuffling and smoke and mirrors, there were multitudes who did not share in the wealth. These silent suffering people had been rendered invisible. The prevailing values had dictated that the wealthy few should take all of the economic spoils. The poor are as they always have been - poor and becoming even poorer. And the middle class is, at best, like the proverbial hamster on the treadmill, spinning wheels yet gaining no ground. In a worst case scenario, the people in the middle are joining the ranks of the poor, and there is no middle left.

In a society that values property rights over people, families are thrown into the streets for the sake of predatory corporate profit. Everyday people must choose between paying for food, rent and health care. The sick are allowed to die because they could not afford to get sick in the first place. Young people are saddled with obscene levels of college debt, yet cannot find jobs to pay off their mortgage-sized tuition loans.

Then there’s the environment. After thousands of years of respecting the land and acting in concert with it, something has gone awry. A few weeks ago I was invited to attend the International Energy Conference at the United Nations. There was a lot of good values talk there - about green jobs, the need for sustainable sources of energy, and empowering poor communities and developing nations through renewable energy technologies. The production-consumption model of economic growth has run its course. Taking, making and wasting for the needs of 1 billion people - at the expense of the remaining 5 billion - has damaged the Earth’s ecosystems, depleted its natural resources, and fueled political instability around the globe. “Oh, mercy mercy me. Oh, things ain’t what they used to be” as Marvin Gaye used to sing. “Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas. Fish full of mercury.”

I can guarantee that the participants in the Values Voters Summit did not hold these family values in high regard--of social, economic or environmental justice -- even though they claim to be religious and know God personally.

Apparently, there are many types of values out there, or at least they are packaged and promoted as such. To be sure, no one should claim a monopoly on them. But in the end, we must decide which values are meaningful to us, and which values should guide our government and our society. We can find values anywhere, including a down-and-dirty, anti-Obama tea party, or at the white-collar, business suit version that just took place in Washington. That does not mean we want to claim them as our own.

(From BlackCommentator.com.)

David speaks about Martin Luther King on "Make It Plain" with Mark Thompson

On January 22, 2009 I was a guest on Mark Thompson's show "Make It Plain" on Sirius Radio channel 146.  I discussed my article in BlackCommentator.com, The World Needs Dr. King More Than Ever.  Click here to listen to the show.

An Inaugural Poem

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
January 23, 2009

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that's what they tell me.

The greatest country?
Now, exactly what yardstick were you using just now?
Such a bold statement with such paltry evidence!
Sounds like the words of someone who hasn’t been anywhere,
Yet those who have lived, traveled and studied
Beyond these shores know better than that.

America. This is the home of the potholes,
Of the crumbling roads and falling bridges,
Of the levees made of duct tape, Lego bricks and popsicle sticks.
Children go to bed hungry in the land of plenty,
Because their parents weren’t smart enough to have been born rich,
And there are few jobs to be had, but plenty of prison beds to fill.

You see, I live in the land that values property rights over human rights,
Where people can’t afford to live and can’t afford to get ill,
And you’re out of luck if the plant closed,
And the sheriff is knocking on the door of your soon-to-be foreclosed life.

But we got your check if you’re a billionaire in need of a Wall Street bailout,
To maintain the lifestyle to which you are accustomed,
Complete with corporate jets and golden parachutes,
And foxhunting retreats in the English countryside.

And here’s some more money if you already have more money than you need,
Or to make more stuff that nobody wants to buy,
Or to start a war to jack some oil,
Or if you want to shoot some Native American, I mean Vietnamese,
I mean Iraqi children,
Or bomb some families in Gaza,
Oh my bad, I forgot all those people are “terrorists.”

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Free market economics,
A dinosaur if ever there was one,
About to go the way of the Soviet Union,
And the Berlin Wall and Apartheid,
And the Edsel and the Pinto,
And the folks who brought you the Edsel and the Pinto.

A big failure, to be sure,
Bankrupt as the nation that swore by it,
Yet the system worked just as the manufacturer intended,
For the benefit of the few.
“The market, unfettered, can do no wrong,” they proclaimed,
And now in this big Ponzi scheme called American capitalism,
They have all of us yelling “We was robbed!”
Call it the free market, laissez-faire or supply-side economics,
Call it the Invisible Hand, or trickle down, or trickle on,
Or the ownership society,
Or just call it a hustle.

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Now, we can’t go any further without mentioning Number Forty-Three,
A.k.a. The Decider,
A.k.a. George W. Palin,
The man who could dodge a flying shoe but will try to dodge history,
And rewrite history,
And will do so in vain.
The man who would make Nero proud,
As he fiddled a tune of indifference while NOLA drowned,
And read a children’s book during Armageddon,
On the day that New York burned.

But that’s all fine, don’t you worry,
Number Forty-Three is God’s President, we all know it’s true,
Taking his orders from the Good Lord Jesus Christ himself.
And America is God’s country, so we’re all set.
So step up Mr. Preacher Man, come feed at the trough,
Let’s get you some of this faith-based hush money.

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Never was I one to be proud of this or any other country,
As patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
But I see a game changer here,
You’ve given me something to work with,
And this is as good a time as any to break old habits.
They always asked the Black man to clean up the mess,
But never was that mess the entire country,
Or the whole world for that matter.
Now, these are the things of which progress is made…

As for our adversaries,
Even a deck full of race cards wouldn’t work this time,
No longer enough Southerners for a good ol’ Southern strategy,
Or at least that type of Southerner,
The type that would protect the women and children from the boogeyman.

Yes, people are wising up, and America is browning up.
Race is but a social construct,
Skin-tone solidarity will get you but so far,
It didn’t get some people very far, so far,
And it even set them back a bit,
When they realized that being White and angry—
Angry at the gays, and at the immigrants,
At the Latinos, the Muslims, the Arabs—
Just isn’t enough to pay the bills.
And since we’re all in this together,
Might as well love the one you’re with.

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

In forty years we’ve gone from four little Black girls
Dead in a Birmingham church,
To two little Black girls living in the White House,
Getting dibs on Lincoln’s desk.
A little sister’s gotta study somewhere.
Now that’s some history right there,
And daddy’s gonna borrow Abe’s Bible for the big day.

Just a few generations separated they are
From bondage in South Carolina,
From the rice plantations of the Gullah lowcountry.
Who would have thought!

But let us not forget what brought us to this place,
And the size of the mess before us.
We’ve had some bad times around here, to be sure,
And now we got some hope and the promise of change,
But it will get worse before it gets better,
You’d better believe it, my fellow prisoners.

So let us spill our cups for those who didn’t make it,
The 2,000 souls in New Orleans who drowned over a heckuva job,
And the 4,000 soldiers who died over foolishness and lies,
Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,
Unwilling subjects of some neocon’s mad experiment,
And don’t forget the ones who were kidnapped, tortured and brutalized.

America, are you the greatest country in the world?
Well, now is the time to prove it to me.
Now is the time to put people ahead of balance sheets, bottom lines and profit statements.
Let’s make it real, in words and in deeds,
The way Dr. King said it should be.

The World Needs Dr. King Now More Than Ever

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
January 15, 2009

On this 80th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as I look at the state of human rights in the world I ask myself, “What would Dr. King do?”

Look at the situation in the Mideast, particularly the current bloodshed in Gaza. These attacks, a violation of international humanitarian law, can be described most charitably as a disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defense Forces. Some have referred to this indiscriminate bombing of Gaza as a case of collective punishment, with the dehumanizing legacy of the occupation as the obvious backdrop.

As Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily newspaper noted, Israel’s military commander is now inclined “to kill as many as possible,” adding that “The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as ‘exercising caution’: the frightening balance of blood - about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.”

Such are the consequences when the drums of war drown out the voices of peace.

Let me take you to Philadelphia: Rabbi Linda Holtzman represents the best of Dr. King’s philosophy of standing up against injustice and for the rights of all people, particularly when it is unpopular to do so. Recently, she participated in a protest in front of the Israeli consulate. Rabbi Linda, as we affectionately call her, has been a spiritual advisor to my family. She was there for us when my son Ezra Malik was buried, when we sent him off, wrapped in a traditional shroud, to join his ancestors.

And she went to the protest, guided by her convictions, because the attacks in Gaza sickened her, and she could not tolerate what was going on there. To be sure, such a stance does not make Rabbi Linda very popular in some circles. Yet, it is because she exemplifies the teachings of Dr. King that she is one of my heroes.

Drum Major Instinct

As for Dr. King’s antiwar stance, we need not speculate, because he was very clear on the matter. As a key spokesperson for the human condition, King had no choice. On February 4, 1968, only two months before his assassination, Martin Luther King gave a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church titled, “The Drum Major Instinct,” which dealt with the propensity of human beings to want to be superior to others. The concept is important because it linked King’s condemnation of racism, economic exploitation and militarism, the “triple evils that are interrelated.” King, after all, well understood the universality and the interconnected nature of these three forms of oppression, that in order to eliminate one of them, it was necessary to eliminate them all. “And think of what has happened in history as a result of this perverted use of the drum major instinct,” King said. “It has led to the most tragic prejudice, the most tragic expressions of man’s inhumanity to man.”

For King, the world was being led down a suicidal path due to the drum major instinct, and the contest between nations for world supremacy:

“But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. ‘I must be first.’ ‘I must be supreme.’ ‘Our nation must rule the world.’ And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.

God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.”

For the civil rights leader who stood true to the gospel of social justice, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was thrust onto the international stage as a prominent human rights figure, his opposition to war was a natural progression from his platform on racial segregation. He remembered Dante’s admonition that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a moment of moral crisis seek to maintain their neutrality.”

Letter From Birmingham Jail

And today, when many people, particularly religious leaders, remain silent in the midst of war, oppression, killing and other injustices, I am also reminded of Dr. King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail. King had special criticism reserved for the Southern White moderates who may have disapproved of segregation and the attendant racist policies and brutal treatment of Negroes, yet did or said nothing out of fear of retaliation or social ostracism.

He was particularly disappointed with the White clergy, who disapproved of his desegregation efforts as “unwise and untimely,” and whose otherworldly approach to religion precluded them from taking any action regarding social problems. Under their conservative brand of Christianity, order was (and still is) given preference over justice and freedom. “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro,” King said, “I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” Sadly, conservative Christianity made many White religious leaders reluctant to acknowledge the equality of humankind under society and the law, just as all people were supposedly equal before God in the spiritual sense.

Civil Disobedience and Unjust Laws

Martin Luther King led a movement which led to the writing of new laws such as the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. These laws were written in the blood of those demonstrators who risked, and at times gave, their lives for social justice. Ironically, yet appropriately, Dr. King’s achievements came not merely by challenging unjust and immoral segregation laws, but through disobeying such laws.

His attitudes toward immoral laws were rooted in his religious beliefs, and out of a concern for the effects of the oppressive laws on the oppressed. In King’s eyes, segregation was unacceptable because it denied blacks their self-respect. The segregation laws assigned a false badge of inferiority to African Americans and a false badge of superiority to whites. Laws which degrade human personality, in King’s view, are unjust.

The man who broke unjust laws was responsible for the creation of new laws. To that end, Dr. King demonstrated the true potency of nonviolent resistance. “We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us,” he said. “We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights.”

China is one country in desperate need of a Kingian-style movement of civil disobedience. On the one hand, that nation’s rate of economic growth has been stunning by any measure. Until the global economic crisis, this world economic power was bankrolling America by holding $1 trillion in U.S. debt.

On the other hand, the 2008 Beijing Olympics proved that police states put on the best shows. While they do everything to try to prove to you how great and perfect they are, for all of their ostentatious displays, never can they hide the truth.

The world gave China - this Communist totalitarian state turned hypercapitalist totalitarian state – a big huge pass by allowing it to conduct business as usual throughout the Olympics. And in the process, the Chinese government was able to show its people that the world respected it, and that it could do what it wanted to them with impunity.

So during the Olympics coverage, one could learn where to find the best Peking Duck in Beijing, or hear about the hottest fashions in China, or admire that nation’s glitzy, ultramodern, high-tech capital city. The biggest scandals reported were the fake, computer enhanced fireworks display during the opening ceremonies, the allegedly underaged gymnasts, and the lipsynching little girl who replaced a singer judged not cute enough for display at the Olympics.

But the world heard nothing about China’s arbitrary laws and unjust punishments. China promised to allow permits to protesters during the Olympics, yet subsequently sentenced two elderly Chinese women to “re-education through labour” for applying for such a permit.

We heard nothing of China’s economic relationship with Sudan’s genocidal regime. No word about China’s oppression of minority groups, suppression of religious freedom, or its policy of cultural genocide in Tibet. No word about forced labor and torture, a socio-economic apartheid system for rural areas, the assaults on freedom of speech, the arrests of journalists, and the imprisonment of critics of the government.

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Kevin McKiernan is in the post-production stages of a film called Bringing King To China. The documentary focuses on a groundbreaking play in China about Dr. King, and a young American woman’s quest to introduce Chinese audiences to Dr. King’s message of universal rights, peace and nonviolent struggle. Perhaps a cross-cultural dialogue about the man’s philosophy could provide the spark that will transform Beijing the way it transformed Birmingham. Time will tell.

But this is certain: the world needs Dr. King more than ever, and although he is no longer with us physically, he has provided us with a blueprint for international peace that will forever endure…if we allow it.

Republicans Would Chisel the Anger Out of Dr. King’s Face

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
June 12, 2008

It is true that the dead are unable to defend their reputation. Such is the case with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With four decades since his assassination, it is very easy for society to lose sight of the man’s philosophy and his great works. Just to take this a step further, there is a not-so-subtle attempt by conservatives to recast Dr. King either as a mild-mannered and milquetoast individual, obsequious and not easily roused, or as a conservative who, if alive today, would side with the interests he railed against in the 1950s and 1960s.

One example of these efforts is the controversy surrounding the King memorial. Chinese sculptor Lei Yixing has been commissioned to render a 28-foot sculpture of King, carved from Chinese granite, the cornerstone of the $100 million King memorial in Washington, DC.

Frankly, Lei’s proposed likeness of King is a bad piece of work, bad meaning good. King stands erect, back not bent, with a stern face and his arms crossed.

But the United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must give final approval of every facet of the memorial, said in a letter that the statue made Dr. King look “confrontational,” that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed sculpture recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.” The Commission, a federal body that supposedly provides “expert advice” on issues of design and aesthetics in the nation’s capital, “consists of seven ‘well qualified judges of the fine arts’ who are appointed by the President [in this case, that would be Bush] and serve for a term of four years.”

How deviously ironic that the Commission would show concern that a sculpture of King is too confrontational, too political, too angry. King was a man who confronted the three-headed beast of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism, from the unjust laws of Jim Crow segregation, to the White clergy in Birmingham who told him to wait, to the injustice faced by Memphis sanitation workers, to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, and was hunted by the government and gunned down in the process. Let us remember that J. Edgar Hoover called King “the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate.”

Understandably, the artist is aggravated the Commission has asked him to alter King‘s appearance (a depiction they initially voted for unanimously) so that he doesn’t seem to have so much on his mind.

Meanwhile, the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) has kicked off a campaign to place billboards across the country that read “Martin Luther King Jr. was a REPUBLICAN.” One such billboard was placed off exit 145 of I-26 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. According to Frances Rice, who founded the NBRA in 2005, the association “is dedicated to promoting the traditional values of the black community which are in concert with the core Republican Party philosophy of strong families, personal responsibility, quality education and equal opportunities for all.” Further, according to Rice, “Our vision is to help black Americans become power players in the political arena and move into our ownership society, emphasizing small business and home ownership.”

The problem with the NBRA’s argument regarding King is that it is intellectually disingenuous and lacking in historical context. You get the sense that there are people operating the controls, the Republican National Committee perhaps, who hope you don’t see them behind the curtain. On its website, the NBRA states that “It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.”

Proclaiming that King was a Republican is not so outlandish. Frederick Douglass was a Republican, as were the 22 Black members of Congress (two senators, including Blanch Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, a former slave, and 20 representatives, including John R. Lynch, who was speaker of the Mississippi House before coming to Washington) and one Black governor (Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback of Louisiana) who served during Reconstruction. The Republican Party also claimed Black lieutenant governors, a secretary of state, judges, state treasurers, superintendents of education, mayors and generals of state militias.

The Radical Republicans who were responsible for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other post-Civil War legislation, represented a brief glorious period for the Republican Party, but that was a long time ago. The party of Lincoln is not the party of the Bush-Cheney-Rove criminal enterprise. And in the twentieth century, the Republican Party that had a vibrant and viable liberal wing in the form of Sen. Jacob Javits and Mayor John Lindsay of New York, of Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Arthur Fletcher, the “father of affirmative action,” is no more, and has not existed for some time. With no diversity on the national scene, the GOP can offer up only a paltry few prominent faces of color these days, token faces such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, an Indian American.

To be sure, the Democrats must answer for their long history of racism, and even today, the 2008 presidential primaries revealed the problem of racial division that won’t go away. The NBRA likes to argue that “the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism.” But this analysis suffers from historical amnesia.

In its narrative, the NBRA conveniently omits the role of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in steering White segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and winning elections by appealing to White fears of African Americans. It started with Nixon, following Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, which ensured a massive loss of White Southern support for the Democrats. And the Southern Strategy was perfected by Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney - two Jews and a Black - were murdered by domestic terrorists in 1964.

As the now-deceased Republican strategist Lee Atwater said in 1981, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

The Southern Strategy has had a long run in American politics, and it may very well fail miserably in the midst of an Obama candidacy. And yet, this is the last idea the Republicans have left, aside from permanent war, tax cuts, and ending abortion and gay marriage.

The Republican brand, badly damaged, would be taken off the shelves if it were pet food. In this season of discontent, Americans are in dire straits and the economy is ready to jump off the deep end. Foreclosures and food stamps abound. It would seem that eight years of Republican rule have ruined the nation so badly that more parlor tricks, more bait and switch, more smoke and mirrors will not work this time.

McCain, the GOP standard bearer, has the unenviable task of attempting to distance himself from the most unpopular president in American history, a president whose policies are in line with his own. His party, like America’s two-party system as a whole, is a dinosaur. And it faces well-deserved extinction by clinging to anti-immigrant fervor at a time of changing demographics; anti-Muslim sentiment when the U.S. needs to reach out to the rest of the world; robber baron economics which is exacerbating the gap between rich and poor; the elimination of civil liberties ostensibly to make us free, and an unjust and immoral war in Iraq which is bankrupting the nation and sucking the life out of essential social programs.

Uninspiring, stiff and crotchety, McCain is, according to David Letterman, “the guy at the hardware store who makes the keys.” Unable to energize even his own base, McCain faces predictions that as many as 40 percent of evangelicals will support Obama in the general election. With a 50-state strategy and a massive voter registration drive, the Obama train hopes to change the electoral map and make it rain blue in the red states.

So, in light of this, the NBRA hopes for a McCain victory by siphoning off 25 percent of the Black vote in the 2008 election. A quixotic endeavor at best, such a feat would not have been possible even when the Democrats ran boring wooden candidates for president every four years. Their plan for achieving this - not unlike the conservatives who would eliminate affirmative action on the grounds that King wanted a “colorblind” society - is cynically to portray Dr. King as someone who had much in common with today’s atrociously regressive and bigoted Republican Party. Moreover, McCain voted against the King national holiday.

Like Bush’s art critics, expert lackeys who would use a chisel to remove all the anger from Dr. King’s face, it simply won’t work.