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We celebrate the March on Washington. Roger Simon, a veteran of the civil rights brigades of the 60′s says it is time to end the movement.
End the civil rights movement. Now. Shoot the sucker and put it (and us) out of its misery.
It’s a relic of the 1960s about as relevant as bell bottom trousers.
When we are debating Oprah Winfrey’s right to buy a thirty-five thousand dollar purse or whether Barack Obama’s dog should be flown to Martha’s Vineyard in the canine’s own private state-of-the art military transport, you know it’s finished. Or should be.
It’s also time for the NAACP and the Black Caucus to close up shop. They are dinosaurs from another era, making life miserable for the very people they are intended to help.
Black unemployment is at record levels during the administration of the first black president and that horrible situation is aided and abetted by those organizations. They are determined to preserve the image of black people as victims — an insulting self-fulfilling prophecy. What was once a solution has become the problem.
Affirmative action should also be flushed down the toilet with the civil rights movement. …
… And when we discuss Oprah, tell it like it really is — she’s a celebrity who has been extremely rich and famous for decades and has almost no idea what it’s really like to be a shopgirl in Zurich or anywhere else.
Her story is one of Marie Antoinette, not Rosa Parks.
And that’s the point. Rosa Parks was a very brave woman who made a tremendous contribution to our country — in 1955! That’s almost sixty years ago. Stop this nostalgia for racism. Stop playing the race card. Switch to Old Maid — or rummy. End the civil rights movement. We should all honor Rosa Parks’ great contribution by moving on.
More proof of Harry Truman’s saying the only thing new is history you don’t know. Paul Mirengoff takes a look at how the “I have a dream” speech was reported. Would you believe it was almost ignored in the WaPo the next day?
With the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march on Washington fast approaching, I had intended to check old newspapers at the Library of Congress to see how the mainstream reported the march. I confess to having an ulterior motive: I participated in that march and wanted to test the view, now a commonplace, that the media never gets right a story about which one has no personal knowledge.
Unfortunately, veteran Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser has beaten me to the punch. Not only that, he shows that the Post missed the boat to a degree that I would not have imagined possible.
Kaiser writes:
‘The main event that day was what we now call the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most important speeches in U.S. history. But on the day it was given, The Post didn’t think so. We nearly failed to mention it at all. . . .[The] lead story, which began under a banner headline on the front page and summarized the events of the day, did not mention King’s name or his speech. . . .
In that paper of Aug. 29, 1963, The Post published two dozen stories about the march. Every one missed the importance of King’s address. The words “I have a dream” appeared in only one, a wrap-up of the day’s rhetoric on Page A15 — in the fifth paragraph. We also printed brief excerpts from the speeches, but the three paragraphs chosen from King’s speech did not include “I have a dream.” ‘ …
Commentary has reminiscences from Joshua Muravchik who was there. This is long, because he covers the highlights of decades of civil rights struggles.
On August 28, 1963, a quarter million Americans staged the most important demonstration in our nation’s history. They marched from the WashingtonMonument to the Lincoln Memorial in what is now remembered primarily as the setting for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was much more than that. The speech was epochal precisely because the event culminated the civil-rights “revolution” that put an end to the dark era of racial segregation and open discrimination.
Growing up in an activist household, I was, although just shy of 16, already a seasoned protester, having for example first seen Washington when my parents took me to the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools, a prequel to the 1963 march. Thanks to being in the right place at the right time, I now found myself in the role of coordinator of two old yellow school buses bringing marchers from Harlem to Washington. As we prepared for the nighttime drive to the capital, the sense of anticipation in the air along 125th Street was not limited to those who would make the journey. In a late-night drugstore, I assembled the contents of a first-aid kit for each bus, and when I told the clerks it was for the march, they cheered and refused to accept payment.
A checklist for the kits had been issued by the march’s organizers, who seemed to have thought of everything even though there was no template for a mobilization on this scale. In addition to first aid, there was another checklist for the contents of box lunches and dinners that participants were told to bring. Alcohol was banned, as were children younger than 14. Large numbers of portable toilets were rented and so was the best available sound system. Bayard Rustin, the lead organizer, was determined to ensure that everyone could hear the speeches and singers so no one would grow restless. Members of the Guardians, a fraternal order of New York City’s black police officers, were enlisted to provide volunteer crowd control without the help of weapons or uniforms.
The columnist Mary McGrory quipped that it was “the most elaborately nurse-maided demonstration of grievance ever held.” The aim of these preparations was to confound dire predictions that such a gathering would devolve into violence. Weeks later, I heard Rustin chortle at another civil-rights rally: “No one believed we could bring all those Negroes to D.C. without someone getting cut.” For that reason, President John F. Kennedy had tried to dissuade the conveners, fearing that any incidents would jeopardize the civil-rights bill he had sponsored. After Kennedy’s failure to dissuade the march organizers, members of his administration ghostwrote letters to them from liberal senators warning of difficulties. A Gallup poll showed that most Americans had heard of plans for the march and disapproved of it by a 3:1 ratio. …
… The dignity of participants, two-thirds black, one-third white, according to a sample counted by the Washington Post, was matched by the rhetoric from the podium, which resonated with patriotism and measured moral indignation. A. Philip Randolph opened the program by proclaiming: “We are not a pressure group…we are not a mob. We are the advance guard of a massive moral revolution.” Touching on the most controversial part of the civil-rights bill, he said simply and tellingly: “Property rights [cannot] include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin.” The NAACP’s leader, Roy Wilkins, displayed an eloquence belying his known preference for legal briefs over soapbox oratory, decrying racial discrimination as a “sickness which threaten[s] to erode…the liberty of the individual, which is the hallmark of our country among the nations of the earth.” And King’s peroration invoked “the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.’”
When John Lewis, the 23-year-old leader of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or “snick”) prepared a speech of more radical tenor—rejecting Kennedy’s bill for being too modest and threatening a “nonviolent” reprise of Sherman’s March through the South—the other leaders told him that he would not be allowed to speak unless he moderated those words. The specter of a shrill and perhaps violent black militancy that the leaders believed would harm the cause was already in the air. King addressed it directly in his speech, inveighing: “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”
But King did not fear Lewis as much as the spirit that was personified in Malcolm X. The Black Muslim rabble-rouser camped out in the lobby of the Statler Hilton, where the leaders were staying and the journalists were swarming, and offered up sound bites about the “farce on Washington.” “While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare,” he declaimed. “The Negroes spent a lot of money, had a good time, and enjoyed a real circus….Now that it is all over, they are still jobless, homeless, and landless, so what did it accomplish?”
In fact, it accomplished a lot. …
… The march was commemorated this August 24 by another march that did more to remind us of the eventual sad decay of the movement than of its glorious apogee. It was convened and led by Al Sharpton, who uses the title “Reverend” before his name although he never attended divinity school. Sharpton came into prominence in 1988 as the advocate of Tawana Brawley, a teenaged black girl who claimed to have been kidnapped and raped by white men, when in fact she was merely afraid to go home to her stepfather, a convicted killer. The man who served as Sharpton’s assistant during the first four months of the affair later quoted Sharpton as exulting, “We beat this, we will be the biggest niggers in New York.” Eventually, a jury found Sharpton guilty of having defamed one of the accused white men, awarding substantial damages. Since then, Sharpton has made a career as what black columnist Jonathan Capehart calls a “racial ambulance chaser,” highlighted by a campaign against a white store owner in Harlem that culminated in an arson attack in which eight died. Although he denies any responsibility for violence, the formal slogan of Sharpton’s National Action Network is menacing: “No justice, no peace.” Sharpton’s agenda has never been difficult to discern. NAN’s homepage is graced with a photo of King, one of President Barack Obama, one of Trayvon Martin, and three of “Reverend Al.” I have said that the Big Six were men who would never glorify themselves on the backs of their people; Sharpton, in contrast, never passes up an opportunity to do so. Nonetheless, the various reputable civil-rights groups, or rather their empty shells, as well as some labor unions and other organizations, fell in line behind Sharpton’s call.
Thus continues the perverse appropriation of the memory of one of the greatest moments in American history—itself the culmination of one of the greatest episodes—when hundreds of thousands of black and white citizens came together peacefully and in dignity and succeeded in putting an end to the worst evil besides slavery that has ever blighted our land.
For a change of pace, would you believe this has been the mildest summer in a century? Real Science has the story.
This summer, the US has experienced the fewest number of 100 degree readings in a century. The five hottest summers (1936, 1934, 1954, 1980 and 1930) all occurred with CO2 below 350 PPM.
CO2 went over 400 PPM this year, indicating that heatwaves and CO2 have nothing to do with each other. Scientists who claim otherwise are either incompetent, criminal, or both.