Right wing talk show host Glenn Beck and his Tea Party disciples (who had never seen anything wrong with government, not even the George W. Bush administration, until America elected its first Black President Barack Obama) plan a “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, Aug. 28.
It is not a mistake that Beck and his team carefully chose this date because it commemorates exactly the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the historic “I Have a Dream” speech, at the Lincoln Memorial.
It is almost laughable, yet tragic, that Beck would choose this date to basically desecrate King’s legacy with divisive ideas that are out of sync with the vision of the Civil Rights Movement. Lest we forget, Beck called King “a radical socialist” and even questioned the validity of the annual King holiday. He called President Obama “a racist with a deep-seated hatred for White people.”
There must be a response from honest men and women who understand that moving our communities forward cannot be based on racist and divisive tendencies.
Preaching superiority of one race over another has not worked in the past and definitely will not work in 2010. When Beck and his team say they want “their” country back, there is a subtle message.
They are basically saying they want to return to the days when diversity was not an option, when women could not have a say in government or corporate boardrooms and when Blacks were confined to the back door. We cannot keep silent and allow revisionist historians to rewrite the history books with their tainted intellect.
Beck is challenging guardians and followers of the King legacy to an ideological battle. By taking his march to the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” speech, Beck is taking the ideological fight in a huge and symbolic way to the backyard of those who fought to push America further, to the point of democracy where there is a Black president and women serving as leaders.
We may hear from his group on Aug. 28 that King was on the same philosophical wavelength as them. Even though that would amount to a gross abomination of the ideas of oneness that King espoused, some are inclined to believe Beck in the era of renewed demagoguery.
To counter Beck, civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton is organizing a march at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. Sharpton has been rallying people across the nation to stand up and fight back. But it is clear that Beck should not win the public relations battle because of the symbolism and significance of having such an event at the Lincoln Memorial. Sharpton told a gathering of Black journalists in New York last week that when he went to book the Lincoln Memorial for Aug, 28, he was informed that it had already been taken by Beck.
The lesson there is that those who are on the front lines of the battle for human and civil rights must have their “A” game tight. It is clear that Beck is thinking way ahead because engaging opponents with his archaic ideas in a public relations battle keeps his ratings high and ensures his fat check from his bosses at Fox News keep coming.
The Kerner Commission, named after its late chairman, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, set up in 1968 by former President Lyndon Johnson one year after the 1967 riot in Detroit, said there are two Americas, one rich and one poor.
That was the conclusion of the report which unapologetically listed racism and economic inequality as culprits in hindering urban progress.
President Johnson had expected the report to say otherwise and termed the riots to be the work of subversive or outside forces.
Instead, the Kerner report became America’s foremost comprehensive document that looks at racial and other issues of inequality.
King described the commission’s blistering report as a “physician’s warning of approaching death.” He would later tell his confidant, friend and the man who introduced him to John F. Kennedy, Harry Belafonte, that “we’re integrating into a burning house. I think we’re just going to become more firemen.”
The analogy of the burning house by the slain civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner has become a political barometer to gauge how well America has been doing since the King years.
One could argue that since his last words on earth, the struggle for racial and economic justice has been endangered by the undeniable reality that not many firemen have been available since. If Beck and his group want to hijack the question of equality for all and to interprete it in their own language that reinforces the hateful and divisive discourse they are engageded in, more firemen are needed.
There are millions who are caught in the burning house, yet don’t know it because they have been convinced that President Obama is dangerous and is taking the country back to something akin to Germany under Adolph Hitler as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich alluded in his book. With their platforms and trumpets these leaders are fanning the embers of the burning house and making many of their followers seem ill-informed, misguided or just plain stupid.
For example during the historic health care debate a protester carried a sign asking the government to take its hands off Medicare, forgetting that Medicare is sponsored by the government.
The Tea Party is a mixed bag of ideas, one particularly that has been manifested is the proliferation of violent right wing/militia extremism around the country. Some, afraid to speak out, still try to accommodate violent right wing extremism, easily dismissing right wing extremist groups as a bunch of angry, non-threatening individuals. These extremists are given a national platform to advance their ideas under the pretext of being upset with the government.
One Fox News host recently recently boasted before a Tea Party crowd that they all want to be like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma terrorist bomber. Yet there was no condemnation for this kind of appalling pandering. But there is an audience that feeds and feasts on this rhetoric.
That is the audience that plans to undermine the legacy of King on the anniversary of his speech. Some will innocently be dragged like a lamb for the slaughter to the Lincoln Memorial to join Beck in the bastardization of any effort that the Obama administration is making to ensure a level playing field for all communities in sharing the national pie.
Because President Obama stepped up to address the tragedy of millions without health insurance, they “want their country back.”
Because King challenged this nation’s contradiction of being the richest nation in the world and yet poverty is so prevalent, they called him a communist.
When affirmative action is eliminated in Michigan under the false assertion that it promotes minority privilege over Whites, instead of it being seen as a panacea to a sordid historical past that severely impacted Blacks and women, they see it as something else entirely.
When home foreclosures have become the 2010 nightmare for our elderly, destoying the notion of the American dream of home ownershi
p, blame it on Obama, not eight years of Bush.
When public education was underfunded and the cheerleaders of No Child Left Behind were dancing in the corridors of an unsubstantial ideology of compassionate conservatism, Bush was still considered a great president in their eyes.
Detroit is a microcosm of the burning house King referred to that Beck and his team wants us to continue to live in.
A day before her husband’s funeral, civil rights matriarch Coretta Scott King delivered a powerful speech to thousands of sanitation workers in Memphis.
“We are concerned about not only the Negro poor but the poor all over the America and all over the world. Every man deserves a right to a job and an income so that he can pursue liberty, life and happiness,” she said.
That is why Democrats should not be allowed to take the minority vote for granted, confident that they have a ballot monopoly on a diverse cultural landscape.
Beyond Aug. 28 lies the November election where those who want to remain in the burning house will have to make a decision which way forward.
Watch senior editor Bankole Thompson’s weekly show, “Center Stage,” on WADL TV 38, Saturdays at 1 p.m. E-mail bthompson@michronicle.com.
First photo credit: lisaintx.files.wordpress.com