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Tag: martin luther king jr
If Black Voters Abandon Biden, What Will They Get Instead?

If Black Voters Abandon Biden, What Will They Get Instead?

Should Donald Trump win the presidency in November, he will probably owe his victory to Black and Hispanic voters. If that prediction startles you, then perhaps you haven't been reading the most recent polls. Trump is maintaining a small but persistent lead over President Joe Biden in national averages — and the apparent reason is that those minority voters, who voted overwhelmingly Democratic in 2020, show much less enthusiasm for Biden in this election.

Waning support for the incumbent among his own partisan base appears to cross racial, generational and geographic lines, with many asking whether he should have stepped aside by now. Others blame him for inflation, although prices spiked across the developed world after the pandemic. But the dramatic decline in Black support for Biden is deeply puzzling — especially when the only alternative is returning Trump to power.

Exactly how Biden has disappointed those voters remains mysterious, given his own political history and behavior. He was the loyal vice president of America's first Black president and chose a Black woman as his running mate. He has named many Black appointees to top positions in government, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Other than Barack Obama, he is the most outspoken opponent of white supremacy ever to occupy the Oval Office.None of that appears to have made any impression on a substantial segment of Black voters, however, especially among the youngest — whose alienation is now growing because of Biden's support for Israel in Gaza. (One wonders what they, or anyone planning to abandon the Democrats over that conflict, believe Trump would have done or will do in such circumstances.)

But let's ask the question a different way and forget about Biden for a moment. What would happen to Black America — and other minorities in this country — if Trump regains power in 2025?

Begin by glancing back to the time when Trump entered presidential politics, even before he came down the escalator in his gilded tower to slander Mexicans as rapists and murderers. He first signaled those ambitions with his conspiratorial campaign claiming that Obama was not a native-born citizen, and therefore ineligible to be president, but a secret immigrant from Kenya. It was a big lie, the precursor of many more to come, culminating in the very Big Lie that the 2020 election had been "rigged" against him. And it was a racist falsehood, calculated to evoke the ugliest kind of hostility among the Tea Party Republicans who later swarmed into Trump's MAGA cult.

Since then, Trump has demonstrated repeatedly how he uses racial tension to promote himself and his politics. It is a habit that recalls his aggressive campaign to execute the since-exonerated Central Park Five, young Black men falsely accused of a gang rape, and continues today when he ridiculously proclaims that he could have "negotiated" the Civil War, a conflict over human bondage that was not subject to compromise.

The future that a Trump presidency would portend is bleak indeed for a diverse and multicultural democracy whose citizens hope to move forward together, not backward in division. Turning Point USA, the MAGA "youth wing," will mark Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday this month with an expensive campaign to demonize him and to persuade Americans that the landmark civil rights legislation he helped to win was "a huge mistake," according to its leader Charlie Kirk.

Kirk has used his organization and his close connection with Trump to enrich himself and his cronies, but that is hardly the worst of his offenses. His forthcoming crusade to roll back civil rights will be overseen by someone named Blake Neff, a Turning Point staffer who once worked on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show — until the exposure of his voluminous racist and misogynist online messaging. Try to imagine how bad those had to be for a Fox executive who described them as "abhorrent" when the network announced Neff's dismissal.That the Trump movement would aspire to repeal the Civil Rights Act, after everything their leader has done to undermine the rights of minorities and women, shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention. "Make America Great Again" always carried a dubious undertone, loudly hinting this county was better when we lived under the stale hierarchies of a bygone century.

Come November there will be only one effective way to reject that mentality and its implications for us and our children. No American of good will, regardless of race, creed or color, should harbor any illusions otherwise.

Joe Conason is editor-in-chief of The National Memo and editor-at-large of Type Investigations. He is a bestselling author whose next book,The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism, will be published in 2024.

'Tennessee Three' Revive King's Message For Those Who Need To Hear It

'Tennessee Three' Revive King's Message For Those Who Need To Hear It

Since I could not say it any better than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I’ll just quote him: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler nor the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

His Letter from Birmingham Jail, written and published in 1963, was King’s answer to the well-respected white clergy members who deemed his civil rights protests “unwise,” and published their disapproval in an ad in a Birmingham newspaper.

But the message could just as easily apply to the Republican state legislators in Tennessee who last week expelled two Black Democratic colleagues for breaking “decorum,” even as children afraid for their lives continued to plead for gun reform that might make them feel just a bit safer in their schoolrooms. There was shouting but no arrests, no violence, no property damage — just peaceful demands for “justice.”

That Republicans called these demonstrators “insurrectionists” was a disgusting touch that might have had those 1960s-era white clergymen, clueless as they were back then, shaking their heads.

It’s ironic that Tennessee is one of many states peering into a microscope for any sign that classroom lessons on race might cross some vague line, after a law forbidding discussion of so-called divisive concepts was signed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2021. A chapter of “Moms for Liberty” didn’t spare a book about King from its wrath.

The actions by Republican lawmakers in Nashville prove that more, not less, teaching on the truthful history of America and Tennessee, birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, is sorely needed because, clearly, they haven’t learned a thing.

Trying to make uncomfortable truths go away by admonishing and punishing those who bring them into the light has never worked for long.

The fact that three adults and three children at a Christian school in Nashville had been murdered by an assailant wielding a semi-automatic weapon seemed to disappear as GOP members of the Tennessee General Assembly took turns dressing down the “Tennessee Three,” reaching for the most condescending words in their vocabularies.

“Just because you don’t get your way, you can’t come to the well, bring your friends, and throw a temper tantrum with an adolescent bullhorn,” Republican state Rep. Andrew Farmer said to Rep. Justin Pearson. He responded by deriding Farmer’s tone: “How many of you would want to be spoken to that way?”

Better to have listened rather than lectured, and felt the urgency of colleagues who do not look like them, who have backgrounds as activists, who were elected overwhelmingly by constituents, tens of thousands of them, who were stripped of representation when the lawmakers had their microphones cut off, their IDs invalidated and their bodies, finally, cast out.

Better for the legislators from a different political party to have learned from them, and from parents and children in the galleries and outside the chambers.

The third member of the trio, Rep. Gloria Johnson, a teacher, recalled seeing students fleeing a shooting at her school in 2008. She honored the names and memories of those killed at Covenant School. Johnson, spared expulsion by a single vote, unlike the two she stood alongside, is a white woman in her 60s. Just let that sink in for a moment.

And remember, since most of the GOP legislators hypocritically rolling in moral high dudgeon did not, that the disgraceful scene took place in the week of the 55th anniversary of the murder of King by an assassin’s bullet — across the state in Memphis.

What did they accomplish with the swift move? Well, after the events of last week, three state legislators whom few outside of their districts knew much about have had their profiles and causes elevated.

'Built on a protest'

Pearson sounded more preacher than politician when he said: “You are seeking to expel District 86's representation in this House — in a country that was built on a protest,” adding: “In a country built on people who speak out of turn, who spoke out of turn, who fought out of turn to build a nation. I come from a long line of people who have resisted.”

The expelled Democratic Rep. Justin Jones was equally eloquent when he asked: “How can you bring dishonor to an already dishonorable House? How can you bring disorder to a House that is out of order, where the speaker refuses to let representatives elected to speak for their people even be heard?”

Their fight recalled the legacy of King, who traveled to Memphis to raise the voices of that city’s neglected and disrespected sanitation workers, toiling in dangerous conditions for low pay.

The world has also learned about the members of the Tennessee legislature’s Republican caucus, predominantly white and male. Past comments about bringing back “hanging by a tree” as a method of execution, charges of criminal and sexual misconduct and persistent instances of reflexive racism have not been enough to earn the expulsion handed to Jones and Pearson.

Now, Jones is back after the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted on Monday to return him to his seat as “interim” representative before a special election is held. Though he drew the attention and visits from national Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, he did not really need their words to craft a way forward.

Upon his return, speaking from the steps of the Tennessee State Capitol, Jones said: “Today we are sending a resounding message that democracy will not be killed in the comfort of silence.” After a vote is held in Shelby County, Pearson may not be far behind.

But how much will politics as usual really change?

With gerrymandered districts and a supermajority that can do pretty much what it wants, Tennessee Republicans may not be worried about their power slipping away, not anytime soon. In states throughout the country, with blue dots of cities overwhelmed by surrounding red, any meaningful political swing would certainly be an uphill battle.

But I have a feeling the young people who crowded into the Capitol and the elected officials who echoed their concerns are hardly going to shut up.

Mary C. Curtis is an award-winning columnist for Roll Call and hosts its "Equal Time" podcast host. She is a contributor to NPR and The Op-Ed Project.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Texas Governor Doesn’t Want King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech Taught In Public Schools

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Already trying to peel away voting rights in the state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is also pushing a bill that would practically remove women and people of color from a portion of required social studies curriculum. Senate Bill 3 would no longer require teachers to teach civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," the Emancipation Proclamation, and women's suffrage; What's worse the Senate in a 18-4 vote along party lines on Friday passed the governor's racist political vendetta branded as a ban on critical race theory.

The list of social studies elements stripped from required teachings includes "Native American history, work by civil rights activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, historical documents related to the Chicano movement and women's suffrage, and writings by Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass," according to The Texas Tribune.

Texas Senate Committee advances Critical Race Theory Bill | KVUEwww.youtube.com

Sen. Bryan Hughes, author of the bill, wrote in its text that a teacher or other school district employee may not "require or make part of a course inculcation" any concept that holds one race or sex superior to another, define a "hard work ethic" as racist or sexist, or assigns moral character with a particular race or sex. The bill would also prevent teachers and school employees from teaching that: "the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States; or (...) with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality..."

The Senate bill follows earlier House legislation that similarly banned instruction that holds one race or sex superior to another or defines a "hard work ethic" as racist or sexist, or assigns moral character with a particular race or sex, and Abbott signed the bill into law during the regular legislative session. That legislation, however, added the requirement that diverse literature on race be included in school instruction. Abbott wants to change the law back to a version that doesn't include the diverse literature requirement, KVUE reported.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released the following statement obtained Friday by ABC-affiliated KVUE:

"Texans roundly reject 'woke' philosophies that espouse that one race or sex is better than another and that someone, by virtue of their race or sex, is innately racist, oppressive or sexist.
"Senate Bill 3 will make certain that critical race philosophies, including the debunked 1619 founding myth, are removed from our school curriculums statewide. Texas parents do not want their children to be taught these false ideas. Parents want their students to learn how to think critically, not be indoctrinated by the ridiculous leftist narrative that America and our Constitution are rooted in racism.
"Final passage of this bill into law will require the House Democrats who have fled the state to return to the House for a quorum. If they do not, this bill will die, but the Senate will pass Senate Bill 3 over and over again until the House finally has a quorum. I am grateful for Sen. Hughes' leadership on this important issue."

Hughes said in debate The Texas Tribune covered on the chamber floor that the Senate bill counteracts the "pernicious, wrong, harmful" effects of critical race theory. The race theory, however, is not taught in Texas schools and has been defined by scholars as a framework that suggests the U.S. legal system and laws that govern this nation are rooted in race and racism.

"When a fire starts in the kitchen, we don't wait for it to spread to the living room and bathroom, but we start to put it out," the Republican said. Democratic Sen. Juan Hinojosa countered with: "I don't see a fire in the kitchen."

Donald Trump and Kayleigh McEnany

Kayleigh Burned Crispy For Tweet Praising MLK

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Outgoing White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany is facing an onslaught of criticism after posting a tweet praising Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on MLK Day.

Calling Dr. King "a hero, who embodied love and faith in his pursuit for equality," McEnany posted a quote from the iconic civil rights leader. Given that she, as one social media user said, along with her president and her party "tried to nullify millions of Black votes," it is an incredible self-own.

And on her personal Twitter account she posted this quote:

Early Monday morning Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, issued a plea, a reminder, and a warning:

Here's how some are responding to McEnany's remarks.







(That is an actual tweet from McEnany, original here.)