By William Greider,
TheNation.com
Posted on November 5, 2008,
Printed on November 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106108/
We are inheritors of this momentous victory, but it was not ours. The laurels properly belong to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all of the other martyrs who died for civil rights. And to millions more before them who struggled across centuries and fell short of winning their freedom. And to those rare politicians like Lyndon B. Johnson, who stood up bravely in a decisive time, knowing how much it would cost his political party for years to come. We owe all of them for this moment.
Whatever happens next, Barack Obama has already changed this nation profoundly. Like King before him, the man is a great and brave teacher. Obama developed out of his life experiences a different understanding of the country, and he had the courage to run for president by offering this vision.
For many Americans, it seemed too much to believe, yet he turned out to be right about us. Against all odds, he persuaded a majority of Americans to believe in their own better natures and, by electing him, the people helped make it true. There is mysterious music in democracy when people decide to believe in themselves. [Full story: http://www.alternet.org/election08/106108/what_an_amazing_moment%21/]
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
AAAA Remembers Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
Dear AAAA Members, Colleagues and Friends:
On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we take time to reflect upon what has transpired since his passing. Much has been attained towards achieving Dr. King’s dream and vision – more women and persons of color are moving up the corporate ladder, in higher education and government. We are beginning to address the need for persons with disabilities to become full participants in the workplace and society. The wage gap is closing, albeit slowly, and we are experiencing a first in presidential politics: a woman and an African American are candidates for the presidency and a Hispanic was a recent contender as well.
There is much more ground to cover, however. The number of charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission remains unacceptably high. Racial harassment cases and incidents with nooses are far too common, even in the academy. Many professionals who happen to be of color continue to face daily insults based on their race. I can recall our Executive Director and I leaving Omaha, Nebraska a few weeks ago and we faced a most demeaning experience with TSA screeners at the airport – a reminder that while we have our accomplishments, some continue to see us as less than equal in America.
At our upcoming 34th annual conference in Falls Church, VA, themed a “New Era of Leadership and Action,” we will re-commit to the struggle to promote equal opportunity, access and diversity through affirmative action. I hope to see you there.There is still much to be done. We need all of you to ensure that Dr. King’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.
Sincerely,
ReNee S. Dunman
President, AAAA
On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we take time to reflect upon what has transpired since his passing. Much has been attained towards achieving Dr. King’s dream and vision – more women and persons of color are moving up the corporate ladder, in higher education and government. We are beginning to address the need for persons with disabilities to become full participants in the workplace and society. The wage gap is closing, albeit slowly, and we are experiencing a first in presidential politics: a woman and an African American are candidates for the presidency and a Hispanic was a recent contender as well.
There is much more ground to cover, however. The number of charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission remains unacceptably high. Racial harassment cases and incidents with nooses are far too common, even in the academy. Many professionals who happen to be of color continue to face daily insults based on their race. I can recall our Executive Director and I leaving Omaha, Nebraska a few weeks ago and we faced a most demeaning experience with TSA screeners at the airport – a reminder that while we have our accomplishments, some continue to see us as less than equal in America.
At our upcoming 34th annual conference in Falls Church, VA, themed a “New Era of Leadership and Action,” we will re-commit to the struggle to promote equal opportunity, access and diversity through affirmative action. I hope to see you there.There is still much to be done. We need all of you to ensure that Dr. King’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.
Sincerely,
ReNee S. Dunman
President, AAAA
Friday, April 4, 2008
The Other Side of the Mountaintop
Washington Post
Scholars Assess Nation's Progress -- And an Icon's Rougher Edges -- Four Decades After Assassination
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 4, 2008; A01
Near the end of his life, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. felt cornered and under siege. His opposition to the Vietnam War was widely criticized, even by friends. He was being pressured both to repudiate the black power movement and to embrace it. Some of his lieutenants were urging him to jettison his urgent new campaign to uplift the poor, believing that King had taken on too much and was compromising support for the civil rights struggle.
Today students learn of his powerful "dream" that children be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Politicians and private citizens of all ideologies summon King's soaring oratory as the inspiration that challenged the nation to better itself. But this beleaguered young man -- he was only 39 when he died -- was not just the icon celebrated at Martin Luther King Day programs and taught in U.S. schools.
His life, like those of other historical figures -- Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt -- has been simplified, scholars say, his anger blurred, his militancy rarely discussed, his disappointments and harsh critiques of government's failures glossed over.
Forty years after King was gunned down by an assassin in Memphis, it is this sharper-edged figure who has come into focus again. To mark today's anniversary, several scholarly reports have been released charting the nation's uneven social and economic progress during the past 40 years. Some scholars and former King associates are using the occasion to zero in on the two issues -- war and poverty -- that were consuming him at the time of his death.
Both have particular resonance now: The United States is engaged in a war in Iraq that has grown increasingly unpopular, and the poor -- despite the concerns highlighted by Hurricane Katrina and the subprime mortgage crisis -- are as voiceless as they were in King's day, advocates contend.
"His challenge was much bigger than being nice," said Taylor Branch, author of a three-volume history, "America in the King Years." "It was even bigger than race. It was whether we take our national purpose seriously, which is the full promise of equal citizenship."
King's legacy, Branch said, should have been to give the nation confidence that it can address big problems such as the crumbling economy, the endangered environment and ending the war. "Instead, our sense of what we can do has kind of atrophied," he said. "We're still imprisoned by the myths of the 1960s" -- that it was a period when the country went off the rails and government overreached.
If King could look across the landscape today, he would see a mixture of progress and regression on the issues he cared about: The overall poverty rate hasn't changed much since 1968, though there has been a big drop among the elderly. Wider income disparities exist between the richest and poorest Americans, but opportunities for educational advancement have broadened and workplaces have become more diverse.
The number of African Americans in prison or local jails, currently more than 900,000, is nearly six times the number incarcerated in 1970. But the growth in the number of black elected officials is even greater, from 1,469 in 1970 to an estimated 10,000 now. One of them, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), is given a serious chance of becoming the next president.
King was not a fan of fawning testimonies to his greatness, but in the years since his death about 770 streets and 125 schools have been named after him, according to research by Derek H. Alderman, an East Carolina University geographer. The street-namings are fitting tributes to King's legacy, Alderman said, because so much of the civil rights movement unfurled in the streets. Roads link our homes to our schools to our jobs, "the three areas where we struggle the most to negotiate our differences," Alderman said.
But there is an uneasy irony to these tributes: Most of the King avenues run through black communities, often in low-income neighborhoods. In some cities, attempts to rename major thoroughfares -- streets that cross racial and economic boundaries -- after King were met with political resistance.
"Here was this man whose life was committed to bridging races," Alderman said, "and in death his commemoration is largely segregated."
King was the son, grandson and great-grandson of preachers, and he grew up studying and practicing what messages might work best on people. In 1958, Branch said, he traveled 250,000 miles delivering sermons and speeches. As Branch put it, King thought he could preach America out of segregation.
Lawrence E. Carter, dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College, King's alma mater, said that he "recognized the humanity even in people who oppressed him," adding: "He saw in them something that could be redeemed."
But King was not meek, nor were his words always soothing. He called for boycotting discriminatory businesses, sometimes demanding that they advertise in black newspapers and deposit some of their money in black savings and loan associations. He spoke of "cultural homicide" committed against blacks, how their worth and achievements were diminished in schools while white superiority was promoted. In one speech, he even noted that there were 60 "offensive" synonyms for blackness in Roget's Thesaurus, and 134 "favorable" synonyms for whiteness.
But King reserved some of his toughest assessments for the U.S. government, which he called "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world.
"His admonishments to us of how we ought to live seem to be reflected in his social consciousness, and that is rooted in his understanding of Jesus and the social gospels," said Carter, who met King on four occasions. "When he chastised us for being the greatest perpetrator of violence in the history of the world, think about Jeremiah Wright" -- Obama's former longtime Chicago pastor, who came under fire recently for controversial statements in his sermons. [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040304345.html?wpisrc=newsletter ]
Scholars Assess Nation's Progress -- And an Icon's Rougher Edges -- Four Decades After Assassination
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 4, 2008; A01
Near the end of his life, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. felt cornered and under siege. His opposition to the Vietnam War was widely criticized, even by friends. He was being pressured both to repudiate the black power movement and to embrace it. Some of his lieutenants were urging him to jettison his urgent new campaign to uplift the poor, believing that King had taken on too much and was compromising support for the civil rights struggle.
Today students learn of his powerful "dream" that children be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Politicians and private citizens of all ideologies summon King's soaring oratory as the inspiration that challenged the nation to better itself. But this beleaguered young man -- he was only 39 when he died -- was not just the icon celebrated at Martin Luther King Day programs and taught in U.S. schools.
His life, like those of other historical figures -- Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt -- has been simplified, scholars say, his anger blurred, his militancy rarely discussed, his disappointments and harsh critiques of government's failures glossed over.
Forty years after King was gunned down by an assassin in Memphis, it is this sharper-edged figure who has come into focus again. To mark today's anniversary, several scholarly reports have been released charting the nation's uneven social and economic progress during the past 40 years. Some scholars and former King associates are using the occasion to zero in on the two issues -- war and poverty -- that were consuming him at the time of his death.
Both have particular resonance now: The United States is engaged in a war in Iraq that has grown increasingly unpopular, and the poor -- despite the concerns highlighted by Hurricane Katrina and the subprime mortgage crisis -- are as voiceless as they were in King's day, advocates contend.
"His challenge was much bigger than being nice," said Taylor Branch, author of a three-volume history, "America in the King Years." "It was even bigger than race. It was whether we take our national purpose seriously, which is the full promise of equal citizenship."
King's legacy, Branch said, should have been to give the nation confidence that it can address big problems such as the crumbling economy, the endangered environment and ending the war. "Instead, our sense of what we can do has kind of atrophied," he said. "We're still imprisoned by the myths of the 1960s" -- that it was a period when the country went off the rails and government overreached.
If King could look across the landscape today, he would see a mixture of progress and regression on the issues he cared about: The overall poverty rate hasn't changed much since 1968, though there has been a big drop among the elderly. Wider income disparities exist between the richest and poorest Americans, but opportunities for educational advancement have broadened and workplaces have become more diverse.
The number of African Americans in prison or local jails, currently more than 900,000, is nearly six times the number incarcerated in 1970. But the growth in the number of black elected officials is even greater, from 1,469 in 1970 to an estimated 10,000 now. One of them, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), is given a serious chance of becoming the next president.
King was not a fan of fawning testimonies to his greatness, but in the years since his death about 770 streets and 125 schools have been named after him, according to research by Derek H. Alderman, an East Carolina University geographer. The street-namings are fitting tributes to King's legacy, Alderman said, because so much of the civil rights movement unfurled in the streets. Roads link our homes to our schools to our jobs, "the three areas where we struggle the most to negotiate our differences," Alderman said.
But there is an uneasy irony to these tributes: Most of the King avenues run through black communities, often in low-income neighborhoods. In some cities, attempts to rename major thoroughfares -- streets that cross racial and economic boundaries -- after King were met with political resistance.
"Here was this man whose life was committed to bridging races," Alderman said, "and in death his commemoration is largely segregated."
King was the son, grandson and great-grandson of preachers, and he grew up studying and practicing what messages might work best on people. In 1958, Branch said, he traveled 250,000 miles delivering sermons and speeches. As Branch put it, King thought he could preach America out of segregation.
Lawrence E. Carter, dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College, King's alma mater, said that he "recognized the humanity even in people who oppressed him," adding: "He saw in them something that could be redeemed."
But King was not meek, nor were his words always soothing. He called for boycotting discriminatory businesses, sometimes demanding that they advertise in black newspapers and deposit some of their money in black savings and loan associations. He spoke of "cultural homicide" committed against blacks, how their worth and achievements were diminished in schools while white superiority was promoted. In one speech, he even noted that there were 60 "offensive" synonyms for blackness in Roget's Thesaurus, and 134 "favorable" synonyms for whiteness.
But King reserved some of his toughest assessments for the U.S. government, which he called "the greatest purveyor of violence" in the world.
"His admonishments to us of how we ought to live seem to be reflected in his social consciousness, and that is rooted in his understanding of Jesus and the social gospels," said Carter, who met King on four occasions. "When he chastised us for being the greatest perpetrator of violence in the history of the world, think about Jeremiah Wright" -- Obama's former longtime Chicago pastor, who came under fire recently for controversial statements in his sermons. [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040304345.html?wpisrc=newsletter ]
Two Black Americas
The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson
Friday,
April 4, 2008; A23
Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed -- mostly for the better -- and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized.
On April 4, 1968, it was possible to make the generalization that being black in this country meant being poor; fully 40 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line, according to census data, with another 20 percent barely keeping their heads above water. African Americans were heavily concentrated in the inner cities and the rural South. We were far less likely than whites to go to college, and our presence in the corporate world was minimal.
Today, about 25 percent of African Americans are mired in poverty. In many ways, being black and poor is a more desperate and hopeless condition now than it was 40 years ago. For those who managed to enter the middle class, however, most of the old generalizations no longer apply.
There remains a significant income gap between whites and blacks in this country, although it shrinks when educational level is factored in. But the gap in wealth, or net worth, is huge, even when you control for education, age, family size and whatever else you want to throw in. Still, African Americans control an estimated $800 billion in purchasing power. If that were translated into gross domestic product, a sovereign "Black America" would be the 15th- or 16th-richest nation on earth.
Forty years ago, not even 2 percent of black households earned the equivalent of $100,000 a year in today's dollars. Now, about 10 percent of black households have crossed that threshold. George and Louise Jefferson aren't so lonely anymore in that "deluxe apartment in the sky."
Then again, if "The Jeffersons" were being produced today, George and Louise probably wouldn't live in an apartment at all. More realistically, they'd be on a cul-de-sac in a suburban community. In Washington and a growing number of cities, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than within the city limits.
In a sense, then, the most striking measure of how far African Americans have come since 1968 isn't the rise of Barack Obama. It's the story of Stanley O'Neal.
That's not to minimize the prospect that a nation midwifed by slavery could soon have its first black president. But O'Neal did something that would have been equally unimaginable 40 years ago. He rose to become chief executive of Merrill Lynch, one of Wall Street's biggest firms; by all accounts, he was a taskmaster of a boss who cared less about whether subordinates liked him than he did about the bottom line. He placed big bets on mortgage-backed securities, generating record profits for the firm. When he got caught in the mortgage crisis several months ago and was forced to write off billions in losses, he resigned -- and floated back to earth with the help of one of the loveliest golden parachutes Wall Street has seen.
Oh, and his grandfather was born a slave. [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040303122.html?wpisrc=newsletter ]
By Eugene Robinson
Friday,
April 4, 2008; A23
Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed -- mostly for the better -- and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized.
On April 4, 1968, it was possible to make the generalization that being black in this country meant being poor; fully 40 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line, according to census data, with another 20 percent barely keeping their heads above water. African Americans were heavily concentrated in the inner cities and the rural South. We were far less likely than whites to go to college, and our presence in the corporate world was minimal.
Today, about 25 percent of African Americans are mired in poverty. In many ways, being black and poor is a more desperate and hopeless condition now than it was 40 years ago. For those who managed to enter the middle class, however, most of the old generalizations no longer apply.
There remains a significant income gap between whites and blacks in this country, although it shrinks when educational level is factored in. But the gap in wealth, or net worth, is huge, even when you control for education, age, family size and whatever else you want to throw in. Still, African Americans control an estimated $800 billion in purchasing power. If that were translated into gross domestic product, a sovereign "Black America" would be the 15th- or 16th-richest nation on earth.
Forty years ago, not even 2 percent of black households earned the equivalent of $100,000 a year in today's dollars. Now, about 10 percent of black households have crossed that threshold. George and Louise Jefferson aren't so lonely anymore in that "deluxe apartment in the sky."
Then again, if "The Jeffersons" were being produced today, George and Louise probably wouldn't live in an apartment at all. More realistically, they'd be on a cul-de-sac in a suburban community. In Washington and a growing number of cities, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than within the city limits.
In a sense, then, the most striking measure of how far African Americans have come since 1968 isn't the rise of Barack Obama. It's the story of Stanley O'Neal.
That's not to minimize the prospect that a nation midwifed by slavery could soon have its first black president. But O'Neal did something that would have been equally unimaginable 40 years ago. He rose to become chief executive of Merrill Lynch, one of Wall Street's biggest firms; by all accounts, he was a taskmaster of a boss who cared less about whether subordinates liked him than he did about the bottom line. He placed big bets on mortgage-backed securities, generating record profits for the firm. When he got caught in the mortgage crisis several months ago and was forced to write off billions in losses, he resigned -- and floated back to earth with the help of one of the loveliest golden parachutes Wall Street has seen.
Oh, and his grandfather was born a slave. [To read the entire article, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040303122.html?wpisrc=newsletter ]
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