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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/22/2003 8:07:46 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
In an interesting bit of timing, on January 15th, Martin Luther King´s 74th birthday, President George W. Bush announced "My administration will file a brief with the court arguing that the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which award students a significant number of extra points (20) based solely on their race, and establishes numerical targets for incoming minority students, are unconstitutional."
His announcement has not been received kindly in some circles. In fact, Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP responded to the announcement angrily, saying:
"Affirmative action is the just spoils of a righteous war, won at great cost and intended to heal division and end centuries of discrimination."
This may come as a surprise to Julian Bond, who appears to be a bit shaky on history, but taking spoils in war has never been a method of healing division. In fact, the very word means plunder, as in "plunder, pillage, rifle, sack, loot, ransack, spoil, spoilate, etc." While his choice of the word "spoils" of a war may be accurate in describing his notion of Affirmative Action, as it exists at the University of Michigan, it is light years away from what was once called the "Race Relations" movement that actually worked to heal division and end centuries of discrimination.
What we are watching is a reenactment of the battle between Christian-ethic based Race Relations movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and the Marxism based class war of Martin Luther King in the 1960s. Although King talked Christian Race Relations his actions were based on the teachings of Karl Marx and his mentor, W.E.B. Dubois, who sided with the Soviet Union. Dubois died the day before King led the March to the Lincoln Memorial. He died as a Communist in Ghana in 1963, having renounced his U.S. citizenship. For those who were not alive at that point, the purpose of the Civil Rights March itself, as defined by most of the speakers, was not racial harmony but "for unrelenting protest to demand government action."
Before 1963, people in the "Race Relations" movement wanted to bring people together. I was involved in Race Relations. In fact I organized the first integrated group of college age students with students from a white college and a black college in Memphis, Tennessee in the late 1940s. I also urged my employer at the time to consider hiring one of the black girls I knew from that group as a stenographer in the insurance company where I worked. The boss was intrigued. "Do you really think the other girls in the office would actually accept that?"
In Montgomery, Alabama, about the same time, there was another group of people working for "Race Relations." Virginia Foster Durr and her lawyer husband, who were white, and her friend, Anne Braden, a white woman, became good friends with Rosa Parks, a black seamstress. All of them opposed segregation. On December 1, 1955, when Mrs. Parks was arrested for refusing to move back in the bus, it was Virginia and Clifford Durr who went to the jail and paid Mrs. Parks´ bail. That night, Virginia, Anne Braden and a small group of women got together and printed off on the school mimeograph machine a flyer urging people to boycott the City´s buses as a means of standing up for Rosa.
Amazingly, all over Montgomery, the next day, black people walked to work or caught rides or asked their white employers to come pick them up so they could get to work. Everyone thought at the time the boycott would last only a few days. It lasted a year – during which time hundreds of white Southerners provided transportation for the black employees because, like the Durrs, they felt that segregation was wrong. .
Today, most people, and most of the media, believe Martin Luther King started the Montgomery Boycott. He did not. King was asked to lead the movement begun at a school mimeograph machine manned by white friends of Rosa Parks, and spread throughout the city by black friends of Rosa Parks.
The Race Relations advocates hoped to build a culture built on cooperation, racial equality and understanding. The Civil Rights advocates sought to resolve the "problem" by following Karl Marx´s Communist Manifesto which states "The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." Everything was to be turned over to the State. Therefore it was the Government, not ordinary people changing their attitudes, that King believed would solve the problem. In fact, under Marx´s teachings, even the family was to be turned over to the state because, Marx said, "the family exists only among the bourgeoisie" and all things pertaining to the bourgeoisie had to be destroyed to create a Communist state. Marx would be proud of today´s government control over black people in America and the destruction of most black families that has been accomplished largely by government run programs.
Those of us in the Race Relations movement were not aware, until it was too late, that we were considered part of the problem. Most of us not only were family-oriented people, we also were home and business owners – in other words, we were part of the "bourgeoisie" who had to be eliminated according to Karl Marx. And, to a large degree, we were, just as Rosa Parks´ and the Durrs´ have been effectively eliminated from "Civil Rights" day.
So, here we are, almost 50 years later, fighting so-called "black leaders" who are insisting that universities be allowed to discriminate based on the color of the students´ skins. The segregationist policies of Jim Crow are alive and well in the boardroom of the NAACP and at American Universities such as the University of Michigan. A decade ago, California State Universities, became alarmed that relying entirely on admittance policies based on grades would lead to a preponderance of Asian students and opted to limit enrollment of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean high school graduates.
Ward Connerly, a member of University´s Board of Regents, opposed the quotas. As a man of mixed racial genetic inheritance, black, white and American Indian, Connerly advocated and was instrumental in getting Proposition 209 passed ending California´s discriminatory policies in student selection. However, to a large degree Democrat leaders are simply ignoring Proposition 209, which is now part of the State Constitution.
To stop the government from discriminating, in March of 2004, almost exactly 40 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was passed, that made racial choice by employers illegal, California will vote on Connerly´s Racial Privacy Initiative. (RPI), RPI "would prohibit the state from classifying any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment."
What the coming struggle is all about is simply: Do we back Christian based Race Relations or Marxist based Civil Rights? Rosa Parks would choose Race Relations.
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