Showing posts with label Black Genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Genocide. Show all posts

Friday, March 9, 2012

If it is a Boy, Kill Him - The Black Male in Ameria



Do they not go astray who devise evil?   Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people (Proverbs 14:22, 31, 32, 34)

Urban League report focuses on the Black male

'Empowering Black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today. Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African American community, but for the prosperity, health, and well-being of the entire American family.'

NUL President Marc H. Morial


“The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives . . . . ‘When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live (Exodus 1:15-15.)’”  This was Pharaoh’s edict to the Hebrew midwives.  We must pay careful attention to this passage.  Verses 9 and 10 tell us that the problem was that Pharaoh saw that “there were too many of them (Hebrews) and that they were “numerous and becoming more powerful.”  He cautioned his advisors, “Let us deal shrewdly with them (1:10).”

He thought he had the perfect plan.  The goal was not simply to eliminate the boys.  THE GOAL WAS TO WEAKEN THE PEOPLE.  It was to make them weak.  It was to decrease their numbers.  Seeing those who were supposed to bring and nurture life, act instead to destroy it is a real psychological blow to any community.  The first strategy was to get them to do the killing for him.  It may at first have seemed very arrogant and foolish of him to expect Hebrew midwives to kill Hebrew boys, but Pharaoh understood something about human nature. 

First, those who were to nurture life were being forced to serve as immediate witnesses to the genocide.  How many drugged-out mothers have succumbed to the pain of seeing the genocide and victimization of a white supremacist society over the hopes, dreams, futures and very physical safety of their offspring?

In the nations of the Third Reich, when poor Jews started disappearing, those with means could still buy a little food, a little freedom, and a little delay.  The Jews who became guards in the ghettos, and those who supported them, actually came to believe that the massive program of “relocation” (extermination) did not include them.   

Desperate people will easily resort to desperate denials and fantasies in the face of seeming overwhelming power and influence.  Oppressed people, especially those whose faith perspective is limited by their conception of material comfort, too often become the “Indian Scouts” for the colonial cavalry that will eventually annihilate them.  Then those who have had some meager benefit or “funding” from the rich and powerful are often all too ready to preserve their “privileged status” by doing “whatever it takes” to satisfy their benefactors.

The Black African American middle class community understands that many of even the most “progressive and enlightened” among whites in America (and their immigrant American clones and wannabees) have no use for them.  These people love to “help poor blacks,” to conduct mission trips to poor black communities and poor black nations.  They love to wring their hands about what they call “black-on-black” violence.  They sit in Universities and whip out statistics and write papers on all the remedial things they need to devise (of course with themselves in leadership) to save the next generation of “African Americans.”

Yet they won’t step foot in a church, join a club, a lounge, or a nightclub, shop at a grocery store, live in a neighborhood or a send their children to a school where black middle class are in the majority.  Many do not know famous black authors, inventors or significant historical contributions made by blacks.  Many, in spite of numerous advanced degrees have never read a Black author of any kind.  They do not like living and working in situations where Blacks are their “equal,” but prefer to take on the roll of beneficent paternalistic saviors to poor blacks.  They also work hard to pit poor Blacks against middle class Blacks.  They seek to create a false consciousness among poor and middle class Blacks about each other.  Through construct, myth and theory they seek to help all understand how the Black middle class are distant and look down on them, all the while ignoring the fact that these so-called “Poor Blacks” are the brothers, sisters, cousins—and often children of Black middle class families.  Hence we saw television programs in the 70s like the “White Shadow” and “Webster,” and the media still spends an inordinate amount of space and time focusing on that one white teacher or principal who needs to be commended for just doing the job they were paid to do in a “predominantly Black/Latino” school or community center.

Nevertheless, the attempt to destroy the Black middle class and its growth by destabilizing black communities, black households, black economy and black families is working.  The criminal “just-us” system in America has been most effective in carrying out genocide against Black (middle class and poor and underclass) America.  Below are a few illustrations and statistics worth repeating:

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - The prospects are bleak. Genocide is no exaggeration.  Incarceration, AIDS, unemployment and the school drop-out rate are all problems challenging Black people in America—Black males in particular—and according to this year’s annual report released Apr. 17 by the National Urban League (NUL) entitled “The State of Black America: Portrait of the Black Male,” these problems represent the most serious social crisis occurring in the United States today.

“A quarter of all Black Americans live below the federal poverty level, a poverty rate about twice the national rate,” Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) writes in the report’s foreword. “In some cities, more than half of all Black boys do not finish high school, and by the time they are in their 30s, almost six in ten Black high school dropouts will have spent time in prison.”

The bad statistics concerning Black men go on and on. Half of all Black men in their 20s are unemployed, and more young Black men are in prison than in college.

“Empowering Black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” NUL President Marc H. Morial told reporters at the National Press Club. 

“Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African American community, but for the prosperity, health, and well-being of the entire American family.”

Black males are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as White males, and nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with their average jail sentences 10 months longer than those of White men. In addition, Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 are nine times more likely than Whites to be killed by firearms, and nearly eight times as likely to have AIDS.

As a solution to the problems, the report recommends universal early-childhood education; all-male schools which emphasize mentoring programs and longer class hours; more “second chance” programs for dropouts and former offenders; a restoration of the Summer Jobs Program; and an effort to convince children that education pays dividends later in life.

The NUL report bears witness to the condition of the Black man and the conspiracy to destroy Black males. Some have argued that the conspiracy to destroy the Black male is a “theory,” however, the scripture of the Bible gives proof of the reality of a plan to destroy the male child.

During the time of Moses, the Pharaoh of that day issued a decree to destroy all of the male children of Israel, as well as during the time of the birth of Jesus, when King Herod issued a decree to kill all of the boy babies to stop the birth of The Messiah.

The conspiracy and plan to target the Black male is best expressed in the Bible in Exodus 1:10, wherein Pharaoh states “Come let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and join onto our enemy and come against us in war.”

Although the NUL report stated there are solutions, but they don’t operate on a large enough scale, the report, however, fails to reflect the decades of work and admired results achieved by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Min. Farrakhan toured the country, alerting young Black men to a planned genocide against them by the U.S. government through his “Stop the Killing” tour.
This series of lectures was aimed at informing the community, and young Black men in particular, of the government’s plan to target young Black men for destruction. It was also during this period that Min. Farrakhan worked with youth gangs to help promote peace, and with rappers in the hip hop community to help decrease conflict.

In the mid-1990s, Min. Farrakhan launched another national tour entitled “Men Only Meetings” where he again alerted Black males of the government’s plan to promote a negative image of the Black man in the U.S. and in the world as a “menace to society.” This image, according to Min. Farrakhan, was largely promoted through movies and other negative imagery to set up the Black male for destruction.

It was during these series of men only meetings that Min. Farrakhan spoke of A Million-Man March that he began to mobilize for in 1995. The Million Man March was the most successful mobilization of Black men in U.S. history, when more than two million men rallied on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on October 16, 1995.

Growing out of the Million Man March, more Black men voted in the 1996 election than had ever voted before, and tens of thousands of Black children were adopted by families headed by Black males.

“We must close the jobs gap. We must close the education gap. We must close the high school graduation gap. But I suggest to you, that we’ve got to close—as Senator Obama says in his foreword—the empathy gap. We’ve got to close the gap of concern in this nation today,” said Mr. Morial.

  Explanations of black juvenile homicides in the 1980s that focus on the “super-predator” theory have no basis in fact. Justice Department data show that the entire rise in such homicides for the period 1984-1994 was related to firearms, as has been the decline in homicides beginning in 1995. Thus, the lethality of young offenders increased by having access to guns, rather than there being a new “breed” of young killers. Further, if the 15-19-year olds who were committing violent crimes in the late 1980s were actually“super-predators,” then they should have displayed these tendencies in the early 1980s as well, when they were in the 10-14 age range. Data for this period, though, show no indication of that (FBI-3, Crime in the United States, 1996, 1997).

This therefore lends support to the explanation that the greater availability of firearms, much of it related to the drug trade, was the primary source of the increase in violence.  Criminologist Alfred Blumstein has conducted prominent analyses of the overall racial composition of the prison population. In an examination of the 1991 state prison population, he concluded that 76% of the higher black rate of imprisonment could be accounted for by higher rates of arrest for serious offenses. While this held true for most crimes, the critical exception in this regard was drug offenses, which will be detailed further below. The remaining 24% of disparity might be explained by criminal histories, racial bias, or other factors.

Offenses by blacks are more likely to lead to arrest than those of whites. While the self reported involvement of adolescent males represents a 3:2 black/white differential, the arrest ratio is 4:1.

While there are no dramatic differences in the degree to which blacks and whites become involved in offending at some point, blacks are nearly twice as likely to continue offending into their twenties. The key variable in this regard is the adoption of adult roles. Thus, among young adults who are employed or living in a stable relationship there are no significant differences in the persistence of offending by race.

Research on sentencing in a number of jurisdictions has concluded that disparity based on race does in fact occur. One of the more sophisticated such studies examined case processing and sentencing outcomes for persons arrested for a felony offense in New York State for the years 1990-92.  Controlling for factors including prior criminal history, gender and county, the researchers found that for the more serious offenses, there was relatively little difference in sentencing, although it was estimated that 300 black and Hispanic offenders who received prison terms would not have had they been white.

For property offenses and misdemeanors, though, minorities were considerably more likely to receive jail terms.

Sources:
(Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth, “Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74 (fall 1983): 661-753.

Stephen Klein, Joan Petersilia, and Susan Turner, “Race and Imprisonment Decisions in California,” Science,
(February 16, 1990).

John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson, “Criminal Inequality in America: Patterns and Consequences,” in John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson, Crime and Inequality, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 28.

The key issue in this regard appears to lie in the use of discretion by the courts when sentencing offenders. Violent offenders, regardless of their race or ethnicity, are quite likely to be sentenced to prison.

But for less serious offenders where there is an option, but no obligation, to sentence an offender to prison, prosecutors and judges are making decisions in each case about whether an offender will receive six months in jail, for example, or be required to enter a treatment program and make restitution to a victim.

It would be a mistake simply to attribute the results of such studies to prosecutorial and judicial racist beliefs; in some jurisdictions a significant number of prosecutors and judges are minorities prosecuting and sentencing other minorities to terms of incarceration. The results instead may reflect the degree to which offenders bring different sets of resources with them to the court system. For example, do white offenders have greater access to private defense attorneys who can devote more time to their cases to try to convince prosecutors and judges that a jail or prison term is not warranted? Do they have greater access to expert psychiatric testimony or can they afford to subsidize placement in a substance abuse treatment program? Or, is unconscious racism at play: do whites speak in a language and manner that is more comfortable to the decision makers in the courtroom?

These questions have important implications for developing remedies for the racial disparities that are so prominent in the criminal justice system. While some might advocate that a solution to minority over-representation in the prison system would be to sentence more white offenders to prison, such an approach would be extremely costly and would not alleviate any of the harms suffered by minority communities.

The alternative approach is to examine the factors that enable white, or middle class, offenders to be sentenced to non-prison terms more frequently and to replicate those conditions for low-income people. For example, if middle class offenders have greater access to drug treatment resources, courts and communities could expand such services to make them accessible to a broader range of offenders. Additionally, greater resources could be devoted to indigent defense services, a proposal to which Attorney General Janet Reno has frequently called attention.

Since 1980, the “war on drugs” has been the most significant factor contributing to the rise of prison and jail populations. Drug policies have also had a disproportionate impact on African Americans and have exacerbated the racial disparities that already existed within the criminal justice system.* This has come about in two ways: first, drug offenses overall have increased as a proportion of the criminal justice population and, second, the proportion of African Americans among drug offenders has been increasing (James F. Nelson, Disparities in Processing Felony Arrests in New York State, 1990-92, Albany, N.Y.: Division of Criminal Justice Services, 1995).

From 1980 to 1995, drug arrests nationally nearly tripled from 581,000 to 1,476,000, thus bringing nearly a million additional drug cases to the court system each year. Over the course of this period, drug cases came to be treated much more harshly. Primarily as a result of mandatory sentencing policies adopted by all fifty states and the federal government, convicted drug offenders are now far more likely to be sentenced to prison than in the past. Justice Department data reveal that the chances of a drug arrestee being sentenced to prison rose by 447% between 1980 and 1992. 
Taken from
:
The Crisis of the Young African American Male and the Criminal Justice System
Marc Mauer, Assistant Director
The Sentencing Project
Prepared for U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
April 15-16, 1999
Washington, D.C.

_____________________________________

The Hebrew midwives did not follow Pharaoh’s orders.  They knew this wasn’t about the survival of one gender over the other.  They did not allow their enemy’s agendas like “war between the sexes” and “feminists verses male chauvinists” to define their struggle and neither must Black African American, Brown and White Latino American, and yes-Asian American people. 
The Hebrew midwives demonstrated that they were as capable as the King of Egypt when it came to being crafty and shrewd in order to insure their people’s survival.  The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson often says, “No one will save us, for us, but us.”  What the National Urban League and Minister Louis Farrakhan are doing and proposing is just one step in one right direction need to be taken.   But meanwhile the attempt to kill, to incarcerate, to disenfranchise, to mis-educate, to eliminate black boys and also brown boys continues.  Notwithstanding all the test tubes, invitro fertilization techniques, it takes the whole village, not one sex, one type, one class or one cultural competency, to make a community prosperous, strong and thriving.  
Stop the killing of our children!!


Sunday, January 15, 2012

Dr. King's Economic Justice: OUR UNFINISHED WORK



For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help.  He will take pity on the poor and the needy, and save the weak from death (Psalm 72:12-13).

Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith, and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him (James 2:5)?”

You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain . . . .  You oppress the righteous and take bribes, and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts (Amos 5:11-12).

*        *        *

On a Thursday evening, the 10th of November last year, a 37-year old man, a Christian, and an active member of his church was arrested and charged with bank robbery and the murder of a police officer.  After allegedly robbing the Bank of America in Vallejo, California, he fled the pursuit of a 45-year-old, 19-year veteran of the police department there-also a Christian.  Both men were married, fathers of children.  The 37-year-old suspect was out of work.  He had been convicted of crimes before, but had stayed out of trouble for more than 11 years, and had seemingly turned his life around, becoming a responsible member of the community.

The alleged assailant had been unemployed for more than a year and the family home was about to be foreclosed on.  It is speculated that his financial troubles may have been behind his seeming spiral into violence.

The officer was not only a 19-year veteran patrolman with a spotless record, but he was a pillar of the community.  He was committed in word and deed to improving the quality of life for at-risk urban youth in Vallejo, California.  He volunteered as a basketball coach for the local high school, a community center, and in fact had served as a role model for one of the associate pastors of his alleged slayer’s church.  The community was hit hard, grieving both for the slain officer and the family of the alleged slayer.  It appears that though devout and sincere in his faith and his personal transformation, the alleged assailant was unable to hold it together against the economic strain his family faced.  His church’s general negation of the social crises around them in favor of preparing members for prosperity on earth, and encouraging them in their individual spiritual growth and authority as they await heaven, was unable to stem his penchant for criminal activity and his return to the same when he found the promised prosperity disappearing around him. 

The so-called issues of the Social Gospel are the issues of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The exploitation, abuse and injustice leveled by the rich and powerful against the poor are themes in the burden of the Prophets, the Law of Moses, the compassion of Siddhartha, and several Surahs of the Qur’an. 

The church can spiritualize and ignore the real problems of real human beings all it wants, or like some mainline communions, it can cater to the middle and upper classes and get amnesia about the very people that John Wesley dedicated himself to in England, and Richard Allen in America: The poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and those who were being used as human machines for plantations and the new industrial revolution.  Yet these issues do not go away and will continue to have an adverse effect on our people.  Furthermore God will judge us for this neglect, this apathy, this rush to comfort, acceptability and popularity that we seem so compelled to pursue.

*        *        *

On November 27, 1967, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a Poor People's Campaign to address issues of economic justice and housing for the poor in the United States, aiming itself at rebuilding America's cities . . . . Martin Luther King Jr. labeled the Poor People's Campaign the "second phase," of the civil rights struggle - setting goals such as gathering activists to lobby Congress for an "Economic Bill of Rights," Dr. King also saw a crying need to confront a Congress that demonstrated its "hostility to the poor " - appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

Under the "economic bill of rights" the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with an antipoverty package that included housing and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.  Dr. King pointed out that "the wealthy who own securities have always had a guaranteed income, and the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits."  For this reason he argued that the guaranteed income should be "progressive, set at the median income of society rather than at the bottom," and that it should "automatically increase with inflation."

Dr. King had recently published, Where Do we Go from Here: Chaos of Community (1967). In that book, Dr. King called for the complete economic redistribution of wealth in America.  He wrote further:

          Up to recently, we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative, and fragile family     relationships, which distorted personality development.

Dr. King went on to explain in that same chapter of the book:

          I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to   be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it    directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.  . . .  We are likely to find that the attempt to eliminate the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished....  

          The curse of poverty has no justification in our age . . . . The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

We have now gone full circle.  While King’s birthday celebration approaches the vulgar corporate secularism of Christmas, or of a pre-convention political rump session, where the most opportunistic of people with money and power dominate the platforms proclaiming their allegiance to something nebulously referred to as King’s Dream, most fail to remember his speech of December 24, 1967, in which he stated,
"In 1963...in Washington, D.C....I Tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess...that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare.”

In an interview with NPR regarding the Poor Peoples’ Campaign on Dr. King’s birthday, 2008, the Reverend Joseph Lowery stated:

"The nation became conscious of the fact that it has an expanding poor population," says Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. "It's one thing to have the right to check into the Hiltons and the Marriotts, it's another thing to have the means to check out."
For many of America's poor, there hasn't been much progress in the 40 years since the Poor People's Campaign. In 1968, 25 million people — nearly 13 percent of the population — were living below the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau. In 2006, 36 million people or more than 12 percent of the population were living below the poverty level.
Poverty has been rapidly rising for some time.  The black middle class, in fact the entire American middle class in a recent report from NewsMax, is disappearing all over the country.  Opportunities for higher education are evaporating, even for those who would attend public colleges and universities.  The dropout rate, murder rate and the incarceration rates for black and brown boys and men is outrageous, and growing for black and brown women. 


The ranks of jobless and homeless people are growing exponentially while the gap between rich and poor accelerates. Wealth is more concentrated in the hands of the few. “Pew reported last week that there is a growing rift and resentment between rich and poor in America, due in part to “the underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society.” Pew also reported, “According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, the proportion of overall wealth — a measure that includes home equity, stocks and bonds, and the value of jewelry, furniture and other possessions — held by the top 10 percent of the population increased from 49 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2009.”  Democracy itself has vanished or is vanishing as corporate lobbyists exercise almost complete control over the U. S. House of Representative and the Senate. 




*       *        *
So where are the organizations that are addressing King’s economic vision for America?  Where are the progressive economists, business people, educators, clergy and laity who will collectively lift up his vision for economic democracy in America in 2012?  I’m not simply talking about giving speeches like this one, even though more are certainly needed from our too heavenly-spiritually preoccupied churches, mosques, and synagogues. 

One sign of hope has been the Occupy-Move On Movements.  Yet I have heard so much criticism from clergy and other leaders regarding these movements.  I would challenge those critics, put up or shut up.  It is black people and then brown people in America who are disproportionately losing their homes, unable to send qualified children to college, and lacking the funds and resources to keep our children out of the “cradle to the grave prison pipeline.”  The prison industrial complex is growing rapidly.  Many young lawyers are eager to become ADAs so that they can incarcerate more black and brown, men women and children by any means necessary, using this as a stepping-stone to corporate and political careers.  


A sizable number of this army of attorneys are busy working with banks and mortgage companies, helping them to find legal loopholes whereby they can further exploit and suck dollars away from we who are still managing to hold on to our businesses, jobs and homes.

*        *         *        *

Poverty and Faith
Over the past few years, mega-churches have become more popular in black communities, just as they have in white communities. These mega-churches have amassed influence and wealth partly because of their sheer number of parishioners. Some have created satellite churches and broadcast their gospel on television.
On April 3, 1968, in his famous “Promised Land” sermon, Dr. King said, “It's all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here.  It's all right to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the New Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the New Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, and the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.”
This having been said, I would challenge us to adhere to, trust in, reverence, and rely on God.  We need to turn to the pages of the Bible in order to get ourselves back into focus.  We need to recommit ourselves to our first love.  I have no problem in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is both Lord and Deliverer, the savior, the one that God has chosen to bring light and love and truth and hope to the world.  In one of his 1934 readings, the late Prophet Edgar Cayce spoke of the Christ, "Not as only one, but the only one."


We need people who are unapologetically Christian, instead of this wishy-washy “everything is everything” rhetoric that is driving our children elsewhere.  It is God who advocates for us, who has already commissioned Jesus to lead the hosts of heaven in winning every political and economic battle for us, and who is outraged at the state of our planet, but especially at the state of ease, comfort, entertainment, lazy thinking and the absence of thinking and doing and loving in the church. 




One of the hard lessons I have learned is that those who ignore and minimize the sacred texts do so, not because they consider the words archaic or anachronistic or erroneous, but rather because they would rather not be confronted with the expectations God places on us in the scriptures.  It is easy to criticize fundamentalists and evangelicals for having otherworldly views, but I frankly see no strong commitment to economic justice coming from much of the liberal wing of the church.  Our seminaries are in full retreat, having students focus on something nebulous that the majority culture calls “spirituality.”  I grew up in a church where spirituality meant, “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a flowing stream.” 

In fact people like Jim Wallace of Sojourners and Dr. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., are some of the strongest advocates for economic justice for the poor in America.  Rev. Daughtry is no stranger to us, having worked closely with Rev, Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton and having founded in 1982, the African People's Christian Organization. 

The liberal church of which Dr. King was certainly representative and which nurtured him in his ideological understanding of what God requires, is now marching in lock-step with the rich and powerful under the banner of “neo-liberalism.” The name of its game is accommodation-ism, and it will bend over backwards and bow down to Hell rather than offend its rich classist, heterosexist, racist donors and benefactors and its upper middle class and upper class constituencies.

Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the father of American sociology, was often criticized for being a tad bit elitist and detached.  In 1899, while he was working on his great study, The Philadelphia Negro as a faculty member of Atlanta University, the Wilmington Massacre occurred.  As many as a hundred lives were lost.  Much of the black community in Wilmington, North Carolina known as Brooklyn, had been burned to the ground, and thousands of black residents fled for their lives.

The city had been a bastion of the black middle and upper classes in the south, with a population of 11,324 African Americans and 8,731 whites.   All this was to change overnight.  The Democrats were determined to remove all of the black political appointees that President McKinley had made, in gratitude for the role that African Americans had played in the Spanish-American war.  The Democrats recruited farmers in the outlying areas, whites whose wives were forced to find jobs and work for blacks in the state’s cotton mills in the city. 


Their strategy was to shame whites, just as the Republicans are now doing, into voting for "white economic interests" using racial code language.  With the help of right-wing fringe groups and respectable church liberals like Rebecca Felton of the WCTU, they enflamed the white people of the city and surrounding communities.  Felton quoted her mentor, the vitriolic white supremacist WCTU founder Frances Willard, who had stated publicly that "white women needed to be protected from marauding, inebriated black men," who Williard had also characterized as "fierce beasts." This led to the lynching and mutilation of Samuel Wilkes, which was the catalyst to the massacre.  He was cut, mutilated and parts of his charred remains sold all over the south.  

Du Bois, who was startled by the gruesome murder, had written a sober anti-lynching editorial that he was going to give to Atlanta Constitution’s editor Joel Chandler Harris.  With his walking cane and gloves, Du Bois made his way to the newspaper office, but was stopped short when he passed by a shop on Mitchell Street, where Wilke’s charred knuckles were on display.  It was then that Du Bois realized as he wrote later: “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.

I would challenge all who hear and read these words to consider the state of our race, of our nation, and really ask whether or not we can continue to delay or ignore Dr. King’s challenge of economic justice for America.  I would ask us to consider whether or not the time for detachment and sensible responses is over. Perhaps the Occupy Movement is a cue for us to develop a serious program that continues Dr. King’s work for economic justice in America.  I would challenge us to consider those who are starved, excluded, incarcerated, exploited, and have their dreams dashed by those who are interested in quick profits that leave the people hopeless and powerless.  We cannot keep men, women and children out of the criminal justice system with just good intentions.

I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy (Psalm 140:12).

Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain, to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!  You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and forfeiting your life (Habakkuk 2:9).

So I will come near to you for judgment.  I will be quick to testify against . . . those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me (Malachi 3:5).

What will we do with Dr. King’s call for economic justice in 2012?

Don Guest