by Chris Stevenson
One reason to be thankful of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, taken from the pages of "Orders to Kill" by William Pepper: "Dr. King's new commitment to oppose the war became his priority. He told black trade unionist Cleveland Robinson and longtime adviser Stanley Levinson that he was prepared to break with the Johnson Administration regardless of the financial consequences and even personal peril."
You simply can't beat that priceless attitude with a stick, water-hose or anything else. How much in stark contrast have we experienced many black leaders to be since then? What separates Martin Luther King, from a wave of black Lex Luthor Kings is a notable lack of niggardly behavior. No, King wasn't perfect, he had some drama, but comparatively much less baggage. It all starts with attitude, you couldn't buy Martin, Fred Shuttlesworth, Malcolm X, or Medgar Evers. You can conceivably buy black activists today for less than a wooden nickel (black preachers will hold out for a bit more). The leading proponent for that got his start, embarrassingly-enough during King's day. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was described by both close King confidants Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy as appearing in public the day after King's assassination wearing a blood-stained shirt, and claiming it to be the same shirt he had been wearing the previous evening when he held Martin. What does that tell you? Even in our darkest hour, somebody gots to niggerize things.
When I was young, what scared me about King was not King, I was afraid he got us much farther than many blacks would ever appreciate or handle. Today I feel it's gotten much worse. Millions of blacks around the country for example, just got finished celebrating Kwanzaa; an Afrocentric alternative to Christmas based on various aspects of black-on-black love, unity, economic independence, and peace all divided into 7 principles. It was founded by a Ronald McKinley Everett, AKA Maulana Karenga, author, former Professor of African Studies, lecturer, co-founder of a black nationalist group called US or US Organization, and an individual with a pretty violent past. US wasn't an acronym or initial, it stood for the phrase "Us as opposed to Them." They were however sarcastically tagged United Slaves by their more well-known contemporary rivals the Black Panthers.
Black groups like these started the Black Liberation Movement as an eventual successor to the Civil Rights Movement. Another US had different ideas, and expended a lot of time, resources, ideas, and manpower to make sure they would fail; the United States Government. The Panthers and US were manipulated to fight each other by a government agency more secretive than Cointelpro. This resulted in a shootout in 1969 at UCLA and the deaths of Panthers Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, and John Huggins. Soon after the FBI caused some division through letters written by them under the name of either an US member or Panther depending on where it was headed (this of course was in addition to the letters US intelligence distributed between the Panthers that instigated the East Coast/West Coast internal schism). Karenga, for all his high intellect and articulateness always seemed to fall for these divisive tricks with great zeal (he claims he was influenced by the CIA's MK ULTRA program, as opposed to my suspicions of typical black false-importance).
On one occasion Karenga was known to have tortured 2 black females; Deborah Jones and Gail Davis by beating them with an electrical cord and a karate baton while both were naked. This in addition to holding a soldering iron to their skin and beating them with a toaster according to testimony from a co-defendant. Of course Karenga did time, but managed to talk his way into an early release. His prison psychological evaluation considered him delusional and schizophrenic, having been observed talking to his blanket and believing himself to be under constant attack by dive-bombers.
Infiltration into black movements is certainly nothing new, J. Edgar Hoover literally invented this practice from the days of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm's father Earl Little and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Men like these were focused, no-nonsense and lacking in selfish-sadistic-malice. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Karenga today or Kwanzaa and Christmas has an equally or worse suspect beginning if you look into it. But such flaws within some black leaders do nothing but prove to me that being great talkers but poor characters, is putting the cart before the horse. This appointing oneself a legend in one's own mind can lead to narcissism, a complete loss of the original goal and insanity. A latent lingering love of white people and they're "nice things (home, neighborhood, benefits, pension)" seems to be the common thread covertly motivating many of us in spite of outward loud proclamations of pro-blackness. And I do believe that's a major flaw with collective black leadership today.
Black leaders adopting Internal Integration would eventually influence black youths and street gangs to come together.
I would like to declare officially that African Americans no longer need integration. We've integrated as far as we can go, it is no longer an undiscovered country. We marched on Washington, some of us are even marching on Wall Street with whites right now. What blacks need most urgently is an Internal Integration; stop killing each other, stop fighting each other, stop disrespecting each other, stop being jealous of each other, and stop gaming each other. That's right we need a March on Jefferson Avenue. White conservatives and racists need to learn to integrate with us, let them worry about integration.
Part of the problem with integration is the impression long ago that if we begin to look and think more like white people, they would eventually be more accepting of us. That's the basic premise behind it. At some point in history this is what was told to our ancestors, and we lost much time believing it. Even though blacks have done such a great job of integrating so much into white society that our kids and grandkids would prefer shooting one of us, than one of them, the concept is conspicuously outdated. In place of the black activists and religious leaders of yesterday are men of false consciousness and delusion today and a larger group of followers who are mostly good people, but more gullible, less demanding, and too relaxed or distracted to notice the integral, moral disparity between black leaders of Martin's day, and their leaders today.
Chris Stevenson is a regular columnist for blackcommentator, Political Affairs Magazine, and a syndicated columnist. Follow him on Twitter, and Facebook, you don't have to join any of them. Watch his video commentary Policy & Prejudice and The Network for clbTV. Sign his Petition to permanently Abolish the Death Penalty @ Change.org. Respond to him on the link below.
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