As we mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which came about mainly as a result of the efforts by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lynden B. Johnson, let it be known that I'm not the first person in history to call it a complete disaster, for Negroes. Of course, I am well aware at this point in history that speaking about the plight of Black people in America is like talking about the smog in China—nobody cares. Which is why I’m not going to talk about the plight of Black people, as it pertains to America’s failings, no, my message is directed toward the failures of Dr. King, the abject loss of power, and a people who continue to allow themselves to get played, as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A year before, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his celebrated I Have a Dream speech, in which he revealed many of his heartfelt longings/fantasies that, in reality, never had a chance of being realized. I believe that the Reverend's dreams were immediately squashed, and with extreme prejudice, I might add, by the very people he intended to benefit the most—Blacks. The best example I can offer is this:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!” Dr. King. I Have A Dream, speech 1963
The Black Power/Black Culture, Black People Movement put an end to that dream real fast by doing precisely the opposite, embracing an ideology based on physical appearances, not the content of character. What did it lead to? I think the entirety of so-called Black Culture in America can be summed up in the events that took place on the Fourth of July in Chicago, with 82 people shot and 16 dead. Add these to the millions of Blacks shot—yes, millions shot and murdered by Blacks over the last fifty years, which then led to the deterioration of Black neighborhoods, the destruction of the Black family, and alarming illiteracy rates among Black teenagers and young adults.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say the survival of two or three generations of so-called Black People is at stake, right here, right now! Especially when you consider the current state of Blacks being played by their elected messiah, in the form of America’s love affair with the new and improved worker class from south of the border.
While the 1963 March on Washington was the feel-good event of the decade for just about everyone who attended, in reality, it was at best a farce, worse, a plot to derail the one chance Negroes had at achieving equality in America. It is well known that Malcolm X forbade Nation of Islam members from attending what he referred to as the "farce on Washington."
I was eleven years old, living in a predominantly Negro neighborhood, being bused to a predominantly white school at the time, and very aware of what was happening in the diaspora. What Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, then head of S.N.C.C., who was also against the Civil Rights Act knew at the time was that in America, money talks.
Understand, the Civil Rights Act took the idea of filing a class-action lawsuit against the state of Texas and the rest of the southern states, right off the table. Clearly, the Constitutional rights of a certain class of American citizens had been violated merely by enacting Jim Crow Laws in the first place. A class-action lawsuit would have provided the much-needed capital for achieving equality. Here it is, plain as the noses on our faces;
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Amendment XIV-U.S. Constitution
Please don't take my word for it. Here's what Thurgood Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, had to say;
"The rights of minorities have to be protected by our Constitution. As to whether I, as an individual, am being deprived of my rights, is not legislative, but judicial.” Thurgood Marshall, from Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Carl T. Rowan Paragraph 2 - page 201
Being deprived of your rights, "Not legislative (Civil Rights Act of 1964), but judicial," which means courts of law! Think I'm pitching a pipe dream? Then name a single state, city, or local jurisdiction that was sued for a monetary settlement on behalf of all Negroes, because of a Jim Crow Law? Come on... think about the thousands of court cases alone that were conducted against Negroes without a jury of their peers, or being denied a trial at all, and instead lynched in the middle of the night? And that's just the beginning. Also consider the mountain of damning evidence in the form of actual laws and amendments to State Constitutions. There was absolutely no defense whatsoever!
Do you understand the gravity of the situation for those who saw the possibility of Negroes suing? We’re talking about a lawsuit that would have literally bankrupted the South, still reeling from losing the war. My point is that, just the mere threat of a class-action lawsuit, if nothing else, would have led to groundbreaking concessions for Negroes—something more than a treaty—and then to Johnson's Great Society that followed. But no such threat was ever made.
Think about it; we live in the most litigious country on the face of this earth, and a gift-wrapped lawsuit that could have changed the lives of Negroes for the better was never even presented before a court of law? The groundwork had already been laid by the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Thurgood Marshall understood what was at stake. Here he is speaking about the significance of Brown v. Board of Education:
“Do you know what we’re up against?” Marshall asked rhetorically. “The weight of bad court decisions over the century. Hell, we’re fighting Chief Justice Taney.” From: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall, by Carle T. Rowan, 1993, p. 205 1st paragraph
If you are unfamiliar with Chief Justice Taney’s reference, for more than one hundred years, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Dred Scott majority decision (1857) was the ghost in the room, so to speak, undermining the integrity of the XIV Amendment in the South. The South had completely rejected the notion that Negroes were citizens of the United States and equal to any White man, as evidenced by the continuation of the Jim Crow Laws.
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was crucial for the South—they had to win to continue living in a dream world they created for themselves—a world where Negroes lived under the boot of white men. The ruling for Brown left them in a state of panic, knowing the possible consequences.
From Chief Justice Taney's majority decision:
"They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far, inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.
“He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion."
When you live in a country where the ruling authority believes and acts against you according to the belief system above, for god’s sake, you don't go making treaties with people like this or playing the fool begging for favors and handouts—you sue the hell out of them and walk away with the cash! But when you consider that the president in 1964 was Lyndon B. Johnson, from perhaps thee most racist state in the union with thee most to lose, then what I have to say, might not seem so far-fetched. Texas was so racist that when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in September of 1863, they didn't inform slaves they were free until June of 1865, two years later!
Ironically, today, it's a Holiday celebrated by Blacks called Juneteenth, which is actually celebrated on June 19th, go figure. But the real tragedy here is that Blacks are celebrating when they should have sued the crap out of the state of Texas a long time ago, for not only ignoring Federal Law, but for the violations of their Constitutional rights. The 14th Amendment was passed in 1864.
Folks, I’m a college dropout, not a lawyer—this is basic math—it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. President Johnson had a reputation for being a pretty crafty southern Democrat, capable of getting his way. What he needed was a capitulating Negro he could use for an agenda that would solve America's "Negro problem" for years to come, a way to get them back on the plantation picking government checks, instead of cotton. Those government checks would make billionaires out of drug dealers, liquor store owners, fast food joints selling death by the bite, sneaker companies, the music business, and prison systems filled with Y.B.M.s, (young, black males), as a result. And let us not forget the hospitals and undertakers. Welcome to Johnson's Great Society—class-action lawsuit neutralized.
To make Johnson's dream come true would require the services of a dreamer—a Negro who could capture the hearts and minds of Whites, Negroes, Jews, and the world. A man he could mold and shape. Preferably, a religious leader, because just as the Negro's former masr' understood, Negroes could be controlled through the religion they were taught on the plantation—the religion of death, sinners, suffering, and salvation after you die—Christianity! It sold the ideology that plantation life, with all its misery and hard work, was all a slave deserved from cradle to grave. Spirituals helped them work faster, in harmony, and without complaining. The commandments and religious hierarchy, like Saint Paul and the fear of the Lord, kept them in a state of submission to power. It is my opinion that the Equal Rights Movement was hijacked by the Civil Rights Movement and religion.
"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." Dr. King’s, “I Have a Dream Speech.”
He might as well have just said, 'Gobble-de-goop, goobbally-gop," for all that was worth. It's just more religious platitudes that haven't yet proved effective in building the dreams of a people. Yet the pure resonance of Dr. King's voice and his poetic, Southern preacher style made everything he said sound like it made sense.
"I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racist-with. its governor, having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification…” Dr. King
If everyone on planet earth knew just how bad Alabama was, as well as its racist Governor George Wallace, then why weren't these people getting sued?
See what I'm getting at? Choice 1: A Civil Rights Act and no money out-right to start a new life, while you're getting the boot into the heart of Capitalism?
Or…
Choice 2: A Class Action Lawsuit that would have put a lump sum of actual cash in hand, to build a new life? Don't believe for a second that people weren't discussing the latter. But like all political intrigues, where great sums of money are involved, the solution is always in finding the perfect patsy to convince the people of the rightness of the masr's actions. Preferably, this person is afflicted with substantial flaws that could be exploited and used against him in the court of public opinion.
So, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I. went to work. Most men in positions of power are easy targets for sexual discrepancies. It didn't take long to find out that Dr. King liked to indulge in extramarital affairs—it was his way of relaxing. People have been talking about it and not talking about it for years. Most of us learned about it in David Garrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the time, J. Edgar was good enough to send audiotapes of hotel trysts to Dr. King’s wife, Coretta.
The point is, Dr. King was terrified the public would find out. I mean, he was a minister, and even though everyone knows ministers often dip into the parishioners’ pool, the White folk and the American press would have had a field day, especially since a few of his affairs were reported to have involved white women. There was also talk of plagiarism and his dissertation for the doctorate he received from Boston University. Sadly, years later, a Boston U. panel did in fact find such evidence.
Again, the point is that information is king to those who do dirty deeds. How much did Dr. King really know about the efforts to steer him in the direction of a Civil Rights Act that would thwart a class-action lawsuit? No one really knows. All we have are the results—no class-action lawsuit, followed by a stifling, murderous, racist ideology called Blackness.
There's a certain irony when comparing Dr. King's dreams to the shattered reality that exists within the Black community today. In fact, the speech doesn't say anything about Negroes gaining in economic strength or striving to become a valuable force for all that is good and strong in America. Nor did he dream that one day Negro children would stand side by side with all the little children of the world, achieving excellence in education and skills they can take into the future. No, instead his dreams consisted of platitude after platitude, delivered eloquently, but sorely lacking in substance.
The one thing he said that actually came true was the cashing of the checks part, but in the case of Blacks, it was for having babies and kicking the fathers out of the house throughout the 1970s and 1980s to get the checks. With Johnson's Great Society, the Black family began to disintegrate and Y.B.M.s reverted to a slave mentality that said; 'your children don't belong to you; they belong to masr', which in this case, was the Federal government.'
Listening to Dr. King's speech again, after all these years, I gotta tell you it's packed with a lot of completely false beliefs about the position of Negroes in America, and what it would take to actually rise up from the so-called corners of American society.
"In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
To begin with, Chief Justice Roger B. was correct in asserting the framers of the original Constitution did not have the Negro in mind when they were talking about all men being equal, seeing that they all owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln admitted to never envisioning a moment in time when the Negro and White men would be equal upon this soil. Again, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney:
"These laws show, too plainly to be misunderstood, the degraded condition of this unhappy race. They were still in force when the Revolution began and are a faithful index to the state of feeling towards the class of persons of whom they speak, and of the position they occupied throughout the thirteen colonies, in the eyes and thoughts of the men who framed the Declaration of Independence and established the State Constitutions and Governments.
They show that a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery, and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power, and which they then looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings, that intermarriages between white persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as crimes, not only in the parties, but in the person who joined them in marriage.
And no distinction in this respect was made between the free Negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race."
“And no distinction in this respect was made between the free Negro or mulatto and the slave.” The idea that Chief Justice Taney's America would be cashing any checks presented to it by Negroes, was just that, a dream. History has proved that the only way you succeed in America is with a really excellent cadre of lawyers. The N.A.A.C.P. had some of the best in the world, but Dr. King had a better plan—President Johnson’s solution.
The whole sordid mess has always reeked of capitulation, back-room deals, and outright betrayal to screw a people out of their right to seek legal redress, for thousands of civil rights violations over a one-hundred-year period. And one must completely disregard the notion of reparations for slavery, especially since the United States wasn’t actually breaking any laws—slavery was legal in most of the world and still is. But the creation of laws designed to impede the Constitutional rights of a particular class of American citizens is another matter indeed. Remember, the 14th Amendment specifically defined a citizen as “a person born,” which, unlike the original document, included Negroes. And all citizens have the right to seek legal and monetary redress, as Thurgood Marshall referenced when he mentioned Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.
Today, we actually call Dr. King a hero for undermining one of the greatest victories the Negro had on this soil, since the Emancipation Proclamation. A few years later, the angry, racist ideology of Blackness sprang from a collective frustration that turned into burning anger over seeing one dream after another fade away, like smoke in the rain.
And while we’re speaking of dreams fading like smoke in the rain, welcome to Obama’s great new America, and getting played once again!
Written by,
Herman Williams 3rd
