Raynard Jackson: Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor
By HHR | September 2nd, 2010 | Category: Featured, General, Opinion/Reviews | 6 comments
By Raynard Jackson
Originally, I wasn’t going to write about radio talk show entertainer Glen Beck’s supposed “March on Washington;” but, because you, my readers, asked me to comment, I will.
The event was called, “Restoring Honor.” Its stated purpose was to be a “celebration of America’s heroes and heritage. So, I have a few questions that I wish Beck would have addressed. You can only restore that which was lost. So, what in Beck’s mind was lost and how is he going to restore it? If it was a “celebration of America’s heroes and heritage,” then why was there no soldier of color participating in any of the activities? All the soldiers were white men. It reminded me of watching the Flintstones and the Jetsons cartoons as a kid—not one Black was ever seen in either. The Flintstones were about the past and the Jetsons were about the future. So, according to Hollywood, Blacks had no past and we don’t have a future. Is that what Beck was trying to restore?
Beck claims he had no idea that August 28th was the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech.” He claimed on his TV show that “conservatives needed to reclaim” the civil rights movement.
So, let me make sure I understand Beck. He claims that God told him to pick this date. So, this same God couldn’t have told him the significance of this date to the civil rights community? Beck was asked by many in the Black community to move the date of his event in deference to our feelings about this date. He refused. But, he wants the Muslims in New York to move the location of their future mosque in deference to him and others who think the location is too close to ground zero. Hmmm, how do you spell hypocrisy? I looked it up in the dictionary and found a picture of Glen Beck!
He wants conservatives to reclaim the civil rights movement. Well, I can’t find any history of Beck being involved in civil rights—either historically, or recently. This is the same person that called a sitting president “a racist…with a deep seated hatred of white people.” The day after his event, he gave a simi-apology for making that statement. But one would have thought if he really was regretful of what he said, he would have used the national stage he had during his event to make the apology. But maybe he didn’t want his white friends in attendance to see him apologize in front of a national audience. Afterall, we wouldn’t want people to call him an “apologist” for America like they say about President Obama.
Remember, you can’t have unity without “u & i.” But everything about Beck does just the opposite. Am I the only Black who felt somewhat uncomfortable during the “Black” portion of the program? This was near the end of the event; before Beck’s self indulgent, meandering, narcissistic, rambling, tortuous speech.
Beck trotted out about 12 Blacks to come on stage for window dressing. But, my good friend, Alveda King (M.L. King’s niece), gave the best speech of the day. I strongly encourage everyone to pull up her speech from the event. In about five minutes, she gave a great recitation of the civil rights movement. After she left the stage, I sent her a text message telling her how proud I was of her for not allowing herself to be used and pimped like a lot of the typical Black Republicans/conservatives!
During this “Black” portion of the program, there were two female gospel singers who were awesome! In watching this portion of the show, I couldn’t help but think about how Blacks seem to always be there to entertain white folks. Of the three awardees, one was Black. But, there were no Blacks from the military, no Black speakers during the white part of the program, nor many Blacks in the audience.
If this was about “reclaiming civil rights,” then why did Beck not say anything about civil rights nor have more meaningful participation from Blacks? I wonder does Beck even have any Black employees on his staff or in his production company? People like him and other conservatives talk a good game about equality, but their actions normally contradict their words.
Be very weary of people like Beck. They have become like the sounding brass or the tinkling cymbal, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
NOTE: The picture is of me and Bernice King—M.L.K.’s daughter
Raynard Jackson is president & CEO of Raynard Jackson & Associates, LLC., a D.C.-public relations/government affairs firm. He is a contributing editor for ExcellStyle Magazine (www.excellstyle.com). For those who use skype (www.skype.com), please add him. The name there is: raynard jackson
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I see that Mr. Jackson views all his thoughts through the prisim of race. That’s not what Dr. King said or intended. But no matter, the race hucksters will distort Dr. King’s words to suit their grievance and victimhood agenda. They’ve got to keeep the racial grievance industry flowing otherwise they have no job nor secure income.
Rewriting history is one of the many offenses that political conservatives are constantly accusing liberals of committing. But no one is guiltier of this transgression than conservatives themselves, who have a particular fondness for rewriting the history of the civil rights movement, especially their opposition to its most visible leader – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the moment Dr. King stepped onto the national stage during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, until he fell to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, political conservatives despised him. In the South, they hated him for trying to end de jure discrimination, and outside of Dixie, they loathed him for trying to end de facto discrimination. As the leading voice of the civil rights movement, Dr. King represented everything that political conservatives opposed.
In the 1980s, political conservatives began to embrace Dr. King, turning to him for moral cover as they waged war against affirmative action and other race-based efforts designed to remedy past and present racial discrimination.
Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, was the key to their about-face. During Dr. King’s most famous speech, he articulated his dream of a colorblind society, one in which his children would “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.”
Political conservatives latched on to Dr. King’s speech, trumpeting his words as evidence that he opposed race-based solutions to race-based problems when in fact he supported them vehemently. Indeed, they re-wrote history – their own history and that of the civil rights movement – as they endeavored to preserve the last vestiges of white privilege.
Today, political conservatives, led by media showmen such as Glenn Beck, are once again turning to Dr. King to deflect charges of racism as they advance their agenda by questioning, among other things, the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president. To mask their own racism, they have turned history on its head, bastardizing Dr. King’s dream.
Political conservatives are not the heirs to Dr. King’s legacy, and to suggest otherwise is not just fanciful, but farcical. Unfortunately, too many Americans don’t know enough about history to separate fact from fiction.
http://www.race-talk.org/?p=5389
Mike ¡¡BRAVO!! ¡¡BRAVISIMO!!
Charlatans and Hucksters for the Ruling Elite is what those J Goebbels propagandists are, nothing more! There M/O has always been Devide & Conquer hence raising the Culture Wars to an art: Gays, Guns and God! Conservatives have had the majority on the SCOTUS for some time now, why haven’t they Overturned Roe v. Wade? ….
Racism is not a respecter of political ideology or philosophical tradition, both sides have unclean hands.
When Bigots Become Reformers – The Progressive Era’s shameful record on race.
The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else.
Today many on the liberal left would like to revive that movement and its aura of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers, speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future, described Progressivism as “one of the country’s great traditions.” Progressives, he told the crowd, “exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern history.”
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917, the very worst of it—disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching—“went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left.
At the heart of Southern’s flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. “At college,” Southern notes, “budding progressives not only read exposés of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science.”
Popular titles included Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and R.W. Shufeldt’s The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of “race suicide,” the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.
Such thinking, which emphasized “expert” opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed “the working man,” “the common man,” or “the people,” he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.
For a good illustration, consider Carter Glass of Virginia. Glass was a Progressive state and U.S. senator and, as chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, one of the major architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of his state’s massive effort to disfranchise black voters. “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” he declared to one journalist. “To remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
Then there was political scientist John R. Commons, an adviser to the Progressive Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M. LaFollette and a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Immigration Commission. Commons, the author of Races and Immigrants in America (1907), criticized immigration on both protectionist grounds (he believed immigrants depressed wages and weakened labor unions) and racist ones (he wrote that the so-called tropical races were “indolent and fickle”).
Woodrow Wilson, whose Progressive presidential legacy includes the Federal Reserve System, a federal loan program for farmers, and an eight-hour workday for railroad employees, segregated the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. “I have recently spent several days in Washington,” the black leader Booker T. Washington wrote during Wilson’s first term, “and I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”
Perhaps the most notorious figure of the era was Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive and inveterate white supremacist. As senator from South Carolina from 1895 to 1918, Tillman stumped for “Free Silver,” the economic panacea of the agrarian populist (and future secretary of state) William Jennings Bryan, whom Tillman repeatedly supported for president. “Pitchfork” Tillman favored such Progressive staples as antitrust laws, railroad regulations, and public education, but felt the latter was fit only for whites. “When you educate a negro,” he brayed, “you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”
Nor did African Americans always fare better among those radicals situated entirely to the left of the Progressives. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, though personally sympathetic to blacks, declared during his 1912 campaign for the presidency, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro.” Other leading radicals offered even less. Writing in the Socialist Democratic Herald, Victor Berger, the leader of the party’s right wing, declared that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many years.” The celebrated left-wing novelist Jack London, covering the 1908 heavyweight title bout between black challenger Jack Johnson and white boxing champ Tommy Burns, filled his New York Herald story with lurid ethnic caricatures and incessant race baiting. “Though he was a committed socialist,” observed Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward, London’s “solidarity with the working class did not extend to black people.”
As Southern thoroughly documents, these examples just begin to scratch the surface. Progressivism was infested with the most repugnant strains of racism. But was there something more, something inherent in Progressivism itself that facilitated the era’s harsh treatment of blacks? According to Southern, who repeatedly maintains that racism derailed “the great promise” of Progressivism, the answer is no. “The ideas of race and color were powerful, controlling elements in progressive social and political thinking,” he argues. “And this fixation on race explains how democratic reform and racism went hand-in-hand.”
That is surely correct, but is it the whole story? As the legal scholar Richard Epstein has noted, “the sad but simple truth is that the Jim Crow resegregation of America depended on a conception of constitutional law that gave property rights short shrift, and showed broad deference to state action under the police power.” Progressivism itself, in other words, granted the state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life while at the same time weakening traditional checks on government power, including property rights and liberty of contract. Such a mixture was ripe for the racist abuse that occurred.
Take the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the South’s Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty. In its 7–1 ruling, the Court upheld segregation in public accommodations so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example, segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in 1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in 1915–16, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in 1934.
No doubt many of those businesses would have excluded or mistreated black customers whatever the law. But in a market free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first place.) The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, granted “free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected.”
Furthermore, this tangled web of regulations, ordinances, codes, and controls was spun during the heyday of Progressivism, precisely when such official actions were least likely to receive any meaningful scrutiny. Southern, despite his otherwise close attention to the many permutations of race and racism, fails to recognize this major defect in the Progressive worldview.
A similar failure handicaps his treatment of one of the era’s rare victories for African Americans. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Louisville ordinance segregating residential housing blocks by race. The case involved a voluntary contract between a white seller and a black buyer for a housing lot located in a majority-white neighborhood. Under the law, the new black owner could not live on the property he had just purchased.
Writing for the Court, Justice William Rufus Day held that “this attempt to prevent the alienation of the property in question to a person of color…is in direct violation of the fundamental law enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution preventing state interference with property rights except by due process of law.”
Yet Southern dismisses this rare and important victory as “hollow” and incorrectly asserts that it “was decided not on the grounds of human rights, but on those of white property rights.” In fact, the judicial recognition of black rights stood at the very center of the decision. Justice Day’s opinion clearly states that the Fourteenth Amendment “operate[s] to qualify and entitle a colored man to acquire property without state legislation discriminating against him solely because of color.”
Nor should Southern’s characterization of this victory as “hollow” pass unchallenged. As the legal scholars David Bernstein and Ilya Somin have argued, the Buchanan ruling played a major though sadly underappreciated role in the burgeoning fight for civil rights. “Buchanan could not force whites to live in the same neighborhood as blacks,” Bernstein and Somin write, “but it did prevent cities from stifling black migration by creating de jure and inflexible boundaries for black neighborhoods, and may have prevented even more damaging legislation.” It is well worth noting, they continue, that the South did not adopt South African–style apartheid at this time, despite widespread white support for such measures.
In addition, Buchanan was the first major Supreme Court victory for the four-year-old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a huge boon for the organization that would go on to win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954), overturning Plessy. W.E.B Du Bois, an NAACP founder and longtime editor of its newsletter, The Crisis, gave Buchanan credit for “the breaking of the backbone of segregation.”
Despite these significant shortcomings, The Progressive Era and Race deserves careful attention. The Progressive movement unleashed, aided, and abetted some of the most destructive forces in 20th-century America. The better we understand this history, the less likely we are to repeat it.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/05/05/when-bigots-become-reformers
Mr. Jackson I am very disappointed. Especially after ready many of your other pieces
As I read, I was waiting for you to call the black folks who attended Uncle Toms but you refrained from such vile and divisive language and you instead chose to equate them to Window Dressing (property) I take offense to you comparing anyone to property you should be ashamed.
As stated above the Progressives did many things but the Conservatives allowed it to Happen.
I feel sorry for you. You use racism to hide your hatred towards others who have never done anything or shown any harm or hatred toward you. Your religion is only for Sundays and then every other day you can forget about it. It unfortunately shows that you truly have no believe in Christ and what he taught which was love one another even your enemies. You choose who you want your enemies to be and if you let that anger fester inside of you it will do nothing but destroy your soul. I hope you can see the good Glenn is trying to do. He prays for our President and all our political leaders even if they are not on the same page as the rest of America and what our constitution proclaims. I hope you can be a little more positive in your messages and stop instilling hatred into the hearts of you readers. Look at yourself first and stop judging others. You are not a judge of Israel and there is only one that can see the real intents of our hearts and even then you can tell a person by their fruits. I’ll get off my soap box now and end my comment!