A Natural Rights Movement Must Further Dr. King's Dream

July 20, 2010 at 9:31 am | Posted in NewsRealBlog | Leave a comment
Tags: Aveda King, Black History Month, civil rights, Civil Rights Movement, glenn beck, Martin Luther King Jr., Mike Wallace, Morgan Freeman, Natural Law, natural rights, Racism, redistribution of wealth, Socialism, Wealth Redistribution

by Walter Scott Hudson, contributed to NewsReal Blog

In a 2005 interview with 60 Minutes, actor Morgan Freeman took Mike Wallace completely aback by calling Black History Month “ridiculous.” Freeman affirmed the condescending nature of the commemoration by prompting Wallace to confess no desire for a “Jewish History Month.”

“Black history is American history,” Freeman proclaimed. When a confounded Wallace asked how else to combat racism, Freeman’s answer came without a moment’s hesitation.

Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman.

This obscure moment in pop culture history echoes a lost sentiment from the Civil Rights Movement. Like Freeman, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., sought regard as a man, not a black man. To the Left, such respect is unacceptable, because it eliminates balkanization and diffuses useful tensions.

The goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to end institutionalized racism. In the wake of J. Christian Adam’s recent testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which revealed a de facto policy of discrimination by the Department of Justice against white voters, we see that many on the Left have pursued a different goal. They have erected a new institution of racism against whites. As the Civil Rights Movement fought discrimination against blacks, a new movement must rise against this fresh disgrace.

As Glenn Beck highlighted on his television show Friday afternoon, there have been pervasive attempts to revise Civil Rights Era history to exclude or minimize Dr. King’s advocacy of equal justice under the law. In May, while speaking to a crowd in Danbury, Connecticut, Al Sharpton slandered King’s legacy.

Someone was saying to me the other day, “Reverend Sharpton, we’ve got an African-American president. We’ve achieved the dream of Dr. King.” And I told them that was not Dr. King’s dream… The dream was not to put one black family in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody’s house.

King did flirt with socialist rhetoric, calling for “a radical redistribution of political and economic power.” However, when one considers those words in their historical context – a society where racial discrimination was institutionalized by law – equal treatment was radical redistribution of power.

Equal treatment was not redistribution of wealth, or an encroachment upon individual liberties. No comprehensive consideration of King’s life suggests he sought more for blacks than their due.

Read on at NewsRealBlog…

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