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How demagogues distort America's racist history

Alicia Colon

By Alicia Colon

Published Sept. 8, 2014

How demagogues distort America's racist history
When I worked for Virgin Atlantic Airlines many years ago, I edited an employee newsletter called The Virgin Scoop. I would interview some of the employees who related their intriguing backgrounds and one of the most intriguing was Laura Webb Childress. She was once a part of an R&B group-The Bobbettes who had one major hit in the '50's- Mr. Lee. I was fascinated by her recounts of her touring experience in the segregated South as a young teen. I tried to interest her in allowing me to write a bio of the group but she couldn't get the surviving members to agree. One member of the Bobbettes, Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in NJ in 1980. Emma Pought is the sole survivor and Laura succumbed to colon cancer in 2011.

It's hard to tell if what she told me then was the truth or just the embellishment of a teenage girl but Laura described travelling in tour buses and being told not to look out the window at the bodies of men hanging from the trees. Although Laura related the story in a blase manner as if it was no big thing, I could imagine how frightened she would have been since we grew up in the same inner city where lynchings were verbal not physical. Whether Laura actually witnessed those bodies is irrelevant. The lynchings happened; there is overwhelming photographic documentation for the crimes committed against the black community in the South but it is despicable for today's race hustlers to compare these victims with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. What a slap in the face for all those civil rights advocates who marched and fought with courage for the simple rights given to them in the constitution amended by a bloody Civil War.

It's absolutely amazing that Harvard is still considered a primo institution when it maintains on faculty the likes of Professor Charles Ogletree` who compared the Ferguson shooting to the assassination of Martin Luther King. He also said, ""This reminds us of exactly what happened years ago when I was a young kid to the great man Emmett Till, the young kid who was killed in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman."

Mr. Ogletree should be aware that Emmett Till did not live to be a great man because he was murdered at 14 but his legacy is that the acquittal of his murderers launched the civil rights movement of the '60's. If he is hoping that the death of Michael Brown will launch a new civil rights drive, he is sadly mistaken as is Gwen Ifil of PBS who said of Ferguson, "There's a new civil-rights movement which has sprung up."

It is blasphemous to compare Emmett Till, Medger Evers and MLK to teenagers Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin who both chose unwisely to attack their killers and who were probably under the influence of marijuana. It is also historically stupid to compare today's police force with the Bull Connor law enforcement machine of the 1960's South. I am willing to bet that if the mainstream media had ever bothered to interview any of the Ferguson rioters or looters and asked them about Bull Connor, they would have answered, "Huh?" All that these denizens of the inner city know about their civil rights history has been filtered through the sound bites of racial demagogues and their cohorts in the mainstream media.

Bull Connor was the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama during the American Civil Rights Movement and this office gave him oversight of the police and fire departments. Connor would use fire hoses and police attack dogs against the demonstrators some of whom had children with them. Marvin Gaye's video of his song,"What's Going On" is just one of many reminders of the brutality of Connor's regime. The photos and eyewitness stories of the horrors of that period is what has filtered down to the black community without any details of who was responsible for them.

Bull Connor was a Democrat as were the segregationists in power in the 1960's South; e.g. George Wallace, Lester Maddox. Never once do we hear the historical connection between the KKK and the Democrat Party which founded it. This sustenance of ignorance can only be the consequence of a public education system that filters out any truth that that exposes the venality of a Marxist agenda.

The Democrat Party has won the allegiance of the black community without ever having improved their lives in a meaningful way other then providing them with government checks from Uncle Sam's plantation. In essence, blacks are merely a political instrument that keeps that party in power.

In truth, there is only one legitimate civil rights organization that played a significant role in the movement and is still functioning today. It isn't the NAACP which is just an adjunct of the Democrat Party. It is the Congress of Racial Equality aka C.O.R.E. Because it is truly bipartisan, it has been ignored by the mainstream media but it continues to do yeoman work on behalf of the black community and all other communities in need of help. Three of its members were the civil rights activists murdered in Mississippi during that turbulent period and were the basis of that feature film, "Mississippi burning." It is still chaired by the honorable Roy Innis who can be seen on YouTube decking Al Sharpton on a television program. Although they were once friends during the Civil Rights Movement, it soon became clear to Mr. Innis that Sharpton was involved with self promotion rather than valid issues. Sharpton tried to get Mr. Innis involved in the Tawanna Brawley hoax and sought his help but Innis was appalled at the deceit and refused.

C.O.R.E. has been involved in global programs that assist African farmers to become independent by learning modern technology. It holds an annual Health Care Festival aimed at disseminating information on the various health care opportunities available. Attractions include free Blood Pressure and diabetes testing. Seminars and workshops conducted by health care professionals, food and entertainment will be conducted in Times Square. Also in New York, it partnered with Cabrini hospital to offer free 64 slice heart scans that would detect heart defects that caused fatal attacks for young athletes. When did we hear anything this positive from the NAACP? If you compare these real achievements with that of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, you'll find that the only deficit that C.O.R.E has is in organizing protests. You will not see C.O.R.E in Ferguson, MO or Staten Island, NY.

Its achievements are remarkable but unheralded in the media because C.O.R.E. has received help from prominent conservatives. Check the events page at www.core-online.org.

Until we see real progress in education in the inner-city, minority communities will be subject to the lies and distortions by leftwing politicians and their minions in the media.

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