A Unique and Different View of the 2013 March on Washington

 Reflecting Pool. 1963 March on Washington.

When the original March on Washington occurred, I was serving overseas in Korea as a soldier in the U.S. Army. If I was in this country, I would have personally been at the March.

Back in 1963, there is no cable television, personal computers, the Internet, and even television itself was still in his early childhood years. We didn’t have a television set in our barracks and took thirty days to get a letter from home. No one had a radio except the company commander and no one had a telephone. When Kennedy was murdered, we were put on alert, all of our leaves were canceled, but it wasn’t until a day later that we learned that he was assassinated by a US citizen.

In this historical context, Jim Crow laws were still the norm in the South, the Mason-Dixon Line still existed, and white racist Democrat governors ruled the Southern states. What Black Americans need to understand today that by voting overwhelmingly Democratic, we are perpetuating the racist practices that the racist Democrat governors who ruled the South wanted to exist, but who then carried out their practices overtly, now the Democrats, nationwide, carry them out covertly.

It was the Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower who pushed through both the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. Prior to 1957, during the presidential campaign of 1956, the Republican platform had expressly endorsed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Democratic platform did not.

President Eisenhower also established the Civil Rights Commission and it was as Eisenhower, not Truman,who fully desegregated the military. I could go on about how the Republicans had to constantly fight against the white racist Democrats in an effort to secure the Civil Rights of Black Americans, but I now want to make an observation about this 2013 March on Washington commemoration.

I considered it to be downright disrespectful and politically stupid that no prominent Republicans were invited to speak at this commemoration. Rather two former presidents were invited – – the grossly incompetent and pathetic, Jimmy Carter and the morally decrepit, Bill Clinton – – both were born and raised in the Jim Crow South and exhibited the typical racist characteristics, personality, and beliefs that white folks had who came to age during that era. Indeed, Clinton admits that the racist, J. William Fullbright, was his mentor. And there’s a reason why the Jimmy Carter administration was left out of the “Butler” movie. Someone should ask Lee Daniels why?

Let me conclude on a note that neither this nation, nor the world would have known or experience the grace and competence of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice if it wasn’t for the administrations of Ronald Reagan and both George H W Bush and George W. Bush. Because of their backgrounds and views, neither Carter nor Clinton probably never even considered doing something like that.