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Guest Editorial

Dr. King’s Voting Rights Legacy Under Attack

“No nation can long continue to flourish or to find its way to a better society while it allows any one of its citizens…to be denied the right to participate in the most fundamental of all privileges of democracy—the right to vote.” .—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

BY MARC H. MORIAL

On Monday, January 16th, America celebrated what would have been the 83rd birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The day will be marked from coast-to-coast with parades, speeches, and pilgrimages to the new King Memorial on the National Mall. But in the midst of this outpouring of praise, there is a sinister movement afoot to undo one of Dr. King’s hardest fought victories—the removal of discriminatory barriers to voting and the passage of the Voting Rights Act signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

In Dr. King’s day, billy clubs, cattle prods and guns kept African Americans away from the polls. Today, new voter restriction laws on the books or in the works in at least 34 states could deny the right to vote to more than 5 million Americans this year. These laws include new photo ID requirements, elimination of early voting, bans on voting by out-of-state college students, and rollbacks of voting rights for ex-felons who have paid their debts to society. Florida has even eliminated voting on the Sunday before Election Day which has traditionally been a day when African American churches organized “souls to the polls” drives for their congregations.

The mostly conservative proponents of these new laws claim they are meant to prevent widespread fraud—the casting of ballots by people who are not legally eligible to vote. But both the Bush and Obama Justice Departments have looked and not found significant voter fraud in American elections. So let’s be clear—the real reason behind this spate of new laws is to suppress the votes of people likely to support progressive candidates and issues—African Americans, Latinos, young people, the elderly and people with disabilities. This is unconscionable. It is un-American. And it dishonors the sacrifices of generations of Americans who have fought and died to extend the right to vote to every citizen.

Fortunately, a growing number of Americans are fighting back. On December 10th, the National Urban League joined the NAACP and a coalition of civil rights groups at a “Stand for Freedom” march and rally at the United Nations to protest this blatant attack on voting rights. Attorney General Eric Holder has also expressed concern about the legality of some of these new laws. Recently, the Justice Department struck down a voter ID law in South Carolina and Holder promises to continue to monitor these attempts and stop them when they violate the law. But beating back these efforts will require citizen vigilance and action.

In a recent speech at the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, Holder urged Americans to “Speak out. Raise awareness about what’s at stake. Call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and… urge policymakers at every level to reevaluate our election systems—and to reform them in ways that encourage, not limit, participation.”

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League.

An Apology To Dr. King

BY EARL G. GRAVES, SR.

Today, more than four decades after his death, the legacy and contributions of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the sacrifices he made to bring justice to African Americans and to challenge America to live up to its ideals, are being celebrated more than ever before. King’s birthday has been recognized as a federal holiday since 1986. More recently, King is the subject of a powerful new Broadway play, The Mountaintop, starring A-list actors Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, located at the Lorraine Motel, the site of King’s assassination in 1968, has just unveiled an extensive makeover campaign. And earlier this year, we celebrated the establishment of the King Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., not far from where a living symbol of King’s legacy, Barack Obama, is finishing his first term as president of the United States of America.

It’s fair to say that we have done justice to King’s memory. But the truth is America has not done justice to his dream. In fact, I and the rest of King’s generation, now between the ages of 70 and 85, owe King an apology. Due to our lack of leadership and accountability, and despite the conspicuous success of a minority of African Americans, we have failed to do what it takes to lead our people to the promised land of freedom, equality, and the full measure of the American dream.

King’s dream was about equal opportunity and economic justice for all black Americans, not just an exceptional few. After making progress toward those goals into the late í80s, we somehow lost our desire to pursue King’s agenda. Ultimately, we simply stopped fighting, as if we no longer believed that what King died for was worth continuing to sacrifice and fight for. And for that, Dr. King, I am sorry. You left us with an example and a challenge to make a better world for our children. And we’ve failed you.

The evidence shows that our failure is as complete as it is indisputable. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, American education remains largely segregated by race, with black children bearing the brunt of failing public schools. We’re failing King in economic justice. Today, the wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans is wider than ever, and black-owned businesses remain largely excluded from economic power centers-from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street and Madison Avenue. The quality of life for African Americans in our urban centers has hardly improved, and in many cases, has worsened, since many urban areas were destroyed by riots in the aftermath of King’s assassination. Sadly, in nearly every area, from healthcare outcomes to high school drop-out rates to entire generations of African Americans trapped in our prison system, the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren is no better than the one we inherited.

I was assigned by Sen. Robert Kennedy to assist Coretta Scott King with getting her slain husband’s body from Memphis to Atlanta. I know intimately the ultimate sacrifice that King made-based on the promise of future generations-so that we would have the opportunities that we enjoy today. It’s a promise we have failed to keep.

Our fight for freedom and justice is not over. We have not won. Memorials aside, my generation owes an apology to King for having dropped the baton, for not taking the torch he lit and running with it. Now, it is up to our children and grandchildren to continue the fight to ensure that Kingís dream is deferred no longer, and that all African Americans, not just a select, privileged, or fortunate few, reach the promised land of freedom, equality, justice, and opportunity.

Visit http://www.blackenterprise.com/2012/01/16/an-apology-to-dr-king/ to link.

Earl G. Graves, Sr. is founder & publisher of BLACK ENTERPRISE Magazine.

Political Race Baiting

BY JUDGE GREG MATHIS

The 2008 election of Barak Obama to the United States presidency gave many of us hope that, indeed, American issues of race—and how it relates to politics—had somewhat diminished. We knew that we weren’t yet a ‘post racial’ society, but we believed that Obama’s election marked a giant leap forward. Fast forward to 2012: the presidential race is heating up and Republican candidates are trying to establish ground in a crowded field. Comments by some of the presidential hopefuls clearly demonstrate that, although voters may have been able to look beyond race, our candidates are having a hard time doing the same.

Republican Presidential candidate and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, while speaking on the campaign trail about so-called entitled programs like Medicaid and food stamps, commented that he ‘want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money’. Santorum has backed off of those

To add insult to injury, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently stated that he was going to travel to the NAACP convention to “tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”

Santorum and Gingrich, with their statements, have put black face on programs that provide necessary assistance to the needy. This harkens back to Ronald Reagan who, while running for president in 1976, spoke of the mythical welfare queen who, in his descriptions, was African-American and a drain on society.

Like Reagan, Santorum and Gingrich are flat out misinformed. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of entitlement program beneficiaries are white. Over 60-percent of welfare recipients are white— 33-percent are black—and whites receive 34-percent of federal food assistance while African-Americans receive 22-percent.

Far too often, race baiting in political campaigns has been used as a way to appeal to the latent racist sentiments of voters. By playing off of people’s fears, candidates try to grow their popularity and, hopefully, sweep into office. We’ve come too far in society for politics to revert back to these tactics. While Obama’s history-making victory may have shown how much we’ve grown, these recent developments show just how much more work we have to do.