On January 16th, I attended the 22nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. dinner sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. Held in the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, suffice it to say, I had an opportunity to meet a large number of very prominent americans.
The keynote speaker was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who delivered a fairly pro-forma speech on the meaning of Dr. King's life, but what interested me were the many representatives of some of the nation's most important corporations who have been longtime CORE supporters.
In an era when corporate america is unfailingly depicted as exploiters and evil, companies like ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Northstar- Foley Contracting, Coca-Cola, Mutual of america, L'Oreal USa, and so many others were represented. Rarely, if ever, does the public learn that every corporate sponsor of CORE has a long record of humanitarian service.
Because its political and social philosophy is conservative, CORE is an afro-american organization that gets very little notice in the media for its own programs to improve the lives of blacks in america and around the world.
Indeed, it's founder, Roy Innis, in greeting the several hundred guests, took special notice of the tide of "indecency" that is so frequently identified as black culture in the form of rap music, the ways blacks permit themselves to be portrayed in films and on television, and what too often passes for humor among black comedians. He decried this trend and called on the Black community in america to reject it.
This kind of criticism is not known to the wider public because the media wants to focus on people like Jesse Jackson, al Sharpton, and, on the same day as the dinner, comments by New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, who blamed Hurricane Katrina as God's retribution to the Bush administration for the liberation of Iraq and the subsequent effort to assist Iraqis establish a democratic nation. Nagin then went on to say that New Orleans would be "chocolate at the end of the day…this city will be a majority african-american city," said Nagin. "It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way."
Let be said that Ray Nagin is an idiot. and a bigot. His performance before, during and after Katrina was a disgrace. at least he is consistent.
While Mayor Nagin was grabbing headlines in New Orleans as the Big Easy's new prophet of God, in New York at the CORE dinner, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi was accepting an award to the people of that State. In that unique Southern drawl of his, he related to the multi-racial audience gathered to celebrate Dr. King, how proud he was of Mississippi's people who came together to help each other regardless of race, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, after Katrina's rampage. He told the audience he was proud that Mississippi had the highest number of blacks elected to public office of any U.S. state. I looked in vein for any media coverage of the Governor's comments, nor was there mention of any of the other proceedings of the 22-year-old event.
also while the attendees and honorees at the CORE dinner were breaking bread together, Sen. Hillary Clinton, a carpetbagger from arkansas who now claims New York as her political base, was addressing an audience, telling them that the House of Representatives was a Republican "plantation", with all the attendant connotations of that description. She apparently forgot that the Democrat Party ran Congress for some 40 years before the Republican Revolution of 1994, insuring that segregation and poll taxes would be the rule of law in many Southern States.
Finally, on the same day, former Vice President albert Gore, Jr., was declaring that the President should be impeached or at least investigated for tapping the phone calls of potential enemies of the United States calling from overseas to perhaps plot the deaths of americans. Since losing his bid to become the nation's most certifiably crazy president, Gore has never lost an opportunity to make a complete fool of himself.
In sum, those Democrats elected to positions of leadership around the nation managed to disgrace themselves in various paroxysms of stupidity and bigotry to remind the rest of us why the Republicans are, indeed, in control of the White House and Congress, and why decent, hardworking afro-americans should look to organizations like CORE to represent them.
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