Martin Luther and Coretta King and the Victim Industry
By Mary Mostert (02/14/06)
Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta, were people of my generation. As young people born and raised in the segregated South we were all concerned about making changes in the illogical and backward culture of segregation. The Kings were black, and I was white. Martin and I were born in different Southern states 3 weeks apart.
Coretta was a couple of years older but she and I had a somewhat similar background. We both lived in Alabama as children, we both walked to a one room school for at least part of our school years, we both wanted to be musicians, we both were good students, and we were both opponents of the segregation system we grew up in.
However, Coretta came from a well to do family, had a supportive mother and father and I came from a broken home and was very poor. At sixteen I graduated from high school and got a job as a housemaid that paid for a semester in college before having to drop out of school for lack of money.
Coretta was able to graduate from Antioch College in Ohio with a B.A. in music and education and went on to study concert singing at New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She met Martin Luther King in Boston as he was finishing his Ph.D. at Boston University. Martin was the third generation in his family to receive a college degree from Morehouse College in Georgia.
In 1962 Coretta and I met each other when we were among the 52 American women who flew to Geneva, Switzerland as part of the Women’s Strike for Peace, headed by Dagmar Wilson, to convince delegates to the 17 Nation Disarmament Conference that they needed to agree on a nuclear test ban treaty.
It was at that Conference that I watched the budding “Civil Rights Movement” join forces with the “Peace Movement” as supposedly non-violent techniques of protest and civil disobedience were argued and taught by well financed communist women and wealthy American liberals. The key to the technique of protest was to present your case as a victim in the “class struggle” described by Karl Marx. The technique was to set up the scenario by presenting yourself as a member of the poor “proletariat” then seize control by attacking the other side as the greedy, guilty “bourgeois.”
There was another movement back in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, before it was destroyed by the Civil Rights Movement, that I had been very active in. It was called the “Race Relations Movement.” Many of the people involved in that movement were Quakers or followers of Mahatma Ghandi who actually BELIEVED in non-violence – not as a confrontational technique, but as a way of life.
In 1947, as an 18 year old I organized in Memphis, Tennessee an interracial teen group, centered mainly among students at Memphis State College, then a white institution and Lemoyne College, a black institution. I was the chairman of a youth group in a Unitarian Church and had the support of the minister. In talking with a teacher at the black college in presenting my case for the interracial group she said, thoughtfully, “Well, we’ve tried that before. In fact, we have tried that three times before, and it didn’t succeed. ” Then she paused and said, “It’s about time it succeeded!”
Race Relations was based on the fact that ALL of us were being damaged by the segregation laws of the South and, therefore, we were all needed to work together to change the minds of people who were comfortable with segregated facilities. In effect, race relations was what prompted Booker T. Washington, a black man who was born a slave, to became a conciliator, educator, founder of Tuskegee Institute and nation builder He taught that the best interests of black people would be realized through education and hard work rather than political agitation..
It was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois who led the fight for political agitation and founded the “victim” movement in America. Du Bois adopted the techniques of conflict outlined in the Communist Manifesto, even tho he was a privileged black man educated at Harvard. Du Bois is the reason why you never hear anything these days about the accomplishments of people like Booker T. Washington – and why modern blacks who followed Booker T. Washington, such as Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, by working hard for an education and cooperation rather than blaming whites for their problems are viewed as “not really black” by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others who have taken the path of being a “victim” of white people.
On the day that Martin Luther King led the 1963 Civil Rights march in Washington, W.E.B. DuBois died in Accra, Ghana having renounced his American Citizenship and having joined the Communist Party. The political confrontation torch was passed to Martin Luther and Coretta King. For 40 years black people have been taught that they are victims of white oppression and therefore could not succeed until white people “helped” them by liking them better, giving them public funds, better schools and jobs. Huge sums of money pored into the Kings’ Southern Christian Leadership coffers in spite of the fact that since the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was passed there has been no LEGAL segregation.
However, today there is more de facto segregation than there was in my childhood with segregation laws. While I knew, played with and picked cotton with children from strong, intact, caring black families in the South as I was growing up, my grandchildren get very tired of listening to black classmates complain about their situation while refusing to work, study, try to get along with others, or behave themselves. Today millions of black youth refuse to even GO to school and millions of black men are in prison. They see themselves as “victims” of “white oppression.”
They aren’t. They are victims of the oppression of black leaders that teach behavior and attitudes guaranteed to cause them to fail. To succeed they need to follow the example of the successful people among them –such as Booker T. Washington, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Thomas Sowell to mention a few.
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