Republicans, Martin Luther King, And The Strangers In Our Midst

Anyone who has been following Connecticut Commentary – and the stats suggest many people are – knows I  have written extensively on cities, territorial pools more or less owned by Democrats over the years. Here are some few columns, all of which have been printed in a handful of Connecticut newspapers.

In one of them, I fell to my knees and beseeched Republicans not to cede this fertile ground to Democrats. That cry has not resonated with many Republicans, but it should. And by Republicans I mean the whole enchilada:  Republican leaders safely ensconced in the General Assembly; Republican worker bees of every kind; African American and Hispanic Republicans who have found, much to their surprise, that one of the chief difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties is that The Republican Party is NOT a closed shop; and minorities and whites who have survived the left leaning biases of academe and are familiar with the history of both parties from the post-Civil War period through 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was established.

The Civil Rights Act, it will be recalled, enforced the constitutional right to vote, conferred jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States of America to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, empowered the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes. After lengthy filibusters by Democrats, the Senate bill was voted upon in the House. Democrats favored the bill 63-37 percent, Republicans 80-20 percent.

The first time a Civil Rights Act was presented to Congress was in 1875. Republican Congressmen Robert Brown Elliott and Josiah Thomas Walls, both African Americans, spoke in favor of the bill in the House of Representatives.

Congressman Walls said, "Men may concede that public sentiment is the cause of the discrimination of which we justly complain...If this be so, then public sentiment needs correction...Let it be understood that individual rights are sacred and it is the duty of men, in whose hand is trusted the destiny of the Republic, to remove from the path of upwards progress every obstacle which may impede its advance into the future."

Fredrick Douglass was the Martin Luther King of the pre and post-Civil War period, a gifted civil rights leader who, like Martin Luther King, straddled the ages. President Abraham Lincoln invited Douglas to the White House because he wanted Douglas’ opinion on his second inaugural address. It was during that speech that Lincoln quoted from the Bible and said:

“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Douglas gave his approval.

The sentiments here expressed by Lincoln, engraved on the interior North Wall of the Lincoln Memorial, were part of the marrow of Martin Luther King’s bones when he stood on the steps of the memorial, not very far from these very words, and thundered, at the urging of Marion Anderson:

“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God Almighty, We are free at last."

Martin Luther King was a Christian minister of the word and a Republican.

There were some sharp differences between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X at the time. Malcolm X was unwilling to forego violence in response to violence exercised against African Americans, especially in places where the Klan was still operating. After Malcolm X returned from a Hajj in Mecca, where he had met many white Muslims and embraced Sunni Islam, his views on racial separation underwent a change. On his return, he broke publicly with the Nation of Islam and denounced both racism – “I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then ... pointed in a certain direction and told to march” -- and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X was assassinated in February, 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam.

The 1960s was the decade of the assassins. Just count the corpses: President John Kennedy (November 1963), Martin Luther King (April 1965), Attorney General Robert Kennedy, (June 1968). Whatever their differences, they all shared in common one golden perception – that real freedom, personal liberty, may only be found on the path that leads to self-reliance. When Malcolm X died in a hail of bullets, it was a free man who died, and the same may be said of Martin Luther King.

So then, how goes it on the freedom and independence front in 2014?

The figures point to a new and resilient kind of dependency. Since the 1960s, the two mediating institutions that truly lift the struggling poor out of poverty – work and marriage – are disappearing in the broader culture, but in the cities they are already a ghostly presence.

In 1970, marriage throughout the United States was the rule rather than the exception: 90 percent of women and 80 percent of men between 25 and 29 years of age were married. The comparable figures today are 50 percent of women and 40 percent of men. It is astonishing to think that in the 1960s fewer than 10 percent of children were born to unmarried mothers.

The poverty gap between the races has grown over the years. Among non-Hispanic white married couples, the poverty rate is 3.2 percent, while the rate for non-married white families is seven times higher at 22.0 percent.  Among Hispanic married families, the poverty rate is 13.2 percent, while the poverty rate among non-married families is three times higher at 37.9 percent.  Among black married couples, the poverty rate is 7.0 percent, while the rate for non-married black families was seven times higher at 35.6 percent.

The strongest and most dependable bulwarks against poverty are solid marriages and a sound education. In the absence of either, one is thrown into bony arms of the solicitous state, where one remains unawakened, doomed to a fitful and uneasy sleep, hoping that perhaps the child of her heart will not fall prey to the ravening wolves prowling about the neighborhood.

It is this challenge from which Republicans retreat when they leave what has falsely been called “social issues” to Democrats who, since the 1960s, have shaped the unsafe at any cost social “safety net” – especially in urban areas, where not a whisper of resistance to Democratic hegemony is possible.

What is missing – what is needed, far more than a crippling and false solicitude – is a Republican Party mission to the very heart of darkness. That mission must have as its object a restoration of those saving and mediating institutions that have always stood between children and a soul-crippling dependency that can only be described as a milder form of slavery, in which the futures of children are thrown upon the mercy of a state that regards them as problems and strangers.

On January 20 – Martin Luther King’s birthday, as it happens -- Regina Roundtree will address issues of this kind at 12:00 (High Noon) at the Legislative Office building adjacent to the State Capitol in Hartford. Ms. Roundtree’s site may be found here, along with travel directions and other information concerning her press conference. For Republicans who want to punch a hole through the wall that so far has prevented them from appealing directly to the victims of Democratic solicitude, attendance will be mandatory.

Race And Politics In Connecticut

The 2014 Democratic campaign for urban hegemony is now officially underway.

It will involve the usual tousle among Democrats for political prestige and power in Connecticut’s larger cities. During his first campaign for governor, then Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy – on becoming governor, Dan requested that the media refer to him henceforward as Dannel -- easily captured the urban vote and slid past Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley by the slenderest of margins. Mr. Malloy, once again in his reelection contest, may face Mr. Foley -- or some other worthy Republican champion; State Senator John McKinney has announced and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton is teasing from the sidelines -- and the remembrance of slender margins past has caused some wonderment among the state’s left of center media concerning Mr. Malloy’s recent campaign endorsements.

A Hartford newspaper has wondered aloud editorially whether it is politically prudent for the governor to pick winners and losers in urban primaries. Mr. Malloy recently traveled to New Haven to offer a ringing endorsement of Toni Harp as mayor, even though it had been widely reported that Ms. Harp’s now deceased husband is the city’s most celebrated tax scofflaw.  Most recently, the former mayor of Stamford publicly rejected the mayoralty choice of Stamford’s Democratic Town Committee by endorsing a non-party endorsed candidate.  People took notice. This is not the way to gain friends and influence Democrats in Stamford. Then too, the governor’s primary endorsements feed the growing apprehension that Mr. Malloy just can’t restrain himself from upsetting apple carts and sticking his thumb in every warm pie.

The Connecticut Republican Party, unfortunately, has withered away in the state’s larger cities. Urban populations, fleeing urban problems, have left behind a minority residue wholly at the mercy of a party that has made no serious attempt to drive people at the economic margins of society into jobs and social configurations that would not leave them at the mercy of urban gangs and ubiquitous social service agencies. President Bill Clinton’s noble attempt to “end welfare as we know it” has in recent times suffered a perhaps irreversible decline under an increasingly progressive regime. Any attempt seriously to address the issue of social disintegration in cities – fatherless families or single parent families locked into a ridged and unalterable social service structure -- is hooted down as an indication of racist bias.

Republicans in Connecticut are so fearful of being thus tainted that they have simply surrendered the “social issues” front  to Democrats who, especially in cities, are finding it more and more difficult to quiet a restive population that wants what Martin Luther King said it wanted half a century ago – their piece of the American dream. Among African Americans in cities, fifty years after the “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C., the traditional African American family, robustly restored in Northern cities after the Civil War, is now a byword.

The decimation of the African American family has accelerated at a rapid pace from the 1960s forward. The statistics are too astonishing to be any longer ignored.  The most recent Urban Institute Report finds that 17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but not their father in 1950. By 2010, the number had increased to 50 percent. Out of wedlock childbirths from 1965 to 2010 increased from 8 to 41 percent; the figure today has risen to an astonishing 72 percent. In 1950, the number of African American women married and living with their spouses was 53 percent. That figure has been reduced today to 25 percent.

Many of these figures have been in the public domain since 1965, when then Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York released “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  The recent Urban Institute report updates the figures to 2010. The Moynihan report is not dated in its principal conclusion: “…at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”

There is a Berlin Wall of silence surrounding these figures – and others: On average, 1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the United States, and black women, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, are more than 5 times as likely as white women to have an abortion; African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. The conclusion that Mr. Moynihan has drawn in his earlier report is no less pertinent today than it was in 1965, two years after Martin Luther King had let loose his thunderclap before the Lincoln Memorial.

These figures, it may safely be predicted, will play NO part in any urban election in Connecticut – none. If you know what the problem is, hard solutions offer themselves. But politically, any effective remedy that disturbs the status quo causes a tighter breathing and chills the bones of politicians to zero. The road to Hell, as Martin Luther King well knew, is paved with cowardice; only courage can set you free.