How the Republican Party got crazy

The name the “Radical Republicans” has been taken and is now retired like the No. 42 that baseball legend Jackie Robinson wore. The radicals were noble politicians, who pushed valiantly before and after the Civil War for full civil rights for black people.

Sadly, the nation failed to heed these prophets crying in the desert of racial oppression. If it had, the gains the 1960s civil rights movement made would have come a century earlier. Still, the radicals’ vision haunted the nation and helped inspire the 1960s movement.

No, “Radical Republicans” is too honored a name to describe the current crop of "hell-no" Republicans in Congress. A more apt term for politicians eager to plunge the nation into financial ruin if they don't get their way without compromise: "Crazy Republicans."

Maybe, crazy is what you get when you court folk who despise the Radicals' vision, as the Republican Party did in a pact it made with the devil.

The Democratic Party had a fateful choice to make in the 1960s. Would it side with the civil rights movement or the resistance to civil rights, with its Negro base or its white Southern base? Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson came down on the side of equality for all, alienating white supremacists, South and North.

The Republican Party went after those disenchanted voters with a passion, promising – in code, of course – to keep black people in their place. This "Southern strategy" turned the South from solid Democratic to solid Republican and enabled the GOP to form majorities to win elections.

Now the party is paying the price for selling its soul. It dangled intolerance and fear to draw new voters. So, not surprisingly, intolerance and fear are now a major part of the Republican base, which had fits when a black man was elected president.

The base staged tantrums and demanded its country back and called itself the Tea Party. It lashed out at President Obama, calling him simultaneously and contradictorily a Muslim and the disciple of a mad Christian preacher; a Communist and a Nazi. The base questioned the president's citizenship, pooh-poohing even notices of his birth in Honolulu newspapers at the time he was born.

The Republican base's vitriol, born of the Southern strategy, also shows in its opposition to immigration, gay rights and "big government."

The problem for the party is that the Southern strategy is not the winner it once was. It used to be that the strategy gained far more in white votes than it lost in black votes. No longer. The white share of the electorate is shrinking; the non-white share is expanding.

Karl Rove (President Bush's brain) recognized that fact and tried to push comprehensive immigration reform to woo Hispanics. But the GOP base blocked that move. And Hispanic support for the Republican Party dropped.

Not that the base cares. The vituperative base views any compromise as betrayal, whatever the consequences.So presidential candidate Mitt Romney is forced to downplay his singular achievement as Massachusetts governor: health care reform. And Republicans in Congress are barred from making concessions that would raise taxes on the rich just modestly even though that's what the country wants.

The GOP finds itself in a policy straitjacket that will hamper the party in winning elections – a straitjacket the party weaved for itself out of intolerance and fear.

Grizzled civil rights warriors pass the torch

Reuben Harpole speaks as Harry Oden, George Sanders and Paul Blackman look on.

Milwaukee’s Reuben Harpole grew up at 807 W. Somers St, in the shadow of the Lay’s potato chips and the Wonder bread plants, a stone’s throw from bustling Walnut St., where black-owned restaurants, haberdasheries and other establishments thrived and the Regal Theater swung to the likes of the Duke Ellington and Count Basie.bands.

Wiped out by "progress" - housing projects and a freeway - this one-time hub of black Milwaukee lives only in memories now. It served as a backdrop in the saga of the struggle for racial fairness and justice in the city, as told by Harpole and other oldtimers at a forum the other day.

A side show developed on Facebook when two days prior to the event a young man replied with bahs and humbugs to the forum’s announcement.  

“I see no record of impact they have [on] … epidemic conditions of Black Milwaukee,” he wrote of the panelists, starting a string of back-and-forth commentary

No doubt, members of my father’s generation would be chuckling now. The curse parents secretly bestow on their troublesome offspring – may you have children like you – has been fulfilled.

Back in the 1960s we young know-it-alls scoffed at our elders for accommodating white racism. We confronted it. We marched and picketed and sat in and demanded equal rights. We refused to scrape and bow. No, we weren’t loud about our superiority – well, maybe a few of us were.  Mostly we were just quietly smug. We’re putting our bodies on the line, and you didn’t.

Now what goes around has come around. So a young man attacks a panel of older activists, saying they did nothing for the cause of racial justice, offering as Exhibit A the continuing blight in the neighborhood around Coffee Makes You Black coffee house, 2803 N. Teutonia Ave., where the forum took place. It was titled “Grizzled Black Men Discuss Their Historic and Ongoing Struggle on Behalf of the Black Community.” The eight panelists were all at least 70 years old.

Harpole, black Milwaukee’s oral historian, related pieces of the struggle. He noted the epic push for open housing in the 1960s. And he told of his involvement with The Milwaukee Star in an era when black weeklies were fresh and urgent. He was the newspaper’s advertising director.

Paul Blackman, retired labor leader, recalled a flashpoint in the marathon series of open housing marches, when it encountered violent resistance on the white ethnic south side: "I was on the 16th Street Bridge dodging bottles from some of our Polish neighbors."

He related how he led A. O. Smith steelworkers on strike, shutting down Chrysler, Ford and General Motors in the process. The Milwaukee plant was the world’s largest maker of automobile frames. In the end, the union got everything it wanted. The lesson: "If you are organized, anything is possible.”

My generation was wrong – very wrong – about our elders. We came to realize that it was on their shoulders that we stood as we fought racism. Our parents forged strong families through much work and sacrifice and gave the children the security and strength to permit them to challenge the social order.

Besides, “accomodationist” oversimplifies that generation. My own dad, for instance, refused to surrender his dignity when growing up dirt-poor in Birmingham, Ala., a city synonymous with racial oppression. The rule among kids was that, when the police came, you ran. But according to family lore, my dad refused to run, to the exasperation of his playmates, especially his older brother. My dad was polite in dealing with the police, but he stood his ground.

My father’s generation emerged into adulthood in the 1940s; the panelists did so the next decade, and my wisdom teeth broke out in the ‘60s. The civil rights revolution was mainly waged by the ’50s and ’60s generations.

It is not crystal clear whether the Facebook critic is attacking a whole generation. He faults two of the panelists by name – Harpole and black business advocate Curtiss Harris – charging they have sat on economic development boards with zero benefits for the black community. But he attacks the panel as a whole, too. And since the panelists have been involved in Milwaukee’s and the nation’s broad struggle for racial justice – from Martin Luther King Jr., to Stokely Carmichael, to the Black Panthers – he seems to be pooh-poohing that struggle.

Maybe what’s at work here is the intractability of racism – a phenomenon the struggle brought to light. You get rid of Jim Crow and, as the late NAACP leader Ben Hooks used to put it, his more sophistticated cousin – J. Crow. Esquire – takes over. You integrate the city schools, then whites resegregate by fleeing to the suburbs. Sharecropping replaces slavery, mass imprisonment of black men replaces sharecropping.

In a post after the forum, the Facebook critic said many of the panelists were in denial that the black communioty was in a state of emergency. Trouble is, not one panel member expressed that opinion. In fact, they went in the opposite direction. To wit:

• Carl Estrada – who was wheelchair-bound and who was an activist in Milwaukee, Detroit and New York City – called Wisconsin the “third most racist state in the country” and urged a grassroots movement to attack the problem.
• Former State Sen. Monroe Swan intoned, "The proportion of black imprisonment in the state of Wisconsin is the worst of any jurisdiction in this country, thusly the greatest anywhere in the world.” America leads the world in overall incarceration rate.
• Harpole said getting black businesses a fair share of public contracts remains a struggle.
• Harris said, “We didn’t have parity when it came to economics and we still don’t.”
• George Sanders, artist and activist who once worked for The Milwaukee Star, spoke only briefly, but his e-mail recipients know he consantly rants about the sad state of black Milwaukee.

The other panelists were Harry Oden, a former Milwaukee Public Schools principal and a basketball star at the University of Minnesota, and Mason Bullock, a carpenter.

To be sure, the hard-fought civil rights movement fell far short of its goal. As a rule, blacks still don't enjoy the same life chances that whites do. The battered, grizzled civil rights warriors are passing the torch to a new generation.  Now it's up to the Facebook critic and his peers to change the world. Criticism has its place, but, more importantly, they must come up with their own goals, tactics and strategies.  And they shouldn't be too surprised if decades hence a new cocky generation belittles their efforts.

NAACP alienates civil rights leaders in Milwaukee

The behavior of the NAACP’s national office in a contentious branch election has left a sour taste in the mouths of much of Milwaukee’s civil rights leadership, which was rooting for the reform slate, the side that eventually won.

Victory was sweet, but not enough to negate the sourness – raising the question of how well will the NAACP’s Baltimore headquarters and the new Milwaukee board relate.

James Hall

Branch President-Elect James Hall, a civil rights attorney, says he’s looking “forward to a positive, constructive” relationship with the national office.

But others involved in the movement to reform the branch cite a continuing sore point: The national office went berserk with suspensions, ousting from the organization eight people in the reform camp. Members of that camp find it hard to forgive and forget while their comrades in struggle remain suspended. Some suspensions are for three years; others are indefinite.

The suspensions are in fact astounding. Kicked out were revered stalwarts of Milwaukee’s black community. The most illustrious is perhaps Lauri Wynn, who in 1973 became the first African American to head the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s umbrella teachers union. Before that, she was on the front lines of the struggle to desegregate Milwaukee’s schools. And in 1983 she became an aide to Wisconsin Gov. Tony Earl.

A picket line protested the suspension of Milwaukee NAACP
members before voting took place across the street.

Among the other prominent evictees are Wallace White, chair of the Milwaukee African American Chamber of Commerce, vice chair of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewerage Commission and CEO of a business consulting firm, and Elmer Anderson, former second-in-command at the Milwaukee Urban League and a former administrator at the Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Their crime? Publicly speaking out against the administration of the local branch.

“Outrageous” and “incredible” was how former Milwaukee Alderman Fred Gordon, a lawyer, described the behavior of the national office, adding, “I think it sucks.”

Picketers end their demonstration with a prayer.

Interviewed on Nov. 20 on his way inside Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church to vote, Gordon theorized that the national office behaved the way it did because “the current NAACP leadership and the branch have been very close.” He noted that a few years back the branch had hosted the national conference, which, he said, had made money for the NAACP.

Frank Atwater, who formerly headed agencies serving the black community, found particularly incredible the suspension of Wynn. “She’s an icon of the community,” he said.

The national office has not yet responded to my request to give its side of the story.

Widespread discontent about the performance of the branch led to the movement to reform it. A pivotal date in the drama was Sept. 18, when, according to an e-mail message from Hall to his supporters, a branch membership meeting “was improperly adjourned and the lights were turned out and police summoned to disburse approximately 150 members assembled to elect a nominating committee and conduct other business.”

About 50 people re-assembled across the street in a restaurant parking lot and put together a nominating committee. It was members of that committee who got suspensions, which made them ineligible to vote. Representatives of the national office came in and conducted the election instead.

Gloria Gilmer – an educator, civic leader and mathematician – described that meeting as the turning point in that it showed many in attendance how bad the branch leadership was.

Jerry Ann Hamilton, branch president for 10 years, had chosen not to run again and picked her second-in-command, activist and businessman Wendell Harris, to succeed her.

The reform camp had accused the incumbent leadership of mismanagement of funds, nepotism, and failure to deal effectively with a complex of problems crushing the black community, such as high poverty and unemployment rates. That camp has noted that the branch has gone without a financial audit for 10 years.

Hundreds turned out for the election. Many were turned away because, even though they vowed they had paid memberships, NAACP officials could not find their names in their records. Some went home to get proof of membership and returned. Among them was Atwater, who came back with a cancelled check for his membership dues and was allowed to vote. The news media was not allowed inside the church.

Almost everyone appeared to be under the impression that they could run in, vote and leave. But such was not the case. Nominations took place first and the voting procedures were explained. The wait was a couple of hours and more for some voters. A woman who left without casting a ballot said she couldn’t wait any longer. She had a wedding to attend.

"I would say a good 100 people left without voting because they had other plans,” commented Jenelle Elder-Green, an NAACP member who once handled public relations for the Milwaukee Public Schools. “It really is unfair. People were denied the right to vote. If that had happened in any other election, the NAACP would be filing a lawsuit”

Notable about this whole episode is the passion the reformers show for the NAACP.  They could have just given up on the organization and attempted to form an alternate group. But they believe in the NAACP, or at least the ideals of the NAACP. Mary Glass, a suspended member, talks about restoring the NAACP brand, making the organization true to its purpose – a notion echoed by other reformers.

Gilmer said, “I think what happened here can be a resurgence of the NAACP.” She stressed she was referring to the national organization, not just the Milwaukee branch. Reformers have emerged at other troubled branches, she said, and the national office, to judge by its attempts to tamp down reform in Milwaukee, has also lost its way.

Photos by Gregory Stanford

Is Glenn Beck reborn in the image of King?

The rally Glenn Beck staged the other day on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial raises the question of whether he has been reborn in the spirit of the great man he repeatedly invoked: Martin Luther King Jr.

Up to now, there was no confusing Beck with King. Truth be told, Beck was more in the mold of a nemesis of the civil rights struggle, George Corley Wallace, the Alabama governor who stood at a university doorway to block its first two black students from registering. Wallace ran for president as a populist, broadcasting the slogan “Stand Up for America” and railing against “pointy-headed intellectuals” and other assorted liberals. He won strong support in pockets of white America fearful of the racial, social and cultural upheaval under way in the land (think Archie Bunker) – the very same sectors that today revere Beck as a leader of their effort to take their country back.

At Saturday’s rally, however, Beck cooled his shrill, divisive rhetoric, saying: “There’s a lot we can disagree on, but our values and our principles can unite us. We must discover them again.”

What’s more, the next day the talk show host took back the slur he made against President Obama last year – remarks that had epitomized Beck’s tendency to polarize the nation. He had accused Obama of harboring a deep-seated hatred of white people and of being a racist – without resting the accusation on any facts. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, however, Beck finally admitted he had erred and that he regretted the remarks, adding: "I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things"

So does Beck’s revival-like rally signal he has atoned for his sins, that he has seen the light, that he has become a new man, in the spirit of King?

I happened to have basked in that spirit at the original March on Washington in 1963. I was a high school kid, D.C. was my home town, and King and his fellow freedom fighters were my heroes. I felt awed and honored to walk in their midst.

Despite the often brutal resistance the civil rights warriors faced in the South, peace and love pervaded the original march. The participants heeded King, who said in his “I Have a Dream” speech: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.”

So has Beck now ascended to that plane? Unfortunately, the signs so far are that Beck’s conversion is phony.

A case in point: In taking back his Obama slur, Beck still dismissed the president as “a guy who understands the world through liberation theology,” as if that was a bad thing, Yet, liberation theology is precisely what King practiced, as alluded to in his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and stated perhaps most emphatically in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The relevant excerpt:

“Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind that Marxists like to see - an opiate of the people.”

At the rally right-wing darling and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin likewise spoke contradictorily about King. On the one hand: “On this ground where we are so honored to stand today, we feel the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” On the other hand: “We must not fundamentally transform America as someone wants. We must restore America and restore her honor.”

That “someone” is, presumably, Obama. More to the point, the fundamental transformation of America is what King was all about, as he particularly made clear in his 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. An excerpt:

“The Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. … One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there 40 million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.”

Since fundamental change through liberation theology was so central to King, there is absolutely no way to trash either concept and still claim to be his disciple.

Beck and Palin remain lost in the wilderness of social unfairness, self-delusion and hucksterism.

Relevant links:

“Martin Luther King would have been on Glenn Beck's chalkboard,” Media Matters
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail"
King’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech
Paper on the 1968 campaign rhetoric of George Wallace
Youtube video comparing King’s words at 1963 March on Washington with words of participants at Glenn Beck’s rally