White moderates like Clintons, Gore dangerous for Black America

By Rhone Fraser

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died at the age of thirty-nine, on April 4, 1968, exactly one year after the day he gave one of his most memorable speeches on April 4, 1967 at Harlem's Riverside Church, calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. As we approach the thirty-ninth anniversary of this memorable speech, we need to revisit the forces in American society that he challenged, forces that King clearly identified by race: "the white moderate," so we can implore them to end the war in Iraq and address more pressing domestic needs.

In this speech, King says that "the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." He said only three years earlier in his Letter From A Birmingham City Jail that "the Negro's greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

We must also identify the white moderates of our time, mainly the Democratic Party, not for the purpose of attacking them, but to implore them by vocal persuasion, by e-mail, or by other nonviolent protest, to move them out of their neutrality and demand withdrawal from Iraq. Each passing day where troops are killed and the Iraqi peoples' sovereign way of life is destroyed is yet one more affirmation of their neutrality and thus, their complicity and contribution to the Iraq War. To better understand how to approach the white moderate power structure, we must first realize how King's criticism of the moderates of his time is not different at all from a criticism of our time.

When King says that "the white moderate is more devoted to 'order' than to justice" he is clearly referring to both the actions of Bill Clinton and Al Gore after the 2000 Presidential Election.

Clinton sat by in 2000 and did nothing

In a 2001 article called "Civil War 2000" published in The Black Scholar, Charles P. Henry writes: "Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, reports that his organization begged the Clinton Justice Department to intervene in the voting irregularities that occurred in Florida on Election Day. Mfume says, 'the Justice Department turned away.''

After the elections, Mfume asked the Justice Department to hold hearings - 'the Justice Department just looked away.' Despite the lack of response by Clinton's Justice Department, he was given an 'Image' Award by the NAACP in 2001! How do we explain what Mfume calls the cool, cold, and callous response of the Justice Department?" Instead of awarding white moderates for suppressing or silencing the voices against disenfranchisement and injustice, their feet need to be held to the fire so they address the pressing domestic issues of today like Iraqi withdrawal. In one of the first scenes in the 2003 film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Al Gore and the entire U.S. Senate rather stoically and sternly denied the Congressional Black Caucus their right to challenge the 2000 election results when all they needed was a signature from one senator.

Did they believe they were "keeping order" by doing this? Also, Al Gore moved assiduously to silence not only the NAACP when they were trying to sue the state of Florida for disenfranchising black voters, he also asked that the Congressional Black Caucus be silent and not be too vocal about the racist disenfranchisement of black votes in the 2000 election.

White moderates prefer 'negative peace'

King later says in the Letter that "I had hoped the white moderate would understand that the present tension of the South is merely a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace." There is no question that by ignoring the disenfranchisement of the African-American vote that a "negative peace" is created.

Rhone Fraser is an independent journalist and can be reached at rhone2001@hotmail.com.