Martin Luther King’s dream has been hijacked. By whom, you ask? You decide.
The Civil Rights Movement has been described, not as a movement about blacks and whites, but as a movement that was about right and wrong and freedom and justice. Blacks and whites alike fought and died together. They fought against laws that denied rights to blacks because of the color of their skin. Some, such as Viola Liuzzo, died because of the stand they took. Others were assasinated where they stood, because of the stand they took.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the now famous I Have a Dream speech, he and the 200,000 standing with him were standing for the removal of laws that denied personhood and equal protection to blacks. As I remember it, he and those with him were fighting for hope and justice for all, and it was not a movement that was behavior driven, but was driven by the laws of the land.
So when I was confronted, for the second time, with the idea that because I am pro-life, I cannot lay claim to the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, I was stunned. Some want me to believe that my having grown up and survived in Jim Crow America does not count. According to those who say they are continuing the civil rights fight, the legacy is only available to those who want the government in their lives, taking care of them as Al Sharpton said on August 28, 2010. My memory is so very different from that. I recall the movement as one that asked the Government to get out of our lives by removing the government sanctioned Jim Crow barriers that blocked us from the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Movement I recall revealed numbers of blacks and whites working together in a “symphony of brotherhood”. Blacks and whites were working together in faith to see "justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
My participation in the pro-life freedom rides and the launching of the Endangered Species education campaign are extensions of the hope, justice and freedom mantle those in the real civil rights movement left us. However, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, characterizes today’s “civil rights movement”, as a movement that is about being pro-abortion, a movement that is all about choice. Their notion of justice focuses only on the 'reproductive' justice of the mother and never on paramount right to life of the child that dies as a result of that choice. They call death by abortion a civil right that is to be guarded. Their notion of freedom centers on the sexual behaviors of consenting adults and in many instances the death of those conceived as a result of that sexual behavior. Their coalition embraces a fight for the approval of behaviors that back in the fifties and sixties was considered and called sin.
I am not sure when we entered this modern day era of civil rights, but the Movement I was raised in never gave consideration to men having sex with men and women with women or men and women sleeping with multiple partners at will. The movement I am acquainted with never condoned the killing of black children in the womb. Such a notion was unconscionable in light of the many children that were ripped from their mothers arms and sold as property.
The leaders of the Movement I am acquainted with would have joined me in standing with Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and daughter of A. D. King. Not only do I believe they would have stood with us, but they would have lead the freedom rides and education campaigns because they understood that the only way for the Black community to grow into a political force is through increasing our numbers by having our children. I believe they would have fought, bled and died to keep the eugenicists and other elitists from destroying America through abortion.
For the first time since the Jim Crow laws were erased from the books, America can see the hand of racism as it extends into every woman’s womb. The history books don’t lie. The KKK, Nazi like destruction of life can be traced back to an elite group of racists who clearly proclaim their desire to “exterminate” the black race and other “dysgenics” as Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood Founder openly stated. But some of us have been so blinded by the woman’s right to choose dogma that we willingly participate in our own destruction as Sanger and others intended.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. his brother Rev. A. D. King and many others sometimes fought alone, while locked in roach infested jails, for our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Others like Emmet Till died lonely tortuous deaths because the rabidly racist did not want them to exist. And like Emmet Till, some of these brave men and women were betrayed by their own, turned over to their assassins by other blacks. But they fought nonetheless, so that one day we could indeed say “Free at Last!”
It was more than ten years from the start of the Movement before change came. May it not be ten years before we see an end to the practice of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s acknowledged population control by abortion, lest there be no population to control.
Martin Luther King’s dream has been hijacked. By whom, you ask? You decide.
