Barry and Biden Barely Cared About King

On January 15, 2016, when he proclaimed the national holiday for Martin Luther King, President Obama said:

With profound faith in our Nation’s promise, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a non-violent movement that urged our country’s leaders to expand the reach of freedom and provide equal opportunity for all.

Together, with countless unsung heroes equally committed to the idea that America is a constant work in progress, he heeded the call etched into our founding documents nearly two centuries before his time, marching and sacrificing for the idea of a fair, just, and inclusive society.

 Today, we celebrate the long arc of progress for which Dr. King and so many other leaders fought to bend toward a brighter day.  It is our mission to fulfill his vision of a Nation devoted to rejecting bigotry in all its forms; to rising above cynicism and the belief that we cannot change; and to cherishing dignity and opportunity not only for our own daughters and sons, but also for our neighbors’ children. . .

That invites a look at what that the president said about King in his younger days. Barry, as mother Ann Dunham called him, was born on August 4, 1961, so he had yet to turn three on August 22, 1963, when King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1965, Ann Dunham married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro and Barry was attending the Besuki school in Jakarta when King was murdered on April 4, 1968. The author of the 1995 Dreams from My Father is pretty quiet about King’s impact at the time.

In that book, Barry’s strongest influence is the black poet “Frank,” who is really the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who dedicated most of his life to the all-white dictatorship of the Soviet Union. In Dreams Frank gets more than 2,000 words but the poet says nothing about Martin Luther King Jr.

At Occidental College, Barry gathers books from the library, but not Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, from 1958, or any other book by King. The student reads books by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. DuBois, but as Barry explains, “only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different.”

Malcolm X, as Stanley Crouch noted, was the “chief black heckler of the civil rights movement,” and regarded non-violence as “nonsense.” As Penn professor Thomas J. Sugrue notes, black-power radicals derided King as “de Lawd” and branded him as “hopelessly bourgeois, a detriment rather than a positive force in the black freedom struggle.”

In Dreams, Barry meets Malik, “who mentioned that he was a follower of the Nation of Islam,” and the narrative portrays the NOI as a positive force.  As Crouch explained, for NOI boss Louis Farrakahn, “the white man was a devil ‘grafted’ from black people in an evil genetic experiment by a mad, pumpkin-headed scientist named Yacub” and “the first devils to roll off Yacub’s assembly line were the Jews, the idea of their being the chosen was a lot of baloney.”

Nobody doing serious work in civil rights, Crouch recalled, “would have anything to do with the Nation of Islam. It was too racist and too much of an intellectual embarrassment.”  On the other hand, as the Department of Justice notes, King’s Jewish colleagues played significant roles in the civil rights movement:

Fully half of the young people who flooded into Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 were Jewish. Among them were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered along with African American activist James Chaney because of their efforts to register Black voters. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel served as an advisor to Dr. King and marched with him from Montgomery to Selma in 1964. That year, 17 rabbis were arrested with Dr. King in St. Augustine, Florida, after a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations.

In 2005 the Dreams author  happily posed for a photo with Louis Farrakhan, the nation’s leading anti-Semite. It’s hard to find any serious criticism of Farrakhan by the composite character president, who invited Black Lives Matter leaders to the White House. BLM is the direct descendant of BLA, the Black Liberation Army, a violent criminal gang posing as persecuted political activists.

BLM’s hero is fugitive cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur. In 2011, Obama brought to the White House the rapper Common, whose “Song for Assata,” released in 2000, portrayed Chesimard as a victim of police violence.

All things considered, the composite character president has more esteem for the violent radicals who mocked King than the non-violent leader who held “profound faith in our Nation’s promise.” Consider also the current White House occupant.

Sen. Joe Biden was a big fan of Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the former Ku Klux Klansman who voted against Thurgood Marshall and took part in the “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas. Biden claimed Byrd “elevated the Senate” and the Delaware Democrat had no problem working with segregationist southern Democrats James Eastland and Herman Talmadge.

Last year at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, in a speech of 2,794 words, Biden mentioned King 19 times but said “I” a full 50 times. Joe reports, you decide.