Opinion
Selma: White Savior Not Required
“Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now”
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The Skanner Newspaper, established
in October 1975, is a weekly publica-
tion, published each Wednesday by
IMM Publications Inc.,
415 N. Killingsworth St.,
T
he fierce and aligned, if not
coordinated, campaign to
smear the motion picture
“Selma” by suggesting it inaccu-
rately portrays the role of
President Lyndon Johnson in the
fight for Blacks’ civil rights is par
for the course. Critics of the movie
that focuses on the campaign for
voting rights in Selma, Ala. sug-
gest that Johnson was a champion
for civil rights and is principally
responsible for securing voting
rights for African-Americans.
At best that point of view is a
misunderstanding, and at worst,
and what I firmly believe, it is a
deliberate attempt to create a false
narrative to diminish the principal
and central role of Blacks in advo-
cating for their own freedom.
It is ironic, and sad, that the first
full-length theater released movie
chronicling the leadership of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. is being
trashed in an attempt to exalt a
White president. The criticism of
“Selma” betrays the truth and
common sense. Lyndon Johnson
was a southerner; a Texas politi-
cian firmly entrenched as a
Dixiecrat. His selection as John F.
Kennedy’s vice presidential run-
ning mate was a political
calculation to secure southern
votes and resulted in an uneasy
alliance between the Texan and the
young Bostonian. The tragic
assassination of JFK thrust John-
son into the Oval Office and
placed upon the Texan the late
president’s agenda.
Lyndon Johnson was no civil
rights champion. He was a prag-
matic politician who was smart
enough to read the moment and
NNPA
C OLUMNIST
Walter
Fields
self-absorbed enough to recognize
history would judge his legacy
based upon a historical movement
for Blacks’ rights.
Common sense makes plain that
in the turbulent 1960s, no occu-
pant of the White House, the seat
of world power and White domi-
nation, saw their role as a liberator
jected to violence in the south.
Johnson ‘negotiated’ civil rights,
and used his skill as a legislator, to
win in the margins. And even
while proving successful in mov-
ing civil rights legislation LBJ
co-existed with FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover, who was leading a
campaign to suppress and elimi-
nate Black leadership.
Lyndon Johnson should be cred-
ited for a few things. He
courageously appointed two
African-Americans to positions of
authority in the federal hierarchy,
historical appointments that were
impactful in their significance.
Former NAACP legal counsel
Thurgood Marshall was named to
the United States Supreme Court
It is ironic, and sad, that the first full-
length theater released movie
chronicling the leadership of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. is being trashed in an
attempt to exalt a White president
of the descendants of enslaved
Africans. The rights of Blacks
were not central to the mainte-
nance of power though it became a
necessary consideration for the
preservation of order.
What also challenges the John-
son-as-savior narrative is the truth.
As president, he walked gingerly
in taking on southern governors
who were using their powers to
oppress African-Americans and
deny them their constitutional
rights. He reluctantly used his
power to protect Blacks being sub-
and the brilliant economist Robert
Weaver was made the first Black
to serve on a presidential cabinet
when Johnson made him secretary
of the newly-created Department
of Housing and Urban Develop-
ment (HUD). And there were other
appointments in the federal
bureaucracy that changed the hue
of national government adminis-
tration.
While I admire LBJ’s tenacity,
the campaign to canonize him as a
civil rights saint is far-fetched.
The simple question is “If King,
Roy Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell,
Jr., SNCC and others had not
existed, would Lyndon Johnson
pro-actively advance a civil rights
agenda?” The truthful answer is,
no. Johnson felt the pull of a pow-
erful social movement and
understood that change, even if
not desired or convenient, was
upon the nation and inevitable his
presidency.
Perhaps what galls me most with
the latest effort to bestow white
knighthood on a White male for
racial sensitivity is it comes upon
the heels of protests against police
brutality. If we do not speak force-
fully against the misappropriation
of history, we will witness a simi-
lar false accounting about our
present circumstances decades It
also occurs as Hollywood churns
out another motion picture anoint-
ing White benevolence toward a
Black child, a seeming theme in
‘Tinseltown’ that suggests Black
people are incapable of self-deter-
mination and success without the
aid of Whites. It is the worst char-
acteristic of White liberalism and
perhaps the reason why it has
taken until 2015, nearly 47 years
after King’s death, for a major
motion picture to center on the
Nobel Prize winner and human
rights icon.
We are not in need of White sav-
iors. We could use some willing
White partners who recognize and
acknowledge the brilliance of
Black leadership and understand
that their empathy and emotional
investment in our plight can never
approximate the struggle, sacrifice
and commitment of Blacks to our
own liberation.
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Dr. King Left Blueprint for Ending Poverty
“T
here is nothing new
about poverty. What is
new, however, is that
we now have the resources to get
rid of it.” Not too many years ago,
Kirtley Mather, a Harvard geolo-
gist, wrote a book titled, “Enough
and to Spare.” He set forth the
basic theme that famine is wholly
unnecessary in the modern world.
Today, therefore, the question on
the agenda is: Why should there be
hunger and privation in any land,
in any city, at any table, when man
has the resources and the scientific
know-how to provide all mankind
with the basic necessities of life?”
In January 1967, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. took a very rare
“sabbatical” at an isolated house
in Jamaica far away from tele-
phones and the constant pressures
as a very public civil rights leader
to write what would become his
last book: “Where Do We Go from
Here: Chaos or Community?”
Professor Mather’s book arguing
that mankind had achieved the
ability to move beyond famine
was published in 1944, yet in
2015, despite seventy more years
of unparalleled advances in scien-
tific and technological capability
and global resources and wealth,
hunger and want are still rampant
– most shamefully in the United
States with the world’s largest
economy.
Hear again Dr. King: “There is
no deficit in human resources; the
deficit is in human will . . . The
Page 2 The Portland and Seattle Skanner January 28, 2015
C HILD
W ATCH
Marian
Wright
Edelman
well-off and the secure have too
often become indifferent and
oblivious to the poverty and depri-
vation in their midst. The poor in
our countries have been shut out
of our minds, and driven from the
mainstream of our societies,
Americans, including 14.7 mil-
lion poor children, living in our
boastfully rich nation.
How can it be that the top 1 per-
cent of Americans enjoy more of
the nation’s wealth than the bot-
tom 90 percent combined and that
millions of children are hungry
and homeless and poorly educat-
ed? If the qualification for
individual and national greatness
is genuine concern for the ‘least of
these’ as those of us who are
Christians say we believe, and if
nations and our concurrent role as
members of nations and not just as
individuals are accountable, then
too many of our political, corpo-
‘King said: The poor in our countries
have been shut out of our minds, and
driven from the mainstream of our
societies, because we have allowed
them to become invisible’
because we have allowed them to
become invisible. Ultimately a
great nation is a compassionate
nation. No individual or nation can
be great if it does not have a con-
cern for ‘the least of these.’”
When Dr. King died in 1968
calling for a Poor People’s Cam-
paign, there were 25.4 million
poor Americans, including 11 mil-
lion poor children. Today, there
are more than 45.3 million poor
rate, and faith leaders and citizens
– all of us who live in America –
are failing.
The national holiday celebrating
Dr. King’s birthday is over, but I
hope we will heed and act on his
1967 declaration —“the time has
come for an all-out world war
against poverty”—and work to
win the first victory right here at
home in the biggest economy on
earth and end the shame of 14.7
million children being the poorest
Americans.
Reflecting on the direction the
struggle for civil rights and social
justice should take in Where Do
We Go from Here?, Dr. King
shared a story about the need to
commit to difficult struggles for
the long haul and described a nine
and a half hour flight he had taken
from New York to London in an
older propeller airplane. On the
way home, the crew announced
the return flight from London to
New York would take twelve and a
half hours. When the pilot came
out into the cabin, Dr. King asked
him why. “‘You must understand
about the winds,’ he said. ‘When
we leave New York, a strong tail
wind is in our favor, but when we
return, a strong head wind is
against us.’ But he added, ‘Don’t
worry. These four engines are
capable of battling the winds.’”
Dr. King concluded: “In any
social revolution there are times
when the tail winds of triumph and
fulfillment favor us, and other
times when strong head winds of
disappointment and setbacks beat
against us relentlessly. We must
not permit adverse winds to over-
whelm us as we journey across
life’s mighty Atlantic; we must be
sustained by our engines of
courage in spite of the winds. This
refusal to be stopped, this ‘courage
to be,’ this determination to go on
‘in spite of’ is the hallmark of any
great movement.”