Redistributing wealth?!

The Obama White House is attempting to perpetrate the biggest hoax in the nation’s history by insisting that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was really about the redistribution of wealth. The claim is that had the Civil Rights Movement not gotten bogged down in court action, the focus would have shifted to how wealth was distributed in America. Would have, could have, should have...

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But the fact is that the Civil Rights Movement in America has never been about taking wealth from the rich and reassigning it to those less fortunate. When Rosa Parks bravely refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, back in 1955 she wasn’t demanding that the state of Alabama or the federal government give her money. She was demanding equality under the law. Having personally been involved in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s, I never heard one black leader demand to be “given the wealth”, as former White House green jobs czar, Van Jones would put it. What I heard Martin Luther King and others, like Ralph Abernathy, clearly demand in every case was that we be judged not “by the color of [our] skin, but by the content of [our] character”. To be sure, during that same speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, Dr. King did say,

“In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

But talk of a “check” was a rhetorical device, not a call for the government to render free access to other people’s pocketbooks. In fact, back in those days people who advocated the concept of redistributing the wealth were called “communists” and were shunned by the mainstream of society. To be sure, the American Communist Party ran candidates in nearly every election in the second half of the Twentieth Century and did not enjoy any degree of success until they started running as Democrats. The idea of “redistributive change” in America has recently found its way into the American mainstream due to an unfortunate miscalculation on the part of the American people that it might be really cool to have a black dude sitting in the White House. I can guarantee with 100% certainty that when some middle-class white lady stepped into that voting booth in Youngstown, Ohio to cast her vote for Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States, she was not voting in favor of the Carte Blanche pillaging of America’s wealthy so it could be “redistributed”. What Dr. King was seeking has found its way into the American mainstream, as the “check” he mentioned in his Dream Speech has been cashed and the funds have cleared the bank. This is plainly evident by the fact that a black man now occupies that mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.