The Movement
By Larry Johnson on April 24, 2008 at 10:42 AM in Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Black Agenda Report, Black nationalism, Martin Luther King, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Weather Underground, William Ayers
Give Barack Obama his due. He has revived feelings and emotions that recall the Sixties. But not all of the feelings and emotions of that era are good or decent. Unless you are at least 53 years old, you have no real clear memory of the struggles of the period. So I am guessing that most folks reading this blog only know the Sixties through movies and TV shows.
We are proud to present Flineo’s latest work. It is brilliant. It combines images of today with the words of yesterday.
It is important to acknowledge that Barack is able to run for President today because of the civil rights movement that came to full flower in 1968. It was a movement born in blood—Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are among the most prominent and best-known martyrs. But the Sixties also stands as the Ying and Yang of good and bad political movements. On the one hand, King and Evers preached non-violence and defied the racists to attack them with clubs, dogs, guns, and mobs. On the other hand there were groups like the Weather Underground, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers. They advocated violence.
As a young boy living in Indonesia, Barack had no firsthand experience with, or knowledge of, this period of upheaval in the United States. He learned about it later, in large measure from Frank Davis, a black activist and communist who favored the tactics of the Black Panthers over the non-violence of Martin Luther King.
And here is the critical point for us today. Barack Obama has not surrounded himself with those who represent and espouse the views and vision of Dr. King. He has cast his lot with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. The hope he offers is not the hope of Dr. King. Dr. King saw beyond skin color. Barack has embraced a religious movement that is Africentric and prone to sharpen divisions between black and white. That’s a movement I can live without.






















