"MARTIN LUTHER KING AT COMMUNIST TRAINING SCHOOL"
There it was. In big bold letters. Festooned across the top of newspapers and pamphlets; flyers and billboards. Postcards and mailers. The leader of the Negro movement was backed by communists. In a photograph Dr. Martin Luther King is highlighted, usually printed with a large black arrow with his name inside, sitting along with other "communist sympathizers" supposedly being trained. The photograph had been taken at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. An important incubator for anti-segregation activists that had a long storied history of fighting for racial justice and human rights. The Highlander, situated on rolling hills in the lush high country of Tennessee, had been pushing for unionization, women's rights and integration across of the South for decades. At its height of influence in the 1950s you couldn't throw a stone and not hit a future Civil rights icon; there was Rosa Parks talking strategy in 1955 before the bus boycotts, there was Pete Seerger, Charis Horton and Ralph Abernathy confabbing. You had James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette working on SNCC's next move while singing "We Shall Overcome" to break the tension. The Highlander was closed by the state for "inciting public panic" in 1959. In a now famous standoff the county sheriff evacuated the center's building and padlocked the door. Myles Horton, the founder, stood by and watched as reporters flashed photographs. As the sheriff walked away Horton turned to the phalanx of media people and said defiantly "You can padlock a building but you can't padlock an idea."
The photgraph itself was innocuous. A lecture had been given at the Highlander but the words across the top were damming. It didn't matter if the origin of the picture had been planted by the Ku Klux Klan. The smear campaign had begun. Dr. Martin Luther King and his horde of communist backed minions were here to bring violence, unGodliness and white slavery to the United States. Many southern newspapers ran the picture and the accompanying story as a rallying cry for Southern whites to wake up. Rise up. To support and defend their Southern heritage at all costs. Of course this was only a part of a large COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram)--which is a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. These schemes were often facilitated by media. With this backdrop in mind we should not find it shocking that Elisabeth Hasselbeck suggests the Black Lives Matter movement is a hate group. I'm surprised that this didn't come sooner.
The goals of Hoover's machinations were simple:
1. Create a negative public image for targeted groups (e.g. by surveilling activists, and releasing negative personal information to the public)
- Think of how #BLM member Shaun King was "outed" a few weeks ago for not being Black.
- Think of how the 2 #BLM Black women who organized the strike on Bernie Sanders's Seattle rally were called out because one of them was a former Palin supporter and was labelled as a radical Christian.
- They claim that civil rights organizations exacerbate race relations and cause violence as in the recent shooting of a Texas law enforcement officer, but are silent when two cops are gunned down execution-style in a Las Vegas pizza shop and covered with the Gadsden Flag (Don't Tread on Me) which has become the standard of the Tea Party.
2. Break down internal organization
- Think about all those news pundits who keep saying nobody knows what the Black Lives Matter movement really is all about. Even though it has been stated time and time again, on Facebook, Twitter, their website, by members, by me. You just keep hearing this drumbeat of confusion and disorganization. Why aren't the journalist doing journalism instead of conjecture?
3. Create dissension between groups
- There's a rule of thumb used in Civil Rights. If the media can find one Black person to refute the claims of any Civil Rights organization, that organization is automatically discredited. We saw this after Dr. King was openly criticized by the Black elite after his blistering "Beyond Vietnam" speech where he excoriated President Johnson for his slow-pace on fair housing here in America while spending millions to send troops to die in Vietnam. They told Dr. King he was being ungrateful and petulant. A year before Dr. King died a poll was conducted that showed 53% of African-Americans viewed him unfavorably.
- We see it now as FOX News parades out a string of "coons for coins" who are all too happy to denigrate Black civil rights leaders and organizations. These so-called "experts" are willing to make the most outlandish and incendiary claims which in turn vacates Hasselback, Doucy, Hannety, O'Reilly, Coulter and others part in race baiting. They can easily say "See this Black hates Obama; he doesn't think racism is real; Black people are lazy, dangerous and sad. And because we love our own magical Negro, Dr. Ben Carson, the other forty-five million of you must be wrong."
restricting the ability to organize protests and restricting the ability of individuals to participate in group activities. All of these are done to dilute, distort, defame and deflect the organization and our attention away from the real matter at hand. To keep the narrative away from the systemic death, destruction and denigration of millions of American lives. So while Hasselback's comments are controversial and she will take some heat for it; the truth is her sentiments were scripted for her years ago by an angry, racist zealot sitting in a marble fortress fighting against the forward momentum of racial justice. From his heart of darkness he has created a still formidable matrix that uses misinformation and apathy to prop-up an untenable situation, one that we must not only confront but affirm that BLACK LIVES MATTER.
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