Take King and Malcom, who I grew up listening to. King had the ideal strategy for the South. He knew the enemy, he knew the terrain, he knew the strengths and weaknesses of both the foe and his own people. King’s strategy was for a people who had already achieved or proven beyond reasonable doubt they could achieve sociological parity with whites.

Growing up in the south, it never occurred to me that I, as a black child, could not become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or businessman…because I was surrounded by doctors, lawyers, teachers, and businessmen who looked just like me. Certainly I could go to college–so many people around me who looked like me had gone to college. That wasn’t even a question–it was normalcy. What blacks in the south had accomplished was very similar to what Jews and Chinese were able to accomplish.

There wasn’t anything whites were doing or could do in the south that black people were not doing–except where a white man stood bodily to block them. There was a King in the south mostly because there had been a B. T. Washington in the South.

That was not the situation in the north. Much more clever forms of racism made it less clear that black people could ever achieve their parity. It was, in fact, much more effective than racism in the south. The murder of Malcom–who knew northern racism and the strategy to over come it– timed at it was, might have been a greater tragedy than the murder of King.

I think the controversy is now being exploited for the expansion of some people political agenda. Wrongly so, because this is the 21th century and I don’t think many Back people have any sense of the ancestors now. Many have no idea how it was to live under Jim Crow. It is almost as if we have some Disenyized or Williamsburg’s vision of the past.

In the fifties most Blacks understood how we survived and how many compromises one had to make.

its important to fight for civil rights, but its important that the race tries to lift itself up on its own as much possible and become powerful so this way it doesn’t have to depend on the majority race.

in fact as good as the movement was in the 60s, i think that is what went wrong. when MLK was assassinated it was as if many people didn’t know what to do after that, and then you had the 70s and that didn’t help with the underground/gangs and all. i think this is why people like jackson and sharpton have alot of power in the black community and are major jokes to white people.

i personally don’t like those sharpton and jackson because they aren’t helping the cause, i do think they do the civil rights thing for the attention, not to mention, they have been used to much that its hard to make the whites listen when they appear because like i said before, they think they are jokes.

but anyways, Booker did have a good point, the black race should try to uplift itself, in the same way the Jewish people did, the Asians did, and the Native Americans did.

I mean we may have the worse American history, but we should overcome it to have a more positive ending to the story.