In the 60+% black deindustrializing city where I spent my early and late teens (I'm early GenX), pretty much ALL the blacks I knew REJECTED Michael King. The only ones who embraced all that were blacks in several local colleges' Black Studies programs that started in the mid 1970s.
(IIRC "black studies" came out of Harvard, in 1968, but I may be misremembering. Racial grift was already a thing under LBJ--look up the money he poured into HarYou in NYC--Black Science Man's daddy headed that up--under the auspices of City Hall. My recollection is that he gave something like $120m in fedbux--equivalent of about $1.2 bn today--to push HarYou's programs all over NYC and nationally.)
But back to the topic. King had attended seminary nearby after WW2, and a lot of the AME and other black churches had had experience of him preaching there in the runup to the 1964 "Civil" "Rights" Act, and then afterward, in the road show preparing our and other cities for annual summer race riots. (So useful for driving down the value of real estate, or getting out from under bad real estate investments.) That area's black population was primarily Southern blacks brought North for war industry then postwar jobs. I.e. WORKING families. Deindustrialization hit that area hard.
Then there were the Nation of Islam guys I knew through the community radio station. They rejected Michael King as well...and called "Civil" "Rights" another form of slavery (they also were called "anti semites")...but they were open to the populist and self-determination/free enterprise messages of the early Rainbow Coalition. At that radio station were also Christian blacks, R&B secular blacks, disco blacks...and I can't recall ANY of them who didn't growl at the idea of getting race-based special treatment. The only black guy I knew who supported all that, outside of the Black Studies club, was married to a jewish sociologist.
In that area the Rainbow Coalition included working class black Rs and Ds, as well as black professionals. And whites both of founding stock and later arrivals, and Puerto Ricans, and Indians (dot) of which we had a good amount thanks to nearby engineering programs.
The RC may have been flawed in just the ways you say (I didn't hear any of that till later, regarding the NYC and Chicago PUSH and ACORN iirc)...but the Coalition focused Americans' hunger for a unifying populist party/movement that more resembled the classic Republicanism of the first three decades of the 20th century.
It had to be stopped--after all, by the mid-1980s both parties were full-on permawar neocon globalists--and the (((media))) takedown of Jackson over his "anti semitic remark" was the method.
And it's not like those blacks were cookie cutter people. Their communities had many/all of the same deranged individuals and behaviors as we see today, though probably in a lesser proportion given there could still be pushback--from EVERYONE--on black misbehavior. Including pushback from that now-nearly-defunct phenomenon: black fathers and grandfathers, and strong pastors.
In 1981 these same black families had joined with black families in Philly in REJECTING Wesley Cook, the cop killer (Danny Faulkner). They rejected him so hard that Cook's (((lawyer))) had to take the road show to (((Hollywood))), remaking Cook as "Mumia abu Jamal." Then marketing him to college students.
About 10 months after the DNC convention in San Francisco (Nov. 1984) to nominate Walter Mondale and make sure the Rainbow populists were Shut It Downed, those same black families in Philly, and their elders and youngsters, REJECTED the so called "back to nature" cult, MOVE, which had been installed in the middle of a tidy middle class black neighborhood in West Philly (by whom, would you guess?). These neighbors had been pressuring Mayor Wilson Goode to get them out of there by any means necessary. It went poorly, but considering how poorly City Hall was run by then after 20+ years of (((racial grift))), that was to be expected.
The shakedown stuff that came later--I wouldn't be surprised by any of it. A lot of political conflict in the US has been played out by You Know Who using NGO fronts. All I'm saying is that in the early years, the Rainbow Coalition attracted a very broad base. 1984 was a watershed for that.
TPTB quashed the Tea Party 25 years later. They couldn't quash MAGA 30 years later. Oh, but they do try.
In the 60+% black deindustrializing city where I spent my early and late teens (I'm early GenX), pretty much ALL the blacks I knew REJECTED Michael King. The only ones who embraced all that were blacks in several local colleges' Black Studies programs that started in the mid 1970s.
(IIRC "black studies" came out of Harvard, in 1968, but I may be misremembering. Racial grift was already a thing under LBJ--look up the money he poured into HarYou in NYC--Black Science Man's daddy headed that up--under the auspices of City Hall. My recollection is that he gave something like $120m in fedbux--equivalent of about $1.2 bn today--to push HarYou's programs all over NYC and nationally.)
But back to the topic. King had attended seminary nearby after WW2, and a lot of the AME and other black churches had had experience of him preaching there in the runup to the 1964 "Civil" "Rights" Act, and then afterward, in the road show preparing our and other cities for annual summer race riots. (So useful for driving down the value of real estate, or getting out from under bad real estate investments.) That area's black population was primarily Southern blacks brought North for war industry then postwar jobs. I.e. WORKING families. Deindustrialization hit that area hard.
Then there were the Nation of Islam guys I knew through the community radio station. They rejected Michael King as well...and called "Civil" "Rights" another form of slavery (they also were called "anti semites")...but they were open to the populist and self-determination/free enterprise messages of the early Rainbow Coalition. At that radio station were also Christian blacks, R&B secular blacks, disco blacks...and I can't recall ANY of them who didn't growl at the idea of getting race-based special treatment. The only black guy I knew who supported all that, outside of the Black Studies club, was married to a jewish sociologist.
In that area the Rainbow Coalition included working class black Rs and Ds, as well as black professionals. And whites both of founding stock and later arrivals, and Puerto Ricans, and Indians (dot) of which we had a good amount thanks to nearby engineering programs.
The RC may have been flawed in just the ways you say (I didn't hear any of that till later, regarding the NYC and Chicago PUSH and ACORN iirc)...but the Coalition focused Americans' hunger for a unifying populist party/movement that more resembled the classic Republicanism of the first three decades of the 20th century.
It had to be stopped--after all, by the mid-1980s both parties were full-on permawar neocon globalists--and the (((media))) takedown of Jackson over his "anti semitic remark" was the method.
And it's not like those blacks were cookie cutter people. Their communities had many/all of the same deranged individuals and behaviors as we see today, though probably in a lesser proportion given there could still be pushback--from EVERYONE--on black misbehavior. Including pushback from that now-nearly-defunct phenomenon: black fathers and grandfathers, and strong pastors.
In 1981 these same black families had joined with black families in Philly in REJECTING Wesley Cook, the cop killer (Danny Faulkner). They rejected him so hard that Cook's (((lawyer))) had to take the road show to (((Hollywood))), remaking Cook as "Mumia abu Jamal." Then marketing him to college students.
About 10 months after the DNC convention in San Francisco (Nov. 1984) to nominate Walter Mondale and make sure the Rainbow populists were Shut It Downed, those same black families in Philly, and their elders and youngsters, REJECTED the so called "back to nature" cult, MOVE, which had been installed in the middle of a tidy middle class black neighborhood in West Philly (by whom, would you guess?). These neighbors had been pressuring Mayor Wilson Goode to get them out of there by any means necessary. It went poorly, but considering how poorly City Hall was run by then after 20+ years of (((racial grift))), that was to be expected.
The shakedown stuff that came later--I wouldn't be surprised by any of it. A lot of political conflict in the US has been played out by You Know Who using NGO fronts. All I'm saying is that in the early years, the Rainbow Coalition attracted a very broad base. 1984 was a watershed for that.
TPTB quashed the Tea Party 25 years later. They couldn't quash MAGA 30 years later. Oh, but they do try.
Thank you for reading my auld phart blog post.
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GREAT comment.