Showtime at Coretta Scott King's Funeral

Larry Elder has written an outstanding Article about the Coretta Scott King Funeral. Larry puts out that if you listened to all of the speakers talk about the bad conditions the minorities live, you would wonder if Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife accomplished anything. This is a must read...

Feb 16, 2006by Larry Elder

The "funeral" of Coretta Scott King turned into an ugly, disrespectful political rally. Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder -- along with Martin Luther King Jr. -- of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, castigated President George W. Bush for insufficient disaster relief, failing to provide health care and failing to cure poverty. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there," said Lowery. "But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."

Listening to speaker after speaker complain about the poor conditions under which minorities live, one wonders whether Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished anything at all. There stood Oprah Winfrey, the most powerful woman in television, with her net worth estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.3 billion. And she recently signed a $55 million deal with XM Satellite Radio. There stood poet Maya Angelou, who, in one recent year, grossed $3.3 million according to Forbes, and lives in a mansion while employing several people full time. There stood Shirley Franklin, the black female mayor of the city of Atlanta. There stood former presidential candidate Rev. Al Sharpton, a man who once called Jews "diamond merchants" and denounced a white Harlem storeowner as a "white interloper." A man whom many still take seriously despite falsely accusing a man of rape, and despite the existence of a 1983 FBI surveillance tape showing Sharpton discussing, with an undercover agent, a deal to traffic cocaine. And, of course, Jesse Jackson spoke -- a multimillionaire with two sons who own an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship, and another son who serves as a U.S. congressman from the Chicago area.

To continue reading the article go to Showtime at Coretta Scott King's Funeral from Townhall.com

I thought this was a great statement from Booker T. Washington included in Larry's article.

In 1911, Booker T. Washington seemed to address some of those who spoke at the funeral when he said, "There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy, and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. . . . There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."

Larry didn't say this, but it sounds as if he was talking about Jesse Jackson Jr., Al Sharpton, and several other "leaders" who seem to be getting rich on the backs of the people they are supposed to be helping.

Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and publishes a monthly newsletter entitled "The Elder Statement."