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Alveda King is a sad woman living off of her uncle's name
When the NAACP passed a resolution support marriage equality, I knew that THEY were coming.
By “THEY,” I am talking about a group of wannabe black leaders who I like to refer to colloquially as “The Vultures.”
These folks claim to lead “big time” organizations with important sounding names. Something like “The High Impact Leadership Coalition” or “Brotherhood for a New Destiny” or “Center for Urban Renewal and Education.”
I should tell you right now that these organizations are astroturfed. They don’t speak for the black community because a vast majority of us have never heard of them. And why should we? Whenever there needs to be a true voice in the black community addressing issues such as poverty or socio-economic equality, these groups are never around.
They exist only as convenient black faces to be trotted out by conservatives or the religious right when it comes to issues of race. These so-called black leaders don’t care about the black community because they are too busy telling some whites what they want to hear about the black community.
That’s all they do. That’s the only reason why they exist.
And in the case of the NAACP accepting marriage equality, these folks are in rare form. Religious Right Watch covers what several of them had to say:
Stephen Broden, a Republican politician who has said that the violent overthrow of the government should be “on the table,” dubbed the NAACP “irrelevant”:
Stephen Broden, pastor of Fair Park Bible Fellowship in Dallas, notes that the black community is suffering from soaring unemployment, an extraordinarily high rate of abortions, a high school drop out rate among black teenagers that is breathtaking, an exploding rate of single parent households and the decimation of black families.
Yet, Broden says, the NAACP is making statements about same-sex marriage. “The NAACP has proven again to be an irrelevant organization as it relates to issues of survival for the black community,” says Broden who co-authored Life at All Costs with King and Gardner. The book addresses issues such as abortion and homosexuality.
Domestic violence perpetrator turned “pro-family” activist Timothy Johnson called on African Americans to ditch the NAACP and join his own group, the Frederick Douglass Foundation:
“When you recognize that the black community is strongly a Christian-based group of people, conservative in most of the things they believe, the NAACP has gone diabolically the opposite direction of tradition of the black community,” he states. “[The NAACP] really is doing this in order to stay relevant and in order to build up their revenues as it relates to what they can get from the gay community.”
Religious Right Watch also mentions comments by the “Queen Mother” of the group, Alveda King, Martin Luther King, Jr’s niece:
Alveda King, as always, tied the topic to the question of abortion rights and claimed to speak for her uncle and other relatives in claiming that the King family has always opposed the “homosexual agenda”:
“Neither my great-grandfather an NAACP founder, my grandfather Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. an NAACP leader, my father Rev. A. D. Williams King, nor my uncle Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda,” says King, founder of King for America and Pastoral Associate for Priests for Life.
“In the 21st Century, the anti-traditional marriage community is in league with the anti-life community, and together with the NAACP and other sympathizers, they are seeking a world where homosexual marriage and abortion will supposedly set the captives free.”
Alveda King is a sad fraud. Practically her entire career has been reaping off of her famous uncle, a man who lived and died when she was a child. I doubt she knew anything about King. I doubt very much that she is aware that one of King’s advisers, Bayard Rustin, was an openly gay man. It was Rustin who not only coordinated the March on Washington, but also introduced King to the idea of non-violent resistance.
I also seriously doubt she knew what was in King’s heart when it came to the gay community. However, we do know what she thought of Coretta Scott King, MLK’s wife and the person who did know his heart and was also a very vocal ally of the gay community.
Two years ago, when she was asked about Coretta Scott King’s support of the gay community, she made a highly inappropriate comment:
“She (Coretta) was married to him (Martin Luther King, Jr.). I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t. She didn’t. She’s passed away.”
That comment alone gives a great indication of Alveda King’s mindset and lack of integrity.
But generally speaking, anyone using Alveda King or any of these other spokespeople or groups as proof that the black community has turned on the NAACP for the organization’s support of marriage equality is lying to their readers.
Neither these groups nor their spokespeople ever really cared for the NAACP in the first place.
Because to them, it’s all about the spotlight.
8 Comments
I think you’re insulting vultures everywhere by comparing them to this crowd.
Yeah, I know, vultures hang around nasty rotting carrion and all that. But they also serve a useful purpose in cleaning up nasty rotting matter — which is more useful than anything done by Alveda King and others of her ilk. Also, vultures are good at soaring on thermals, and Alveda et al. are very much stuck in the mud on earth.
{ bwa ha ha ha }
As if one can presume to know the mindset and outlook of people who lived 70 years ago in some cases. Let alone that they may have approached any topic with a more informed or wiser opinion in view of new information, etc. I always have limited trust in one who wants to speak for the dead. Just cautious that way.
The vultures are fighting an increasingly desperate rearguard action, as a new ABC News poll shows that most African Americans now back marriage equality, thanks to Obama and the NAACP.
Nice article.
My caveat–this reply is from an old white guy.
My opinion–the NAACP will prevail. And if shit comes to shove, it will favor movement further to the left, not right.
In my 60′s youth, I started trying to do my part by joining the NAACP. But it was not moving fast and hard enough for me and I switched allegiance to CORE. And from MLK to Stokely Carmichael. (MLK came out against the Vietnam War too late for me.) My sympathy was for the Panthers but I thought they were better off without a white contingency.
I know times have changed but I can not believe the Black consciousness is far off from its roots. And this little move by the NAACP for Gay Rights has re-kindled my interest and respect for it after all these years.
The Right cynically uses blacks when it suits their purpose, and since everyone has a price, there are many blacks willing to take a few bucks to be a willing stooge. Many times I’ve seen a GOP pol give a speech on TV and there is often in the crowd at least one black face placed strategically behind them. In the words of Raymond Chandler, they are about as “conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food”.
Alvin,
IF GAY MARRAIGE IS THE ONLY THING ON PEOPLE’S MINDS, THEN THE ASYLUM STATES OF AMERIKA IS SURELY DOOMED……………..
You must be friends of the Chipmunks because you are way off base here. True enough that most black people may not have heard of many of these race hucksters, but the sad fact remains that blacks, as a race, are ten times more homophobic than any other race, whites or otherwise. They don’t need “wannabe” black leaders to tell them what they already believe, and that is they are more homophobic than just about anybody. But hey, leaderless or not, blacks, like their white counterparts, still remain on the war party reservation, voting for one of the rightwings of the war party, being the democrats and the republicans.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but if this is what you believe, I think you’re pegged as a white person who can’t handle, or be trusted with, reality. So you only know black white-face, sort of a reverse Al Jolson but for real. You probably need to grow up.