NOW Can His Statue Replace Davis' in the Capitol Rotunda?

It will not mean as much as if we'd done it before he died, but honoring this champion of political dissent and black power in place of the champion of treason in defense of slavery will be the best thing Kentucky has done for its citizens and the nation since refusing to secede 155 years ago.

From the Herald:

In his 20s, when the United States was in a state of racial and political upheaval, when the country was riven by marches, riots and protests, Ali molded an era by breaking the mold of the black athlete. He was an outspoken advocate of black power and religious freedom.

Despised by many Americans in the mid-1960s for joining the radical Nation of Islam, refusing to be drafted into military service for the Vietnam War and challenging the white establishment ....

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In retirement, he dedicated himself to humanitarian causes, world peace, the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center in Phoenix and the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. The Muhammad Ali Childhood Home Museum – the renovated house where he grew up – opened last month.

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“Ali helped raise black people in this country out of mental slavery,” former Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson once said. “The entire experience of being black changed for millions of people because of Ali.”

He made controversial decisions and remained steadfast in his beliefs despite harsh criticism, racist threats and a three-and-a-half-year suspension from boxing during his prime after he was convicted of draft evasion. Ali argued that he was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

“Where do you think I would be if I didn’t shout and holler? I would be poor and down in Louisville washing windows, shining shoes or running an elevator and saying, ‘Yes, suh’ and ‘No, suh,’ and knowing my place,” Ali said of his activism.“Why does the white man care if I hate him anyhow? He’s got everything going for him — White Swan soap, Tarzan is white, Jesus is white, White Owl cigars, the White Tornado, Snow White and her Seven Dwarfs, the White House. Angel food cake is all white, but Devil’s food cake is black!”

After Ali’s exile, he began to gain acceptance from Americans who had resented him. Times were changing. Ali had been ahead of those times in his commitment to the antiwar movement and the abolishment of Jim Crow laws.

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On Feb. 17, 1966, reporters came to Ali’s Allapattah house to tell him his low draft test score had been reclassified and that he was now eligible to be drafted for the Vietnam War.

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” Ali said. He refused to be inducted, citing his religious beliefs. He was stripped of his title and banned from boxing.

“You want me to do what the white man says and go fight a war against some people I don’t know nothing about — get some freedom for some other people when my own people can’t get theirs here? No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger.

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs.”
Ali was maligned by the media (they continued to call him Clay) as an impudent egomaniac, and now he was unpatriotic, too. He was criticized by his idol, Joe Louis, and by Floyd Patterson.

But Ali’s words resonated with the younger generation. They saw him not only as a fighter for titles but for peace and equal rights.

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In an interview years ago, Ali described how he’d like to be remembered:

“I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: As a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could – financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality. As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam that he found when he listened to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And if all that’s asking too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”

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Escape from WalMart's Stable, Michelle.

Among the many proofs that giant corporations own even the most populist, well-intentioned portions of our nation is the willingness of American leaders who presumably know better to promote and partner with egregious corporate criminal WalMart.

Bruce A. Dixon at Black Agenda Report, via Firedoglake:

Five or six years ago, Wal-Mart had a big problem. It was the largest private employer in the U.S., but its historic growth model was running up against a wall. There were simply no more small and medium sized towns whose markets could be swallowed, prevailing wages depressed, and whose family-owned hardware, grocery, clothing and other stores could be replaced by a publicly subsidized Wal-Mart. Most of the uncolonized territory, from Wal-Mart's point of view, was in and near large urban areas outside the South, places like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The challenge, from Wal-Mart's point of view, was to identify and buy up a brand new bunch of public officials and opinion makers, many of them African American. Wal-Mart had to find and hire black and Latino-oriented advertising and PR agencies to write to write the commercials for those audiences, and stage the events where they handed out scholarships or basketball uniforms. They had to extend their model of public and secret tax breaks, campaign contributions, selective charity, and corporate welfare to a new bunch of elite participants, our own black political class.

Among the first and most prominent Wal-Mart conquests was Tavis Smiley, who at the time was still doing his annual State of the Black Union broadcasts on C-SPAN. And despite his doubtless sincere protestations against poverty, Tavis remains to this day an occupant of the Wal-Mart stable.

The facts are that new retail in existing urban and suburban areas is almost never a net job creator. People don't get more money to spend because there are more stores or different stores to spend it in. New retail, whether it's Ikea, Wal-Mart or whatever, simply diverts business from the places people already shop. Besides that, Wal-Mart's business model of corrupting public officials, lying about job creation numbers, rampant sex and race discrimination, relentlessly low wage and benefit levels, and aspirations to monopoly control of local markets across the country make it a bad neighbor, a worse boss, an unfair competitor and sometimes a criminal enterprise.

Recent news reports that top Wal-Mart officers conspired to hide evidence of how their culture of official bribery operated in Mexico have thrown its practices worldwide and here at home under renewed scrutiny by the public, and even by the Department of Justice. But revealing a corner of Wal-Mart's corrupt practices, which are really pretty much standard stuff everywhere in the capitalist world, and protecting the public against them are two very different things.

Protecting black America against the ravages of corporate capitalism has never been the strong suit of today's black political class. In that class alone, Wal-Mart has many more players in its pocket than just Tavis Smiley. Former Atlanta congressman and mayor Andrew Young was a prominent early sellout to Wal-Mart. Since then the retail giant has acquired hundreds of local preachers and politicians like Chicago aldermen for example, often purchased for what look like embarrassingly small contributions to their churches, political war chests or favorite charities, unless there are other sums of money under the table which the records don't reflect.

Perhaps the biggest single black notable in the Wal-Mart pocket these days is the First Lady, Michelle Obama.

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As the White House's resident advocate for healthy eating and exercise, Ms. Obama has leveraged her image as a priceless asset to Wal-Mart, endorsing its drive to penetrate new urban markets, crush competition, and gobble up even more public tax breaks and subsidies. But in the real world, more urban Wal-Marts, and giving more public subsidies and market share to the amoral company that already accounts for 27 cents of every dollar spent on groceries in this country is not so much the solution to urban “food deserts” as it is the solution to Wal-Mart's problem of how to raise that 27 cents to 30, 40 or 50 cents of every grocery dollar in its corporate coffers. That's the problem Michelle Obama is helping solve, not the problem of accessing decent food at reasonable prices.

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Nobody sensible believes recent reports of rampant corruption in Wal-Mart's board rooms are anything but the smallest tip of a glacier of bribery, conspiracy and criminality. There are competing visions in the land. One is the vision of our black political class, our black misleadership class, of which Michelle Obama is a prominent member. Their vision is about extending corporate power, not protecting us from it. Ultimately it's we who need protection from them.

Read the whole thing.

It has been barely four decades since corporations seeking the kind of political influence criminals like WalMart now take for granted would be laughed - if not tarred, feathered and railroaded - out of town.

The knowledge and moral center that enabled such political independence from corporations resides in living memory. It is not quite yet a lost art.

Michelle Obama rejecting WalMart would make huge strides toward restoring that independence.

Barack's Bittersweet Black Leadership

Coming in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Matt Bai on how Barack Obama represents a bittersweet transfer of leadership among black politicians from the generation that bled at Selma to the generation that graduated from white schools.

For black Americans born in the 20th century, the chasms of experience that separate one generation from the next— those who came of age before the movement, those who lived it, those who came along after — have always been hard to traverse. Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. “But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die.” In any community shadowed by oppression, pride and bitterness can be hard to untangle.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.