There is a “moral bankruptcy” that’s settled into leadership of America in the White House and throughout Washington, D.C., Dr. Alveda King–the niece of Martin Luther King, Jr.–said in an interview Friday morning.
“All of our leaders–or many of our leaders–are just morally bankrupt right now,” King said when asked if President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have helped or hurt the black community in America. “They’re not calling on God. We still stay ‘In God We Trust’ and ‘One Nation Under God’ but we’re not practicing that. We need to call on God. There’s a moral bankruptcy in this country and we really need to come back to God.”
Dr. King is part of an effort that will be announced publicly early next week by various conservative black, Hispanic and Tea Party leaders to reach out to the black community and get them engaged in an effort to help urban centers reject big government in favor of smaller, limited government. The project, called “Restore The Dream 2014,” includes other black leaders like TheTeaParty.net’s Niger Innis, FreedomWorks’ the Rev. C.L. Bryant, radio host Wayne Dupree, Conservative Campaign Committee chairman Lloyd Marcus, Conservative Review president Deneen Borelli, columnist Star Parker, former U.N. Commission on Civil Rights ambassador Ken Blackwell, and others.
In an interview, Innis–whose father Roy Innis has led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the major organizations behind the Civil Rights movement, since 1968–said that progressive and big government policies have created a “welfare state that has largely not only destroyed the black and increasingly so Latino–and American family generally–they have killed the types of incentives that had led people to achieve and build a better life for themselves.”
“You can have opportunity right in front of your door but you’re terrified to open it because you’re a victim,” Innis said. “So those two realities that you have now since a leviathan of the federal government that is trying to fashion itself as a cradle-to-grave big daddy government–going to take care of you from cradle to grave and give you all sorts of disincentives to climbing that economic ladder, and by the way if you do climb that economic ladder they’re going to punish you punitively with taxes that are going to undermine you.”
“If you dare want to open up a business, they’re going to cripple you with regulations and taxes and they’re going to make it easier for you to be a rational human being and just get government benefits rather than being a liberated individual who can climb that economic ladder,” he continued. “So you have that real but not concrete phenomenon of big government mentality crippling you and then you have on a parallel track victimization syndrome overriding it that says–you pick the minority–‘you are a victim and you are the underdog so you can never achieve.’ That is a dangerous recipe and it is a recipe that has dominated urban centers for more than 50 years and what we’re trying to do is liberate them.”
King said that economic indicators show that during Obama’s presidency, things have gotten dramatically worse for black Americans.
“The data is going to indicate black people lost out in every single leading economic category during the Obama years,” King told Breitbart News, noting that liberal commentator Tavis Smiley agrees with her and that they’re not trying to “demonize” or “cast aspersions” on Obama, but the truth needs to be told. “That’s terrible. There’s nothing that’s been done to enhance our lives but there’s all sorts of things that were done to [give us stuff] like free access to abortion, free birth control in a healthcare clinic. But that’s nothing that’s going to help us economically, intellectually, physically health-wise and otherwise–there’s nothing being done for us. Black home ownership is 31 percent less than the rest of the country. Poverty rates have increased from 12 percent to 16.1 percent. Income for blacks is $20,000 less than the national average. Thirty-five percent of young blacks are out of work.”
That’s just the beginning of the black community’s woes under Obama, she said. Education, immigration, and health concerns are abound too.
“I’m not so locked into a political party–Republican, Democrat, independent–it doesn’t matter to me what your party affiliation happens to be,” King said. “We just need to vote and have common sense and good morals when we elect our people. We need hope. We need for the lights to come back on. We need to shine the light of the Lord and the love of the Lord back onto the country. We need a restoration, and that’s how we can restore the dream.”
King pointed Breitbart News to her uncle’s famous “Give Us The Ballot” speech, which he delivered in May 1957 in Washington, D.C., and discussed how he the black community could effectuate change by voting. “Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said in that speech. “Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.”
King said that the black community needs to do the same today to use the ballot to change the liberal policies that are hurting them.
“We have to now in this century understand what my uncle and father talked about, which is that we are part of an equal community where everyone has an equal place in society,” King said. “Giving people government handouts without dignity, that’s not working. Giving people HHS mandate healthcare with free contraceptives and free abortions, that’s not going to help people. So we want to do more. We want our children better educated. We want better education, more jobs, opportunity, so people can contribute to society–so those are our goals.”
King also said she agrees with her aunt Coretta Scott King, MLK’s wife, who in 1991 wrote a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asking him to actually enforce immigration laws so that illegal aliens wouldn’t have a “devastating impact” on blacks by taking jobs away from them.
“I did go down to the border with Glenn Beck because actually I was concerned about the children,” King said. “I do not agree with open borders and you’ve got people who take these little children, cut them up and fill them with drugs then sew them back up and send them over here. I did want the children to be fed, I wanted them to have a warm meal and try to get them back home. I do not support open borders and I certainly agree with my aunt on that.”
The group plans to gather at the MLK memorial in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and then will travel to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then onto Ferguson, Missouri–the site of the shooting death of Michael Brown earlier this year, something that has sparked controversy in the black community nationwide.
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