November 24, 1996

Victim Psychology Hurts Rev. King's Civil Rights Dream

Recent events impinging on minority civil rights are perplexing to your writer whose first editorial 55 years ago in the Flint, Mich., Mott College newspaper was a plea for "integration."

Thus, I am shaken by Columnist Carl Rowan's new book "The Coming Race War in America." Rowan is a respected African-American columnist who has spoken strongly and constructively for civil rights throughout his long career. His pessimism now must be taken very seriously.

Riots erupted recently in St. Petersburg over the shooting death of TyRon Lewis, a young African-American motorist avoiding questioning by police officers. Many innocent people were injured. One policeman was shot in the leg. Thirty stores were looted and burned. Lewis, driving a car with heavily tinted windows, was stopped for a routine traffic violation. He ignored an order to roll down his window to identify himself - undoubtedly because the car was stolen.

He was wanted on three arrest warrants, and he carried a stash of crack cocaine. When the police officer attempted to peer through the windshield, Lewis lurched his car forward four times to prevent inspection. On the fourth lurch, the officer was thrown onto the car's hood. Not knowing who or how many were inside, and whether they had guns aimed, the officer fired three times.

After the police were exonerated by a grand jury, another riot erupted into a hail of stones and gasoline bombs stored by a black separatist group anticipating the verdict.

The St. Petersburg riots are similar to those when Rodney King, a fugitive from justice, resisted arrest and was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers. In that incident, videotaped by a bystander, many people were injured and half the African-American neighborhood was burned. King, a persistent trouble maker, has been arrested several times since for a variety of serious offenses.

Black tolerance of black hoodlums who impose on the black majority - under the license of white hatred - is unfathomable. Lionizing black criminals who beat the "system" - O.J. Simpson being a notable example - dilutes Rev. Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. There has arisen a class of minorities that has succumbed to enslavement by victimization. A minority of minorities burned down their own neighborhood when the first Rodney King jury acquitted the police, and celebrated when the first O. J. Simpson jury absolved him from obvious murder. Pseudo-victims want it both ways - juries that forgive them regardless of evidence and imprison police attempting to restrain them from breaking the law.

Years ago, when AIDS began sweeping through black communities, I visited the College of Wooster, Ohio, to gauge reception of two African-American speakers on the same night. One was a successful business man from Cleveland, Ohio, brought by the Young Republican Club without fee to discuss opportunities available to blacks. The dozen or so Republican Club members came, but no one else.

Across campus was Dick Gregory, then the first comedian/activist featuring bitter-black jokes. He was brought by the Student Union for a fat fee. Gregory devoted an hour denouncing the FBI for "infecting blacks with AIDS to wipe them out." How this could be done was not explained. The packed audience gave him a standing ovation.

Early this year, the victim complaint a la mode was that bigots were torching black, southern churches. President Clinton declared: "Racial hostility is the driving force." The media, and victim advocates, took up the hew and cry. However, contradictory evidence was offered by Michael Fumento, an attorney formerly with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Now he is a columnist and science correspondent for Reason magazine.

Source of the hate-fires statistics was the Center for Democratic Renewal. Its original name was the National Anti-Klan Network - hardly an objective researcher.

Fumento obtained figures from the National Fire Protection Association and law enforcement officials in states listed by the Center - South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.

In brief, Fumento found that church arsons overall have been declining since 1990. About a third of suspicious fires involved white churches. Mixed congregations were counted as black by the Center. Almost all burned churches were small, wooden structures in isolated areas - tempting targets for fire bugs.

Yes, a few black churches probably were set by white racists, but so were a few white churches by black racists, according to Fumento.

Last week, CIA director John Deutch attended a meeting of African-Americans in Los Angeles protesting that his agency flooded their neighborhoods with crack cocaine. They asserted the motive was to destroy blacks. Deutch categorically denied the canard but was loudly booed.

It never occurs to slaves of victim psychology that those who engage in perverted sex, use dirty drug needles and ingest addictive narcotics do so eagerly. No body holds them down and forces the debilitating practices on them. Nor do complainers acknowledge that many whites also indulge the vices.

Rev. King had it right when he declared, "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see."

After 55 years of observation, I still hold my college conclusion - integration is the ultimate solution to racial prejudice. I now add that this will occur only when we stop creating victims through minimum-wage laws, excessive welfare, preferential quotas, and anti-family regulations.

Education and hard work are the only keys. These are available without charge to all who would rise above victimization - real or imagined.

PARTING SHOTS

• "The lie has seven endings" - Swahili proverb.
• The estate of Rev. Martin Luther King is suing CBS-TV for producing a video tape of his famous "I have a dream" speech. The civil rights leader filed for copyright after he had delivered the speech to thousands of people at the Washington, D.C., Mall.
• Copyright must be claimed on printed or taped material before exposure in the public domain. Neither Moses, nor anyone since, claimed copyright to the Ten Commandants. Immortal words will be usurped by everyone.

By Lindsey Williams, columnist for Sun Coast Media Group newspapers