This past Veterans Day, I was honored to participate in a ceremony honoring our Vietnam War veterans in a commemorative 50th-anniversary event. At the event, we pinned commemorative mementos on each veteran, and we said the two words they did not hear when they came home from that combat zone, “Welcome Home.”
But, those same words apply to another group of Americans who have been wandering in a political desert for far too long.
As reported by the Fayetteville Observer:
“Clarence Henderson was part of the sit-in movement of 1960 that desegregated retail stores. Civil rights pioneer Clarence Henderson visited Fayetteville on Tuesday to encourage black voters to join the Republican Party and to encourage the party to welcome black voters.
Henderson, who in 1960 was part of the sit-in movement in Greensboro that desegregated retail store lunch counters, is the president of the North Carolina chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation. He spoke before the Cumberland County Republican Women’s Club. The Frederick Douglass Foundation seeks to grow the ranks of conservative Christian black Republicans, Henderson said, and it has had success.
“What the Democratic Party is most afraid of is conservative blacks,” Henderson said.
He also discussed the lunch counter-protest at the Woolworth store in Greensboro.
Henderson was not one of the Greensboro Four who started the protest on Feb. 1, 1960, but he joined the effort on its second day.
“There’s not a person in this room that has not had defining moments in their life,” Henderson said. “Defining moments are not unusual. It’s what you do with those moments. That’s what defines you.
“For 18 years, every time I went into Woolworth’s, it defined me. Because I went in and saw, downstairs, two water fountains: One saying ‘colored,’ and one saying ‘white.’”
There were separate bathrooms, he said, and no one was doing anything about it.
“When you went upstairs, everything was equal except for the lunch counter, whereby we as blacks had to go to the rear and order our food to go, even though it cost the same amount,” Henderson said. “So the question becomes: Why or when do you get sick and tired of being sick and tired?” he said.”
I met Clarence Henderson when I spoke in Greensboro, NC, at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. The center is located where the actual Woolworth’s was located. When I spoke there, after Clarence, I stood before the wall picture of the four courageous black men, college students, from North Carolina A&T University. What Clarence Henderson says is exactly right, the black community is once again at a defining moment. When will our community grow sick and tired of being sick and tired of being used, abused, and made victims by white progressive socialists and their designated black overseers on the 21st-century economic plantation?
Clarence is spot-on in that the white leftists fear minority conservatives more than anything, especially blacks. I should know since the entire Democrat (socialist) Party made me their Number 1 target in the 2012 election, the second most expensive congressional race in US history. A black Christian, conservative, military veteran, born and raised in an inner-city neighborhood sends the fear of God into the left as they can’t allow anything contrary to their narrative of victimization. So, when does the black community get sick and tired of being sick and tired of:
– Seeing the traditional two-parent black family being decimated? Only 24 percent of black children have a mom and dad in the home.
– Seeing the deliberate, targeted, genocide of unborn black babies led by the organization, Planned Parenthood, that was founded by a white supremacist, racist, who spoke at KKK rallies and openly referred to blacks as “undesirables” and “weeds.” The result: 20M unborn black babies murdered in the womb since 1973, Roe v Wade.
– Seeing the abject despair of failing public schools in inner-city communities.
– Seeing black neighborhoods infested with crime, gangs, and a murder rate that surpasses combat zones.
– Seeing the dearth of small business growth and opportunity in black communities, where they once thrived.
I could go on, but I believe you get the idea. All of these appalling conditions are the result of the policies of the progressive socialist left, the Democrat (socialist) Party.
Yes, President Trump stated it well, “what do you have to lose?”
The low unemployment rate in the black community did not come from the so-called “first black president,” Barack Obama. Educational freedom was not a policy championed by Obama. As a matter of fact, he terminated the DC Opportunity Scholarship (school voucher) Program, while his progeny attended the elite Sidwell Friends School. The Obama Promise Program makes our schools more dangerous by not reporting the disturbing and violent behavior of students. Ya know, discipline is “racist.”
Consider this, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 on a single issue, ending slavery. The first Congressional Black Caucus was Republican. The Republican Party of Texas, the largest red state in America — and we are gonna keep it so — was founded by 150 blacks in the Houston-Galveston area. One of its earliest chairmen was a successful black businessman and entrepreneur, Norris Wright Cuney.
The Democrat (socialist) Party? Well, they gave the black community Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, segregation, welfare, poor schools, murdering our babies (unborn and, now, born), and nearly 55 years of victimization turning our communities into killing zones of economic enslavement and collective subjugation. Sadly, there is a strong contingent of blacks who have Stockholm Syndrome and have fallen in love with their captors, the very people who have kidnapped a once proud and industrious community.
Now, the GOP has much blame in all of this as they have failed to engage and enact policy inclusiveness with the black community. They gave up on blacks and relegated us to a new version of economic slavery and servitude, of which the consequences have been catastrophic. The GOP does not grasp the concept of incrementalism, as they focus on the entire black community becoming conservative overnight. There is no way you are going to undo what the progressive socialist left has been endeavoring to achieve for the past 55 years. But, to just win over 15-20 percent in the black community would be detrimental to the left. That is attainable, especially when one considers that the principles and values of the black community are conservative.
The Father of Black conservatism, Booker T. Washington, had a simple three-point agenda: education, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance. We, the black community, can overcome, but we are going to have to take the first step away from the party that has never advocated for a positive future, full of opportunity and promise for the black community.
Remember, the party that stood for segregation and kept blacks from eating at the Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, NC, was the Democrat (socialist) Party. Clarence Henderson and others stood against them then, and they are doing so now.
The question is, when will the black community grow sick and tired, of being sick and tired of being the victims of the same racists? Same ol’ song, updated lyrics, but the tune remains unchanged . . .
This column was originally published at The Old School Patriot.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
