Choose Black America
More than 100 years ago, Booker T. Washington called on the nation to choose black Americans.
In a speech before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Washington said:
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.
Today, black activists are likewise calling on America to cast aside the allure of seemingly docile illegal aliens. They will take their message to the streets of Los Angeles this weekend.
BTW, it's not just a black thing. The latest Newsweek poll found 63 percent of Americans disapprove of President Bush's handling of illegal immigration.
Indeed, Ted Hayes, chairman of Choose Black America, rejects any comparison between the struggle of black Americans to achieve full citizenship and illegal aliens’ assertion of “human rights” to sneak across the border.
Hayes declared:
The illegal alien agenda is not a civil rights agenda. Forty years ago, black Americans bravely confronted a system that denied them their guaranteed rights as citizens. The illegal alien agenda is an effort to extort rights from the American people that they have not earned and don’t deserve.
We will send a clear message that black Americans will not allow our civil rights legacy to be expropriated by people who have never been denied their rights under the law because their very presence in this country is a demonstration of their contempt for the law. And we certainly will not sit by quietly as illegal aliens fill our jobs, our schools and our hospitals.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, "as the number of less-educated immigrant workers has grown dramatically, the share of less-educated natives holding a job in Georgia has declined significantly."
CIS found "less-educated blacks in Georgia have seen a somewhat larger decline in employment, from 66 percent holding a job in 2000 to just 60 percent in 2006."
Black Americans, representatives from You Don't Speak for Me!, Save Our State and others will gather at the intersection of King and Crenshaw Boulevards on Saturday at 12 p.m. PT and march to the historic Leimert Park in the Crenshaw District.
For more info, call 202/328 7004.
