This page was last updated on January 19, 2012.
King more than a dreamer; Lonzie Cox, Jr.; Beaver County Times; January 19, 2012. I am not related to Mr. Cox.
Most of Mr. Cox’s at least 71 letters since 2004 are tinged with race, and all take leftist positions. The most recent previous Cox letter I critiqued was “Conservative not always good.”
Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.
“It’s January and again time for the annual debacle of misleading information surrounding the Martin Luther King civil rights legacy.
“The media will go on its usual mindless campaign to convince Americans that Dr. King was just another dreamer in his quest for social equality for black Americans. Not true. At the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Dr. King spent much of his speech describing how black people’s unbearable economic condition was caused by Jim Crow discrimination in jobs, education, housing and criminal justice.”
[RWC] “The media will go on its usual mindless campaign to convince Americans that Dr. King was just another dreamer in his quest for social equality for black Americans?” From where does Mr. Cox get his news, or does he just make this stuff up?
“King said black people had been handed a check from America marked ‘insufficient funds.’ The ‘I have a dream speech’ should be called the ‘bounced check’ speech. The emphasis on the dream was just a rhetorical flourish from a genius preacher.”
[RWC] Mr. King said “Negro people,” not “black people.” As for Mr. Cox’s opinion “The ‘I have a dream speech’ should be called the ‘bounced check’ speech,” I am not surprised. I’m not an MLK scholar, but I think the “I have a dream” segment was more than Mr. Cox’s claim of “rhetorical flourish.” It appears Mr. King wanted to focus on where we were going, whereas Mr. Cox is focused on the distant past.
“The fact is that Martin Luther King Jr, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and Fred Shuttlesworth -- all Baptist ministers -- were more likely to pray than to dream. They used moral force to convince presidents Kennedy, and Johnson and Congress that real social change had to be made not through dreaming but by the legislation which resulted in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. The goal: Equal opportunity.”
[RWC] Let’s look at a hypothetical. What if everything about Mr. King were the same except he was a conservative? Given Mr. Cox’s letter-writing body of work, at best he would ignore Mr. King, at worst he would refer to MLK as an Oreo, Stepin Fetchit, Uncle Tom, et cetera.
You see, though most of Mr. Cox’s letters are about race, you find political ideology trumps skin color for him. You may recall Mr. Cox referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom,” and not in a good way. Mr. Thomas’ sin? Being conservative while black.
If you are a leftist with a history of bigotry/racism, however, Mr. Cox has a blind spot. Since at least 2004, Mr. Cox never wrote a bad word about the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV, and former KKK member) until Mr. Byrd died (“Byrd can’t be forgiven racist past”), then back-tracked less than a month later (“Bush should have heeded Byrd on Iraq”).
© 2004-2012 Robert W. Cox, all rights reserved.