Martin Luther King and African-American crime

Gregory Kane:

“Our crime rate is far too high.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote those words in his 1958 book, “Stride Toward Freedom.” He was referring to the disproportionate amount of crime among black Americans, an issue King didn’t flinch from facing.

Nearly 50 years later, King might be inclined to follow that sentence with the words “and some of those crimes are unbelievably heinous.”

Indeed, you have to wonder what King would have made of this story from The New York Times on July 19 about one of the most horrendous and brutal cases of black-on-black crime I’ve ever heard of in my 55 years. The incident occurred at a public housing project called Dunbar Village in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment complex at Dunbar Village … They took cell phone pictures of their acts. They burned the woman’s skin and (her 12-year-old son’s) eyes with cleaning fluid, forced them to lie naked together in the bathtub, hit them with a broom and a gun and threatened to set them on fire.”

As despicable as that sounds, it wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when these vermin, according to Times writer Amy Goodnough, “forc(ed) (the woman) to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son.”

If you’re wondering why the traditional gaggle of black misleaders didn’t dash before the nearest television cameras to condemn what might well hold up as the worst black-on-black crime of the decade, don’t bother. You already know the answer.

They're otherwise engaged. Jesse Jackson has been on a crusade to close a gun shop on the outskirts of Chicago. NAACP board chairman Julian Bond has been doing what he does best: Bashing President Bush and acting as if W conjured up Hurricane Katrina out of thin air for the expressed purpose of oppressing black folks in New Orleans.

Al Sharpton’s probably waiting for the next white radio talk show host to call a bunch of black women nappy-headed ho's. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is no doubt planning another march. The reparations advocates are wondering why their movement has fizzled, and the diversity police are still smarting from the recent Supreme Court decision striking down “integration” plans in Seattle and Louisville.

There does not exist in the country one prominent black leader who has the guts to say “Our crime rate is too high” and make that the issue black Americans must face head on and deal with. Why?

Because that would take guts. It would take being the kind of leader King was, one who told black folks what we needed to hear, not what we wanted to hear. It would mean telling black people that it isn’t Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who are the main allies of white racists against us. It’s the black criminals.

Check the Web sites and blogs of white racists and supremacists, and see if they’re praising Thomas and Rice for being good house Negroes for white folks. No, the white supremacist/racist Web sites and blogs are talking about the disproportionate amount of crimes blacks commit. The racists have had a field day with the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, a white Knoxville, Tenn., couple allegedly carjacked and murdered by five black suspects.

Black criminals are the number one propaganda tool white racists use against black people. Instead of recognizing that fact, our misleaders have made black criminals a new victim class. The misleaders fret that there are too many blacks in prison. They whine about black felons losing their voting rights and rail against the “racial disparity” on death row.

Our misleaders have no use for genuine black victims. You didn’t hear word one from those misleaders in 2002, when one of their beloved criminals set fire to the home of a family named the Dawsons and killed all seven members, including five children.

You haven’t heard from them about what happened to the Haitian immigrant and her son either. In fact, you couldn’t find our misleaders with the Hubble Space Telescope on this one. But if this incident doesn’t inspire a wake-up call among them to address the issue of crime in black America, Lord knows what will?

I’m still waiting for just one of them to look straight into a television camera and say to black America what King said 49 years ago:

“Our crime rate is too high.”

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