Last Saturday, hundreds of mostly black participants in front of Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial gathered to fuse communist slogans with phrases historically associated with the Civil Rights Movement.
Organized by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) – a neo-Marxist racial agitation group aligned with the Democrat Party – on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day long weekend for the purpose of opposing President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming inauguration, the event featured elements of racial black nationalism and socialism/communism. Blacks were framed as a neo-proletariat under the oppression of widespread anti-black racism in order to reinforce black racial perceptions of grievance and perpetuate the Quixotic struggle for “social justice.”
NAN operative Mary-Pat Hector attempted to co-opt the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. in pushing the political agenda of her organization and the broader Democrat Party.
Hector combined mantras from the Civil Rights Movements with communist slaganeering. “We will not be moved!” was shouted alongside “we have nothing to lose but our chains!” (subsequently appropriated and expanded by racial black nationalist and neo-Marxist terrorist Assata Shakur):
“There’s a war on women in this country. There’s a war on black and brown bodies in this country. There’s a war on justice in this country… We will not be moved.
…
It is our duty to fight for our freedom! It is our duty to win! We must love each other and support each other! We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
“We won’t go back!” shouted several of the event’s featured speakers, implying that Republicans and the broader right intended to segregate blacks from whites and subsequently enslave blacks for the benefit of whites. Vice-President Joe Biden expressed a similar sentiment during the 2012 presidential election season.
Hector called for a “second wave of the Civil Rights Movement” to oppose President-elect Donald Trump.
Sybrina Fulton – the mother of the late Trayvon Martin – delivered brief remarks furthering the racial narrative of blacks being violently oppressed by anti-black racism she implied was with police services and the criminal justice system.
“Criminal justice reform” was repeatedly called for by many of the event’s featured speakers as a euphemism for the implementation of racial and ethnic quotas in the justice system (per arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and sentencing).
Sharpton listed four “non-negotiable” issues as essential to black well-being: “voting rights, criminal justice and police reform, equal and fair economic justice, and the Affordable Care Act.”
Cornell William Brooks, the president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), attempted to integrate the Civil Rights Movement with the contemporary leftism of Democrats and the broader left:
“Across this republic, there’s a chill wind that blows. A chill wind of fear for women… who heard a candidate for the presidency talk in the most vulgar terms about grabbing a woman’s genitalia.
….
This is a campaign in which we saw racism regularized, homophobia routinized, xenophobia made the order of the day. It’s a campaign in which we heard over and over and over again, our people being marginalized, our people being otherized… it is a campaign in which many of us felt disrespected.”
Other refrains and themes of the event included calls for “social” and “economic justice,” “no justice, no peace,” “voter suppression,” and calls for raising the federal minimum wage.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) posters and yellow ponchos were visible in the crowd, indicating the leftist union’s involvement in the event.
Red, black, and green Pan-African racial black nationalist imagery was also present at the event:
Other prominent neo-Marxist and racial agitators were featured at the event, including former Ohio state senator OhioNina Turner, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, and National Urban League (NUL) President Marc Morial.
Dyson’s drew on his latest book “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America: – published this past Tuesday – as he called on whites to join the left:
“And what we must tell our white brothers and sisters is, You go to learn from us as well. Don’t be hoodwinked and snookered by investing in white supremacy and the unconscious reflex of bigotry.
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Disinvest in your innocence. Disinvest in your amnesia. Disinvest in your fragility, and learn that you and I must struggle together.”
Color of Change (COC) – a neo-Marxist racial agitation movement founded in part by left-wing CNN Democrat Van Jones – also deployed a speaker to deliver remarks at the event.
Despite operating as de facto political action committees and get-out-the-vote operations targeting blacks for the electoral benefit of Democrats, the NAN, NAACP, NUL, and COC (as well as most of their subsidiary organizations) enjoy tax-exempt statuses via with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The NAN, NAACP, NUL, and COC are all registered with the IRS as either 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organizations.
Although Sharpton has been an informal adviser, strategist, and ally of President Barack Obama, host of an MSNBC program, and radio host, left-wing and Democrat-aligned media outlets neglected to conduct any meaningful reporting on the NAN-organized event. CNN did, however, produce a report on fringe white nationalists and their supposed relationship with Trump.
Sharpton executed a vanity project in which he circulated an image of himself to be signed by the event’s attendees:
Watch the entire event here or here.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.