Larry Elder: What Left-Wing Educators Don't Teach

During 'Black History Month'

cnsnews.com/commentary/larry-elder/larry-elder-what-left-wing-educators-dont-teach-during-black-history-month

Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta Scott King
pose for a portrait in 1964. (Photo credit: Library of
Congress/Getty Images)

When will Black History Month be...history?

Apart from the bizarre notion that educators should set

aside one month to salute the historical achievements
of one race apart from and above the historical
achievements of other races, Black History Month
appears to omit a lot of black history.

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About slavery, do our mostly left-wing educators teach that slavery was not unique to
America and is as old as humankind? As economist and author Thomas Sowell says: "More
whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United
States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought
and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States."

Are students taught that "race-based preferences," sometimes called "affirmative action,"
were opposed by several civil rights leaders? While National Urban League Executive
Director Whitney Young supported a type of "Marshall Plan" for a period of 10 years to make
up for historical discrimination, his board of directors refused to endorse the plan. In
rejecting it, the president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said the public would ask, "What
in blazes are these guys up to? They tell us for years that we must buy (nondiscrimination)
and then they say, 'It isn't what we want.'" A member of the Urban League in New York
objected to what he called "the heart of it — the business of employing Negroes (because they
are Negroes)." Bayard Rustin was one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s key lieutenants and helped
to plan and organize the civil rights march in D.C. that culminated in King's famous "I Have a
Dream" speech. Rustin, an openly gay black man, also opposed race-based preferences.

Do our left-wing educators, during Black History Month, note that President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's celebrated New Deal actually hurt blacks? According to Cato Institute's Jim
Powell, blacks lost as many as 500,000 jobs as a result of anti-competitive, job-killing
regulations of the New Deal. Powell writes: "The flagship of the New Deal was the National
Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June 1933. It authorized the president to issue executive
orders establishing some 700 industrial cartels, which restricted output and forced wages
and prices above market levels. The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers
to hire people who weren't worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some
500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs. Marginal
workers, like unskilled blacks, desperately needed an expanding economy to create more
jobs. Yet New Deal policies made it harder for employers to hire people. FDR tripled federal
taxes between 1933 and 1940....By giving labor unions the monopoly power to exclusively
represent employees in a workplace, the (1935) Wagner Act had the effect of excluding
blacks, since the dominant unions discriminated against blacks."

Are students taught that gun control, widely embraced by today's black leadership, began as a
means to deny free blacks the right to own guns? In ruling that blacks were chattel property
in the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney warned that the
consequences of ruling otherwise would mean that blacks would be able to own guns. If
blacks were "entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens," said Taney, "it would give
persons of the Negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the union, the
right...to keep and carry arms wherever they went...endangering the peace and safety of the
state."

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Are students taught that generations of civil rights leaders opposed immigration — both legal
and illegal immigration? After the Civil War, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass implored
employers to hire blacks over new immigrants. Twenty-five years later, Booker T.
Washington pleaded with Southern industrialists to hire blacks over new immigrants: "One
third of the population of the South is of the Negro race....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: 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 fireside."

About illegal immigration, an issue that nearly all of today's so-called black leaders simply
ignore, Coretta Scott King signed a letter urging Congress to retain harsh sanctions against
employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. The letter said: "We are concerned...that...the
elimination of employer sanctions will cause another problem — the revival of the pre-1986
discrimination against black and brown U.S. and documented workers, in favor of cheap
labor — the undocumented workers. This would undoubtedly exacerbate an already severe
economic crisis in communities where there are large numbers of new immigrants."

These are just a few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during
Black History Month.

Larry Elder is a talk radio host, attorney, author, and documentary filmmaker.

Editor's Note: This column was reprinted with permission from Creators Syndicate.

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