Bobert, first know that I don't question your credentials, your commitment, or your sincerity--ever. I do take exception to the way I felt you portrayed the 60s activists who turned to and/or joined the Black Panthers as a defensive strategy in the wake of James Meredith's shooting and the March Against Fear. There are always turning point events in these liberation struggles, and that event was a high water mark, at least in the south. You see the same thing in the north with Wounded Knee, in Northern Ireland with Bloody Sunday, etc etc The reality is, the murder campaigns by the government and their paramilitaries always ends up radicalizing the oppressed population, because the level of violence always reaches a breaking point where people have to fight back to defend themselves from the onslaught of violence. THAT is what Stokely Carmichael and SNCC did, IMO.

See, the problem I have with painting the 60s black liberation movements (there is always more than just one monolithic "movement" to be sure) with that same broad brush, as I felt you did, was that brush paints Stokely right out of the picture. That is wrong as hell in my view, and it happens A LOT these days with both black and white neo-liberals, some of whom were there at the time, like John Lewis. Stokely AND Martin finished the March Against Fear TOGETHER.

When Julian Bond was backed by Atlanta SNCC when running for mayor or whatever office he was running for then, and Atlanta SNCC came down hard on the black separatist side of the fence, firing the white SNCC members from the campaign, Stokely was initially very much opposed to those actions.

He was far more complex than most of the young leadership working in the south at the time--black or white. I just have never believed that in his heart, Stokely Carmichael every truly and genuinely embraced the black separtist movement philosophy. He began as an integrationist, believed in unity (in a unifed front sort of way, certainly), and ended up being more right than King. Integration didn't do the job. Desegragation and the repeal of Jim Crow laws didn't do the job. I don't know if Stokely was the first one to coin the term "institutional racism" but if he wasn't, he was certainly one of the most articulate spokespersons to address it from that era.

We are still living today with the legacy of institutional racism--that is the part that Kucinich and Edwards are trying to focus attention on with their campaigns. Intitutional racism IS the mainstream today. White people who never suffer from it just plain don't get it, and believe it simply doesn't exist--the 60s took care of all that. The same people are staunch defenders of the gender inequality status quo, claiming that "feminism" took care of all that. There is a saying that is always a dead give away on these things. Either they say "I'm not a feminist, but..." or "I'm not a racist, but..." That makes all the buzzers in my head go off.

And don't get all hot and bothered Bobert, because I'm not talking about you. But I probably am talking about some people here in Mudcat, I just don't know who because I don't know them and their politics (you are too up front with your politics not to know your heart, so it's pretty easy with you).

You see a lot of institutional discrimination in education especially, where affirmative action programs continue to focus on race to the exclusion of gender. Except this uber-conservative educational movement to "save" the African American male--and I work in one of those schools where the plan has been just that, at the expense of the African American girls. Affirmative action laws were passed to address both forms of institutional discrimination, and they aren't doing a very good job of addressing either, even here in the purple heartland of the formerly true blue state of Minnesota.

Last but not least, King's religiousity is a problem for me, as is much of the churchified orientation of the old school SCLC, NAACP type folks. I'm a secularist through and through, and have always resented the way we are portrayed by the high and mighty religious left moralizers, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. That sort of highly moralistic tone merely lends succor to the right wing fundies backlash types. And look where cutting loose the secularists (especially the neo-liberal anti-feminists) in the post-60s era has gotten us--in a pretty fine fix.

One final thing. I have this theory that the white middle class neo-liberal denouncements of the post-60s radical left, and their embrace of status quo "moderate" political views is solely responsible for making the right wing backlash beginning with Reagan, including Bill Clinton (whom I view as being very right wing), right down to today's domination by the neo-cons, regain their stronghold in the US. In far too many ways, it seems to me, we are worse off today--in terms of winning the war against racism, poverty, and injustice--than we were in the 60s, and I fault the neo-liberals for not being vigilant and selling out the ideals of reformers of the New Left.

Neo-liberals, when history finally speaks of them from this era, will--IMO--be seen as having been active participants in the backlash movement against the 60s reformists, and the reforms of the New Deal of the 30s.

Right now, as a political force in the US, I don't think you can be any more regressive than being a so-called "moderate" of either the Democratic or Republican parties, or the party of the status quo--the growing and utterly complacent "independent middle".

The entire spectrum of human political history is littered with the remnants of regressive backsliding that wrecked peoples and nations for generations.

We've seen that happen in South Africa and the US. We've seen it happen in the Phillipines. We've seen it happen in Thailand and Cambodia. Across most of Africa and South America. You know we're screwed when China starts looking too good in comparison to us, you know?