Marchers reflect on social justice agenda

Yawu Miller

Shortly after arriving in Boston from West Virginia in 1965, Robert Traynham was marching with Martin Luther King Jr. against racial injustice.

Forty years later, Traynham joined hundreds of other Boston area residents who re-traced the route of King’s 1965 march and commemorated the historic Selma to Montgomery march. His commitment to social justice, he says, is still going strong.

“All that stuff King was fighting is back on us,” he said. “The war is taking all our money. Our schools are segregated again.”

The marchers were convened under the auspices of Dunk the Vote, a voter-rights organization. Kerry, Georgia Congressman John Lewis and others on the program spoke about the need to re-authorize sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But the war in Iraq was on the minds of many in the crowd. Speaking before the march, City Councilor Chuck Turner noted that more than $600 billion in federal funds are going to the war in Iraq and other military expenditures.

“The Congress this year passed a budget we might as well call the military budget,” he said, drawing applause.

Turner urged the crowd to remember the three evils King outlined in a 1967 speech — militarism, racism and economic injustice.

“Let’s honor Dr. King’s dream and let them know it’s time to fund Dr. King’s dream, not just give empty promises.”

Gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick, who headed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under the Clinton administration, railed against what he said was the conservative movement’s anti-government stance.

“All of us, especially the poor, are on our own,” he said. If you need a picture of what this looks like, recall the aftermath of Katrina.”

As Patrick pointed out, Katrina laid bare the reality of racial disparity in the United States more vividly than any other event during the Bush administration. Pundits noted a more critical tone in the U.S. media’s coverage of Katrina, much of which seemed embedded with the Bush administration from September 11 forward.

But among the nation’s black population, which voted 90 percent for Kerry, neither Katrina nor the more recent Valerie Plame scandal involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s office were much of a revelation.

“I said at the beginning that Bush was lying,” Traynham said. “The weapons inspectors kept saying there was nothing there. It was just lies, lies, lies.”

As the old public relations saw goes, lies repeated often enough become truth. In the mainstream media, Bush administration “facts” — like weapons of mass destruction, a connection between Hussein and terrorism or the alleged 2004 transfer of sovereignty to Iraq — most often go unchallenged.

Now, as Cheney’s chief of staff Irv Lewis “Scooter” Libby faces a federal indictment for lies directly related to the administration’s case for the war, even public officials who voted in favor of the war are beginning to acknowledge that their endorsement of Bush’s war against Iraq was a mistake.

“Knowing now what we know, I don’t think many people in Congress would vote to do it,” said Sen. John Kerry, who spoke at Sunday’s march. “I know I wouldn’t vote to give him that authority. Of course not.”

Libby’s indictment came about as the result of an investigation into the Bush administration’s outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband, retired ambassador Jack Wilson, had challenged the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein had sought enriched uranium in Niger.

Although the fact that the document Bush administration officials relied on to make their claim of an Iraqi uranium buy was forged was reported in the foreign press, that fact and Wilson’s objections were largely drowned out in the mainstream media’s coverage of the run-up to the war.

“This reminds me of Watergate,” said Boston political activist Bob Marshall. “But this time some of the press has been in bed with the Bush administration.”

As media critic Jeff Cohen pointed out, the elite media is on trial along with Bush administration officials. New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spend 85 days in jail after refusing to reveal which Bush administration official outed Plame, is an integral part of the investigation.

Miller, with her extensive reporting of the administration’s attempts to find the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and Washington Post columnist Robert Novak were an integral part of both the Bush administration officials’ selling of the war and their attempts to silence Wilson.

With Katrina and Plamegate turning the embedded media’s attention to the Bush administration, the president’s approval rating has hit an all-time low of 37 percent.

Bush’s response, a call for the American people to back what his administration is now calling the “struggle for democracy in Iraq” has apparently fallen on deaf ears in the black community.

Among blacks, who never quite bought into the Bush administration’s pro-war rationale, the president’s approval rating was estimated to be 2 percent in a recent poll.

Patrick says he takes little comfort in the better-late-than-never awakening among the American public.

“It doesn’t give me any satisfaction to say ‘I was right all along,’” he told the Banner. “There have been more than 2000 U.S. troop deaths and by some accounts as many as 100,000 Iraqi lives lost. What has to happen now is there has to be an accountability for the leaders who brought us to where we are now and an orderly and appropriate and prompt withdrawal.”