Do you remember the Southern Christian Leadership Conference? Of course you do, the SCLC, the organization MLK led during the Civil Rights Era.

Well there new President is a brother by the name of Dr. Charles Steele and here is what he had to say about how the media is treating Barack Obama vs. Michelle Obama.

“Why are they attacking Michelle Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and not really attacking, to that degree, her husband?” Steele asked. “Because he has no slave blood in him. He does not have any slave blood in him, but Michelle does.” Atlanta Journal Constitution

Any thoughts? This should spark some debate!

This is a beautiful picture that represents the ideals of Martin Luther king Jr. and the realization of that dream through Barack Obama. YES WE CAN! SI SE PUEDE!

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme. - Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery - Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t! Bill did us, just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty. - Rev. Jeremiah Wright

You want to repackage Dr. King, make him some quiet loving guy with an Olive Branch in his hand, no, that was not Dr. King. I knew Dr. King, he spoke out against the injustices of America, and that’s why he died, because THEY decided that he had to be killed.- Fathe Pfleger

Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.- Coretta Scott King

The year was 1968, on this day of April 4th a great man and pillar of our nation was snatched away from us due to discrimination, racial hate and fear mongering. Today we pay hommage to the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We must recognize that Dr. King would rather us spend less time idolizing him, and more time practicing his teachings creating a plethora of men in God’s image rather than his own. Here is a clip from his last speech before he was assassinated, he knew then that he may not get to the promise land with us, but he truly believed that we would get there. Let’s get there!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8&hl=en]

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. - Martin Luther King Jr.

Today we are blessed with not one but three photos of our fallen hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his beautiful family. We often only see Dr. King through the lens of the transcendent leader; these photos allow us to see the softer, more gentle side of our hero. A dutiful husband, and caring father; these photo’s capture MLK in his sincerest joy, family time!

As a member of a Black Greek Lettered Organization, I found the following article “interesting” to say the least. I will allow you the pleasure of reading these words and encourage you to engage in lofty discourse over the tone of this article. Please check back tomorrow where I will then post my response to this article. Enjoy!

My “Fascination” With Greeks By Hananie Albert

By Hananie Albert, on 22-03-2008 20:39

Did they starve the consciousness out of you during hazing?

I have always been wary of those within the black community who pay a superficial homage to black history, only to turn and defecate on the legacies they pretend to uphold. Unfortunately this trait seems inherent to the black Greek system at this university—a cluster of complacent organizations who meander around issues of social justice and command respect because of the actions of their predecessors rather than their own commitments to equality, justice and progress. These groups only seem interested in the performative aspects of black culture and fail to reckon with the significance of their complacency, given their immense influence in the black community.

My time here at UF has been marked by crises that challenged the strength of the black community—from the bitingly ignorant Alligator cartoon, to the lack of funding for the African-American Studies Program to the controversy with the Jena 6. In these instances, individuals from Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) offered their support—but the Greek community at large stood idly by, seemingly ignorant of their power to galvanize the students and the administration to action. Oddly enough, they put this power to great use when it was time to raise awareness for a party or a step show. I began to wonder if these organizations felt at all ashamed to claim great Civil Rights leaders and political figures as alumnus, given the insignificance of their records of local social activism.

A recent forum titled “What’s your fascination with black Greeks?” promised to facilitate a dialogue between the Greek and non-Greek community, and I attended on my editor’s insistence. I was curious to see how the black Greek community would address the stark hypocrisies in their records—the fact that they had stopped earning the respect they demanded, the fact that “brotherhood” came to be marked by well documented instances of hazing and male on male sexual harassment, and the fact that they seemed to privilege mindless assimilation and social mobility over social justice.

The responses at the forum were as contrived and hollow as I had assumed BGLOs to be. When questioned about their failure to live up to their founding tenets, one Greek panelist responded that the public underestimated the efforts put into step shows; others insisted that Greeks were normal people and were unfairly put on a pedestal. Finally, one Greek responded with what seemed to be the default answer whenever a particularly tough question was posed: there was just so much that the public did not know. This implies that the public does not have the right to judge BGLOs because they are not privy to the same information. I doubt that adequate justification for black Greek complacency is somehow written into the founding principles that are beaten into them– or that one acquires intellectual infallibility by “crossing the burning sands.”

If the BGLOs at the University of Florida want to take the cowardly route favored by organizations such as the Black Student Union and respond to accusations of complacency by claiming that they are a “social” organization rather than a “political” one, they have every right. However, black Greeks must understand that they invoke a higher standard every time they mention alumnus like Huey P. Newton, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent figures in black history who might very well be ashamed to have their names associated with the uninspired, unengaged morass that is black Greekdom at this university.

This is not an assault on individuals within the organization—I know several exceptional individuals that join these organizations and strive towards social equality and consciousness—unfortunately the overall character of these groups is impermeable to the progressive intentions of the individuals. BGLOs, like other university organizations, will be judged as a whole, not just the sum of its more progressive parts.

I must note, however, that if black Greek existence on this campus seems shallow and self-serving, it is because black Greek organizations are composed of and cater to a shallow and unengaged black community who love to point out the evils of discrimination but fail to meet these evils with intellectual resistance and social activism. So, critiquing black Greeks for thinking that uplifting the black community entials nothing more than wearing letters on Wednesdays, the occasional self-gratifying forum on Fridays and a routinized and thus hollow commitment to “community service” on Saturdays, is ultimately a critique of the black community as a whole. Assuming that new members have had the consciousness and social awareness beaten and starved from them during the hazing ignores the fact that that many of these new members may not have cared about these issues to begin with.

As an immigrant to this country, I was ignorant of the significance of black Greeks until I stepped foot onto Turlington Plaza. There, I was ushered out of the way in order to make room for the strolling Greeks; a friend even jokingly suggested that looking them in the eye was disrespectful. I didn’t understand how a group could command this amount of unquestioned respect.

After conducting some research, I began to believe that these students were respected because the letters stitched onto their jackets were a sacred covenant—a reminder of the great contributions of past members and a promise to continue while improving upon their auspicious legacies. I believed that the initiation process was well-reasoned and commendable for its commitment to restoring rites of passage, similar to those in tribal Africa.

After several years on this campus, I am starting to realize just how wrong I was.

http://www.blacklistedmagazine.org/