Harry Belafonte - A Real Uncle Tom
October 20, 2002
by Bruce Walker
Why did Harry Belafonte attack Colin Powell? Belafonte is an average “celebrity expert” which means that he has a wide range of liberal opinions with no knowledge to back up those opinions. Colin Powell is a “moderate” who supports affirmative action, welfare programs, abortion and other liberal positions.
Did Belafonte object to Powell’s role as Secretary of State, and his support for the war on violent, radical Islamic terrorists? Most of the world is troubled by these nuts, and all blacks should be: there is a holocaust of blacks by these same radical white Moslems going on in Sudan today. Secretary Powell is on the side of the persecuted blacks, and against their white oppressors.
Does it bother Belafonte that America is using its muscle in the world arrogantly? If so, then why speak out against Powell, who has urged restraint? Why was Belafonte quiet when ex-president Clinton sent American military occupation forces into the two black nations of Somalia and Haiti? Why was he quiet about American muscle being used in Serbia, Sudan and Iraq during the Clinton years? Because Bill Clinton was a Democrat, and Colin Powell is a Republican.
Belafonte hates Republicans, which is the absurd position of so many black “leaders.” Why do they take this knee-jerk party line position? The Republican Party was founded because southern and northern Democrats supported slavery. During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was founded to terrify Republican blacks and whites in the South.
Democrats at the national level opposed equal rights for blacks for almost eighty years after the Civil War. In the “Solid South,” Democrats passed Jim Crow laws and denied blacks of the right to vote, including the right to vote in Democrat Party primaries. Southern Republicans, by contrast, chose blacks in the South as candidates and delegates to the Republican National Convention.
Franklin Roosevelt always carried the Klan-dominated South. He also won the Democrat nomination in 1932 because he was the favorite within the Democrat Party of the powerful, racist, lily-white Democrat delegations from the South.
Roosevelt did not disappoint them. He appointed the only Supreme Court Justice who had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the only Attorney General who had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and put the only president who had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the White House.
Republican presidential nominees and Republican convention since the end of the Civil War opposed terrorism against blacks, opposed lynching, opposed denying blacks a real right to vote, and supported equal legal rights for blacks. Republican congresses passed the constitutional amendments that gave blacks freedom, equal rights, and the vote. These congresses also passed the very civil rights laws that allowed blacks to win their first victories in the battle for equal rights. Republican presidents appointed blacks to executive offices.
Democrat platforms and candidates were conspicuously silent on these issues and liberal Democrat icons, like Woodrow Wilson, re-segregated the federal civil service (desegregated by Republican presidents) and fired, en masse, all the blacks in the federal government that he could.
Why then do so many black “leaders” support this political party which has been consistently hateful toward them and which has made them “bought” votes in elections, whose real interests are simply ignored by both political parties because they always vote Democrat?
Because Harry Belafonte is right on one point: Southern overlords had both “house slaves” and “field slaves.” Those slaves who lived in the mansion had special, privileged status. This dual status continued in the de facto slavery of blacks after the Civil War. Certain cowardly blacks were left alone and even thrown trinkets, while those blacks who stood up for the rule of law and the principles of equality were lynched, their children whipped to death, their homes terrorized.
Some blacks became “Uncle Toms” and others stood against the evil of Democrat feudal rule. Which brings us to the origin of the use of “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative term. When a black man felt that he could no longer resist racist whites, he did something which black women in the South called “Crossing the Jordan River.”
Such a black man would no longer try to fight for his rights as a man, but instead became an “Uncle Tom” - the downcast, eye-rolling caricature of lazy, shiftless blacks. But what exactly did “Crossing the Jordan River” mean? What act did that signify? What surrender by a black man so enraged black women, whose lives and the lives of their children were surrendered to generations of bigotry? “Crossing the Jordan River” meant that the black man gave up his allegiance to the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat.
Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.
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