When Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated on April 4,
1968, I was living in the Carver housing projects in Spanish
Harlem, and fully expected the mayhem that had erupted in other
cities to hit the streets in my neighborhood. Fortunately, our
mayor was John Lindsay, who immediately walked the streets of
Harlem in his shirtsleeves so that, while other cities burned,
New York stayed calm. What many in the black community seem to
forget is that Lindsay was a Republican.
At Lindsay's memorial service in 2001, Rep. Charles Rangel said,
"He didn't act like he was white and he sure didn't act like
he was a Republican." It's only natural that Democrats like
Mr. Rangel keep the myth about Republicans alive, but the fact is
that Lindsay acted exactly like the members of Abraham Lincoln's
political party. The civil rights movement was born in the GOP in
direct opposition to the party that formed the Ku Klux Klan.
I voted for Mayor Lindsay twice, when he ran as a Republican, and
then as a Liberal. He was a firm advocate for the arts as well as
for civil rights, and at the time I was heavily involved in
pursuing a career as an artist. It was not surprising, however,
that he switched his party affiliation to Democrat during his run
for president. He was always a liberal, and this ideology
accounts for most of the mistakes he made during his tenure as
mayor. Nevertheless, Lindsay lived up to his Republican
credentials by fighting for civil rights. His concern for racial
minorities and the poor in New York helped New York City through
the long, hot summers between 1965 and 1969, and averted the
massive, violent riots that affected other big cities. Mayor
Giuliani was a great admirer of Lindsay, and at the memorial
service, said, "John Lindsay transcended party lines,
reaching across ethnic and racial barriers in a very special way.
He forced people to look for long-term solutions." It was
Mr. Giuliani's vision for viable solutions that's brought about
the city's renaissance and emergence as one of the safest
metropolises.
As a political neophyte, I was also more concerned with social
and economic inequities than I was about solutions that actually
work. I come from a family of Democrats. Although I never
registered as one, I believed, as they still do, that the
Democrat party was for the poor. Whether its commitment to those
less fortunate is sincere or not, one thing is concretely clear.
The party's liberal policies do more harm than good to the
communities they're supposed to assist.
It's rather ironic that those calling for an end to the war in
Iraq cite its monetary cost in billions. The war on poverty has
cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, and yet politicians continue
to enable and fund an enabling welfare system that simply does
not work. There are good people in both of the major political
parties, but loyalty to one's party affiliation becomes
self-defeating if one does not evaluate its platform. All one has
to do is look at the cities with the highest crime rates and
poorest communities to determine that they are controlled by one
party. The biggest difference between liberals and conservatives
is in where they believe the role of government lies.
Consider the city of New Orleans, so crippled by dependence on
government assistance that residents were unable to run for their
lives. To this day, many still believe that the major damage to
the city was caused by Hurricane Katrina. In actuality, Orleans
and St. Bernard parishes in Louisiana were victims of poor
government and central planning, which allowed vast but
preventable flooding. Mississippi suffered major hurricane
damage, but the state was headed by Haley Barbour, a Republican,
and Mississippians were better prepared to deal with its disaster
than their neighbors in Louisiana. Mississippi has lower taxes
and less generous welfare programs, which made it less dependent
on Washington in that disaster.
Have we learned anything here in New York, 2008? Apparently not.
On a bus headed toward the Staten Island ferry, two men were
discussing the presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama. One man said, "I like both of them because
they got good programs for us." The other man nodded his
head in agreement, and they both got off the bus at Victory
Boulevard and Bay Street and headed toward the Social Services
office.
It was Martin Luther King Jr., who said, "Nothing in the
world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious
stupidity." Those words resonate today more than ever.