DECLARE AN UNABRIDGED AND FREE PRESS IN BLACK AMERICA

 

This is a matter most urgent and dire.  The very liberties observed and freedoms appreciated are grossly threatened by a culture's desire to protect a monolithic press and tyrannical government.  A secure press promulgates the façade that a secular city prides itself on one party rule.  Such a press biases reporting with agenda driven editing and condones unilateral thought on multitier matters for the individual and family, education, economics, government and religion.  Rather than becoming the fearless butch dog that checks and balances institutions of power, press, granted ornate and excessive strength through its editorial boards and opinion, simply demur and become data carriers of the engorged and corrupt.  The tool for this lethal subversion or weapon against speech that provokes reason is the art of diminishing the voice of the dissenters.  No, I am not talking about Moscow, Beijing or Havana.  I refer to the "Black" Press in Washington, DC that has for nearly a century secured the proliferation of liberal, progressive speech while degrading and censoring conservative speech.  For the sake or pure reason and the advancement of a demoralized culture, it is essential that organizations like The Washington Informer and The Afro-American tear down the walls of monolithic reporting and commentary and open the doors and windows of a free press.

Frederick Douglass, whose home is landmarked in Old Anacostia thanks to the efforts of such great citizens as Nannie Helen Burroughs, advised, “A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.”  Many a battle has been lost and won in our culture yet, it seems the only narrative presented is that our most prominent victories are the 1964 Voting Rights Act and the elections of two black presidents—one by the Congressional Black Caucus and the other by Electoral College.  We are constantly losing the religious, economic, education, family and individual battles because we have a secure press that promotes without protest the religion of secularism, the economics of Lord John Maynard Keynes, public school only education and family and individual rights as doled out by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.  This was not always so.  Rich debate and journalistic excellence was on display in “Black” Papers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburg Courier.  In 1932, Courier Publisher Robert Lee Vann swayed black voters to shift their political allegiance from the Republican Party to support the Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt.  By 1936, he would come to regret such a decision.  Having criticized Blacks in 1932 for selling their “souls” to the Republican Party, he realized by 1936, per Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race by John B. Kirby, that, Blacks had refinanced their souls with the Democrat Party.  It was not allegiance to either but rich independence from both that would allow men to reason the best course to meet the needs of their culture.

It is written in the First of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.  So why does the Black Press blockade its readers from so small an opinion as those that dissent?  Why does the Black Press reduce, diminish or make less the protester’s view of facts or expression of thought?  Why does the Black Press discriminate against alternative voices in its business of printing or publishing?   Frederick Douglass published the North Star for four years before merging it with another newspaper.  The North Star's slogan was "Right is of no Sex--Truth is of no Color--God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."  It is best that a Free Press pursue the Truth at the cost of losing its coveted place of leisure with the corrupt or relaxing its menace against the corrupt.  Sociologist William Julius Wilson once quipped, “There is a tendency to want to treat blacks as a monolithic socioeconomic group.”  This should never be the doctrine or practice of the Black Press.  Our culture is in need of a Press that will fight tirelessly for their rights as citizens and as human beings.  Black Press, dismantle this wall of monolithic reporting and commentary and open us to a free press.