A History Lesson in the East Room [with comments added]

February 18, 2009, The Caucus, A New York Times Blog by Rachel L. Swarns - First Lady Michelle Obama opened the doors of the White House to 180 sixth and seventh graders on Wednesday for a Black History Month celebration that included two pep talks and a rousing musical performance.

The students, who came from three local schools here, heard from Adm. Stephen W. Rochon, the chief usher, who runs the mansion and oversees everything from state dinners to redecorating. He is the first African-American [named by REPUBLICAN President George W. Bush] to hold that position.

They also heard from Mrs. Obama, who told the students a little bit about the black history of the White House. She talked about the slaves who helped build the executive mansion, about Lincoln [first REPUBLICAN President] signing the Emancipation Proclamation there and about Marie Seilka, a soprano, who became the first African-American artist to perform in the White House in 1878 [by invitation of REPUBLICAN President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes].

She described President Kennedy’s meeting with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. [REPUBLICAN Civil Rights leader]…* [Yes, he was!] in the White House and President Obama, who is the first African-American president to live there. Then – as her daughters, Malia and Sasha, listened along with the students — she urged the students to remember that they would write the next chapters in history. 

“So you have to ask yourselves, what will you do in life to help someone else in need?” Mrs. Obama said to the young people who were gathered in the East Room. “You have to ask yourselves, what are you going to do to make your own community stronger? What are you going to do to make sure that this nation is even greater? And what are you doing right now in school and in your neighborhoods to prepare yourselves to assume a level of responsibility and to be good citizens?"

“Think about, as the Admiral says, getting up every single day and working hard, as hard as you can; putting your best foot forward all the time, not just when somebody is looking, but every single moment; and supporting your family, the folks in your own households; making your beds, putting the dishes up, cleaning your rooms," she said.

“That’s not just a story that Barack Obama is writing, or Admiral Rochon is writing," the first lady said. “Those are the stories that we’re all writing together. And you’re an important part of that."

And after that, the five members of the all-female, African American a cappella ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock, sang their hearts out.

Comments by: PJ Hunter (believing that details matter).

*Broken link above "[Yes, he was!]:  Testimony of MLK's niece that her Uncle Martin was a Republican

[Added 2/17/2014 Re: MLK: REPUBLICAN President Ronald Reagan made Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday a national holiday] Read More......

On King's 'Great Wells of Democracy'

January 21, 2008
By Josiah Bunting III
Times-Dispatch Guest Columnist

PLAINS, VA – The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest principles of liberty were enshrined in America's founding documents and that one key to securing equal justice for all was to make certain that Americans remembered -- and remained true to -- their national heritage.

Someone visiting Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, King once wrote, would have seen not only America's most segregated city, but also a place where the municipal leaders had never learned basic lessons of American history.

"You might have concluded that here was a city that had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber," he said, "a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools."

When King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for marching without a permit, he wrote a letter from his cell that is a supremely logical, yet passionate, defense of civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights. It was the demonstrators in city after city, not the authorities who imprisoned them, King argued, who were defending America's founding principles.

"One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he wrote.

LATER THAT YEAR, when he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, King returned to this theme. "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he said, "they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

As we remember King today, it ought to be obvious that future generations of Americans will not be able to claim this inheritance unless they know what it is.
Unfortunately, a recent survey revealed that American colleges are doing a miserable job when it comes to teaching students many of the basic facts about our founding documents and how the principles they enshrine have -- or have not -- been implemented through the decades.

Last fall, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute surveyed 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges nationwide. Each student was given a 60-question multiple choice "civic literacy" test that focused on American history, government, international relations, and economics. The average freshman scored 50.4 percent, or an "F." The average senior did little better, scoring 54.2 percent -- also an "F."

The results revealed, for example, that only 45.95 percent of college seniors knew that the line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . " comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only 47.71 percent knew Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg, which came before Appomattox. Only 61.42 percent knew Abraham Lincoln was elected sometime between 1851 and 1875. Only 42.77 percent knew that the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans was over Reconstruction.

THE RESULTS also revealed that our nation's colleges especially disserved self-identified minority students (Asian, black, Hispanic, and multiracial), with minority seniors scoring an average of 48.2 percent on the civic literacy exam, or just eight-tenths of a point higher than the average for minority freshmen. On average, in other words, American colleges teach minority students virtually nothing about America's history and institutions.

The failure to significantly increase civic knowledge among college students has immediate practical consequences: The more civic knowledge a student gains in college, the survey data demonstrated, the more likely he or she is to vote and participate in other civic activities.

It also has profound consequences for the longer term. As King argued, the rights enshrined in the Declaration, protected by the Constitution, and eventually redeemed by all Americans through decades of civil struggle and reconciliation, are universal and irrevocable.

If we forget what they are, we will forget who we are: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting III, president of the H. Frank Guggenheim Foundation and superintendent emeritus of the Virginia Military Institute, serves as chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's National Civic Literacy Board. Read More......

Dems thwart MLK, Jr

Martin Luther King, Jr's struggle was against Democrats
Grand Old Partisan Blog, January 15, 2008, Michael Zak wrote,

On this day in 1901, the Alabama Democratic Party called for a convention to write a new state constitution that would prohibit African-Americans from voting. Despite vocal opposition from Booker T. Washington and other Republican civil rights activists, the Democrat scam succeeded.

Democrats dominated Alabama's 1901 constitutional convention, and its chairman was a Democrat. In his opening address, he said: "If we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law -- not by force or fraud... The negro is descended from a race lowest in intelligence and moral precepts of all the races of men."

Alabama's African-American citizens would not vote in appreciable numbers again until the 1950s.

It was a Republican federal judge, Frank Johnson, who in 1956 ruled in favor of Rosa Parks and who in 1965 ordered the Democrat governor, George Wallace, to permit Martin Luther King's voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Condoleezza Rice said: "The first Republican I knew was my father and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."

Democrats want Americans to forget that Republicans supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act much more than did the Democrats. Read More......