Issues & Views

Welcome to the online edition of Issues & Views. The hard copy edition of this newsletter was founded in 1985 by black Americans who advocate self-help and business enterprise and the protection of constitutional rights. It is a forum for dissidents, conservatives, and plain old mavericks -- all those who are concerned about liberties lost, especially through the ongoing exploitation of race.

As Americans have learned over recent decades, there are endless, inventive ways in which cynical opportunists abuse the notion of "civil rights," and government capitulation to their demands has only emboldened them. This stark truth was never more clearly demonstrated than by the bureaucrats who run the country's education system, who flagrantly cast aside traditional academic goals, while substituting their own specious crusades.

The artificial forcing of integration, by any means necessary and with no regard to what it costs the children, began in the late 1950s and is still an obsession among many of these Believers. Trapped in their own single-minded version of "diversity," they diligently promote that which Walter Williams calls "enlightened racism, uniformity of thought, and political proselytizing."

From biased affirmative action policies that inevitably lower academic standards, in order to insure "equality," we've watched the system move onward to Harvard University's "Whiteness Studies," in which college students are taught to renounce Western heritage and scorn its achievements -- and white students are taught that they advance the welfare of mankind by helping to "abolish" their own race. Whoever could have envisioned such an unabashed distortion of values?

This newsletter's initial goal was to debunk the propaganda that depicts blacks as the eternal victim held hostage to an oppressive society. We set out to tell the story of the scores of blacks who, during the years of segregation, refused to wait for opportunities to fall out of the sky, but went about creating them. [See the section, "When We Were Colored."] These were people who discovered that the very principles protecting property rights in general, that had made slave ownership possible, were the principles that allowed blacks, like all other citizens, to prosper through the ownership of private property.

In the pages of Issues & Views, we write about those blacks who, in the 19th century and into the 20th, founded banks and hundreds of businesses, and owned millions of dollars worth of property. What is interfering today with the continuance of such progress?

During the period that we are taught were the "worst of times" for blacks in this country, illegitimate birth was lower and legal marriages were higher in number, and black communities were more stable. What reversed this trend?

During those "bad old days," businessmen like Harlem's Philip Payton acquired the capital to buy and lease buildings for rental to fellow blacks. Why weren't similar businesses like Payton's Afro-American Realty Company being formed beyond the 1960s?

Entrepreneur A.G. Gaston, founder of banks, insurance companies and many other enterprises, at one time was the major employer of blacks in Alabama. How did blacks manage to fall off the economic track so firmly established by a man like Gaston?

Businessman S.B. Fuller, who turned his little door-to-door cosmetics company, founded in the 1930s, into multiple enterprises worth millions of dollars, became the scourge of the black leadership. In the 1960s, Fuller publicly declared that blacks would never solve their long-term problems, which were primarily economic, until, like all other groups, they became active participants in the capitalist system. Offended by Fuller's disdain of their non-economic strategies and emphasis on social programs, and threatened by his rational analysis of the black condition, the establishment judged him an enemy to the black cause. He, in turn, declared these demagogues of the civil rights movement "irrelevant and shallow." Why were the obvious truths raised by Fuller ignored?

The first public figure who was unafraid to dispute the claims of the civil rights propaganda, as packaged by the NAACP, its various spin-off, copy-cat organizations, and the countless militant "activists" who were daily multiplying in numbers, was the discerning scholar Thomas Sowell. In the 1970s, he began pointing to the perverse social policies that were growing out of the very civil rights movement that promised to uplift and "liberate." He showed how such policies would inevitably do great damage to blacks and to the country at large. Since the facts and data as presented by Sowell could not be refuted, the leadership chose to vilify and ostracize him, as they had done to Fuller and myriad other critics.

Blacks who were economically on the road to self-reliance 40 and 50 years before the advent of modern "civil rights," by the 1960s were being encouraged by their leaders to become what another astute scholar Shelby Steele calls a "contingent people," who were soon mired in protest politics.

As protest or identity politics became a way of life, blacks were compelled to place liability for their past and future into the hands of others. White Americans came to accept this state of affairs as normal and perhaps even to be expected, thereby contributing to the drive that led to unconstitutional laws and regulations supporting group rights. At this late date, a great many Americans have awakened to the corrosive damage done to the country and to our constitutional system by earlier failures to search beneath the veneer of civil rights and demands for "social justice."

While exercising to the fullest our right to free speech, we also honor those who stand up to this country's race bullies. In this spirit, we salute Dr. Erenestine Harrison, a black educator in Hampton, Virginia, who saw through the NAACP's self-serving campaign to deny southerners their right to acknowledge the region's Confederate symbols, while honoring their southern heritage. We will continue to give our support to those Americans who refuse to toe an established party line, even after being tarnished with the "racist" or "Uncle Tom" labels.

If you are in agreement with the principles expressed in the pages and website of Issues & Views, and would like to help keep this important voice on the Internet, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution. You can help to make it possible for us to return to publishing hard copy editions. For all who contribute, we will send the last three editions (2000 through 2002), along with the first book that describes the life and times of the indomitable S.B. Fuller -- the long-awaited biography by his daughter Mary Fuller Casey.

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