Remembering King - And Lindsay

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.

acolon@nysun.com