Today, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes that Glenn Beck's 8-28 rally -- set to take place on the anniversary and at the location of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech -- is “an exercise in self-aggrandizement on a Napoleonic scale” and that “no puffed-up blabbermouth could ever diminish the importance of the 1963 March on Washington or the impact of King's unforgettable words.” Robinson further notes that “Beck's version of history is flat-out wrong”:
The most offensive thing about the rally is Beck's in-your-face boast that the event will “reclaim the civil rights movement.” But this is just a bunch of nonsense -- too incoherent to really offend. Beck makes the false assertion that the struggle for civil rights was about winning “equal justice,” not “social justice” -- in other words, that there was no economic component to the movement. He claims that today's liberals, through such initiatives as health-care reform, are somehow “perverting” King's dream.
But Beck's version of history is flat-out wrong. The full name of the event at which King spoke 47 years ago was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Among its organizers was labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, who gave a speech describing the injustice of “a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.”
Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), then an official of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest speaker at the march. “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here -- for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages,” he told the crowd. Referring to proposed civil rights legislation, Lewis said: “We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year.”
Related:
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Would Beck have supported King's March on Washington?
“American miracle”: Beck's outrageous predictions for his “historic” 8-28 rally