Dr. Alveda King Tookes, a niece of Dr. Martin Luther King who has associated herself with a variety of right-wing causes and organizations, recently called on the NAACP to adopt a resolution passed by the Macon, Georgia chapter, requesting that the national civil rights organization work to reduce abortion and infant mortality rates in the black community and reduce the disproportionately high black inmate population.
While civic leaders from across the political spectrum have advanced plans to reduce unplanned pregnancy and the number of abortions, and nobody would question the goals of reducing African American infant mortality and imprisonment, King seems less interested in advancing those goals than in embracing the far-right’s extreme anti-abortion rhetoric:
“Today, there is no greater injustice facing black people than abortion. Over 13 million African Americans are not here because they died by legal abortion. It’s as if a plague swept through our cities and towns and took one of every four blacks.”
King is “Pastoral Associate” and Priests for Life’s Coordinator of African American Outreach. Here’s a sample of that outreach:
“Blacks make up 12% of the population, but 35% of the abortions in America. Are we being targeted? Isn't that genocide? We are the only minority in America that is on the decline in population. If the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant.”
King isn’t the only right-wing African American to equate legal abortion with genocide in an effort to split African American voters from their traditional support for progressive policies and candidates. Two weeks before the 2006 elections, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the High Impact Leadership Coalition minimized concerns about the thousands of people being killed in the war in Iraq by contrasting those deaths to the “genocidal murder” of “millions of black babies.”
