March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The original march’s focus on economic justice issues through a national minimum wage and jobs program would be lost on a party that today consistently opposes aid to low-income Americans and whose last presidential nominee proudly stated that he is “not concerned about the very poor.”
While Bob Woodson of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprises, a speaker at today’s event, lamented that low-income African Americans are being ignored in today’s politics, he blamed their plight on gay people, immigrants, women and environmentalists. Perhaps he has forgotten that many African Americans are gay, immigrants and environmentalists, and at least a half are women!
After quoting columnist Courtland Milloy, who has written that the poor are facing a “nightmare,” Woodson lamented that “everybody has come in front of them on the bus. Gays, immigrants, women, environmentalists, we never hear any talk about the conditions confronting poor blacks and poor people in general.”
He then recounted a story about how one black man was happy that the Ku Klux Klan would be demonstrating in a poor neighborhood because they could “get rid of these drug dealers.”