It's time to set the record straight on what the civil rights movement was really about versus what progressives and radicals want you to think it was about. It was about human rights. But let me show you how the movement has been perverted and distorted.
You've got folks like the Rev. Al Sharpton telling everyone that Martin Luther King's dream was really about redistributing wealth:
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REV. AL SHARPTON: Someone was saying to me the other day, Reverend Sharpton, we've got an African-American president. We've achieved the dream of Dr. King. And I told him, that was not Dr. King's dream. He's a great man. I've been working with the president and supported the president. But the dream was not to put one black family in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house.
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You've got the NAACP telling everyone that King was a socialist and that we wouldn't be celebrating Martin Luther King Day if we really knew who he was. Listen closely to what the chairman of the NAACP recently said:
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JULIAN BOND, NAACP CHAIR: We don't remember the King who was the critic of capitalism, who said to Charles Fager when they were in jail together in Selma in 1965 that he thought a modified form of socialism would be the best system for the United States. We don't remember the Martin Luther King who talked ceaselessly about taking care of the masses and not just dealing with the people at the top of the ladder. So we've kind of anesthetized him. We've made him into a different kind of person than he actually was in life. And it may be that that's one reason he's so celebrated today because we celebrate a different kind of man than really existed. But he was a bit more radical. Not terribly, terribly radical but a bit more radical than we make him out to be today.
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They're trying to paint King as a radical. But one guy doesn't think King was radical enough: SEIU's Andy Stern doesn't think the civil rights legend helped create "real change." In 2004, Stern told The Washington Post that "pressure is needed [to bring about real change.] It was not enough to have Martin Luther King, Jr.... You need Stokely Carmichael."
So he's saying Martin Luther King couldn't have accomplished what he did without people like Stokely Carmichael, who was the honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. So the Black Panthers brought about real change? Carmichael was known for coining the term "black power." So Stern thinks you need civil unrest to meet demands.
Who else is trying to raise the threat of disruption to have demands met now? Oh yes, the New Black Panthers:
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DR. MALIK ZULU SHABAZZ, CHAIRMAN OF THE NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY: We'll see Glenn Beck on August 27 on the National Monument. The New Black Panther Party will see him there. Since he is attacking us nightly and he won't talk to us. We will him on the National Monument at the National Mall.
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It's actually on August 28.
Racism is being used as a tactic for political gain.
The NAACP is now trying to intimidate Tea Partiers, passing a resolution to condemn quote "racist elements" in the party. I do not believe that racism is a white man's problem or a black man's problem or a Hispanic problem.
Racism is a human problem.
They are now trying to divide us into black and white, not unite us into one human race like Dr. King did in the '60s. It is our responsibility to protect the rights granted by God that King fought for the government to recognize and tonight we are going to talk about those rights.
— Watch "Glenn Beck" weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on Fox News Channel
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