Sunday's Quote: Martin Luther King, Jr.

NAACP chairman Julian Bond -- a man cut from the same cloth as your typical race pimp, demagogue, and problem profiteer -- spoke earlier tonight at Washington and Lee University about his former teacher at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King, Jr.  Below is an e-mail I sent last Wednesday to one of W&L's administrators:

I am writing in respectful dissent to Sunday's speaker at Lee Chapel, a man who was once quoted in The New York Times as saying, "If Robert E. Lee had his way, [Black children] would still be in bondage."

I understand that Mr. Bond was once a student of Martin Luther King's during his time at Morehouse College (which is why he is speaking).  Yet I am also of the inclination that an individual who has spoken with such acute negativity about those who painstakingly laid the foundation that has long established our identity -- and in doing so, looks past the imperfections of those he personally places on a pedestal -- will perhaps endeavor to reference progress by making his case for issues pertaining to everything from reparations for "back slave wages," the "dark underside" of the GOP, the "Confederate swastika," and the Obama administration itself.

I'm not an alumnus; I am merely a thankful admirer of the men -- two of the greatest this country will ever produce -- for whom your esteemed institution is named.  I hope that W&L officials will admonish Mr. Bond to mind his manners in an effort to keep from using his forum as a means of expressing his antipathy in regard to our Defenders whom the majority will always hold as chief among all American heroes.

There are those who would rush to label my message as bigotry and/or racist, and maybe that ought to shake me more than it does.  Perhaps the mere threat of being called a name should rock my very foundation, but it does not.  In fact I could take such charges as a compliment upon considering the source. Indeed I refuse the liability of past indiscretions for which I am not responsible irrespective of my ethnicity or the banners I choose to adorn.  And in the name of focusing on that which matters most...

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.; August 28, 1963