In March 1988, I witnessed one of the saddest spectacles of my life. I saw four police officers pry open door 303 at the infamous Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee and forcibly evict a poor, single, black woman named Jacqueline Smith from the only home she had known for 11 years. It was televised. It was a spectacle.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. The motel had been purchased at auction and was to be repurposed into a civil rights museum. Smith had challenged her eviction, believing that Martin Luther King, a man who had championed the plight of the poor, would have sided with her and not the money-grubbing capitalist there to profit from his murder. She swore never to leave her room voluntarily. She had been offered better employment and better housing. She refused. She swore she would resist every step of the way.
She kept her word. Smith did not make her removal easy. As four female police officers picked her up by each of her limbs carrying her down the stairs and off the property, she kicked, screamed, flailed about making their job as difficult as possible.
After moving Smith and all of her possessions to the curb and threatening her with jail if she ever stepped foot on the property again, Smith made a vow to never leave that spot and to protest until her eviction is overturned. That was 32 years ago.
Jacqueline Smith is still there protesting. As the world continued to spin, something kept her trapped in the time loop of 1988. Some say it is conviction and courage. Others will say it is pride and hate. During these decades, while others went to college and trade schools to become mechanics, doctors, teachers, and parents, she has stayed on that spot, selling trinkets and protesting. She says she is still poor and still angry. “Thirty years on,” she told an interviewer, “I still feel the same.”
Smith is a visual representation of black America and the fallacy of endless and perpetual protest. As America has moved on to become tremendously prosperous and powerful,the black community remains trapped in a time warp where it trades prosperity, happiness, and freedom for the prison of endless protest.
Rich liberals, while enjoying their own lives, see Smith as a martyr to their cause. She’s someone they can use. Therefore, they see her as someone to be respected, revered, and even lionized. Conservatives see her as a tragic figure, consumed with pride, hatred, and an inability to forgive—the symbol of a wasted life and all that a wasted life entails: anger, sadness, and regret.
Hardcore black Democrats are the new Palestinians. Most are like Smith. They are so consumed with revenge, hate, and self-pity, it is impossible for them to function as a proper part of society. They have become dysfunctional and undisciplined instead of steeling themselves to obey the laws that most other Americans follow effortlessly. Instead, they are now fighting to defund the police so they can break the law without consequence.
For the past six months, America has witnessed raw and in living color, the hidden society that liberal Democrats consider normal. Rioting, murder, and thuggery. Democrats have started every riot in America over the past 60 years. Watts, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, even Charlottesville. Now they are rioting, looting, burning, and killing all over the country.
Isn’t it amazing that conservatives of all races never riot? We may demonstrate but we don’t riot. Why? Because we do not trust the government. We know the government cannot fix our problems. We will demonstrate to remind the government of what will happen to it if it attempts to infringe, abridge, or violate our unalienable rights.
Observing the spectacle of the past six months, you can see how some believe leftists to be full of hate. Their hatred is toxic and contagious. As in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, when the hateful Captain Ahab infected the once peaceful crew of the Pequod with the deadly disease of revenge, anti-Christian leftists have infected once-peaceful Americans. Even in death, the corpse of the hate-filled Ahab summoned the crew of the Pequod to their deaths. Likewise, Democrats are using the corpses of long-dead Confederate Democrats and their victimized slaves to summon America to its demise.
Black Democrats have learned well from their former masters and present oppressors how to hate and justify all manner of evil because of perceived or imaginary injustice. They are on a rampage seeking revenge against dead and imaginary foes. They are summoning all of America to follow them to Hell. We must resist at all costs.
C. S. Lewis said all suffering originates from the sin of pride. He calls pride the most damnable sin. It is no coincidence that all of the left-wing movements, whether they be the feminist, black, LGBTQ, use the word “pride” to describe their purpose. Thus, the sin of pride has sidetracked the black community from God’s purposes. The healing acts of forgiveness, love, and forbearance are forgotten by Democrats. For decades now, they have been replaced by the pestilence of hatred, revenge, and self-pity.
There comes a time in one’s life when the law of diminishing returns is inescapable: When is the input more than the output? Someone is profiting from this, and it isn’t black Americans. The black community is dying from a festering wound of hatred, not racism. Democrats have always picked at this wound and then profited from the pain.
Here’s the good news. This is not unto death. Most people are good. Most people are sane. The anarchists are a small noisy minority that we can shut down whenever we have the courage to choose to do so.
Sadly, in the meantime, there are many Jacqueline Smiths out there being exploited by the Democratic Party. We must convince them that they are not heroes. They are pawns in a savage game. They can still be parents, teachers, and happy. Because of hatred and revenge, the life Jacqueline Smith and the lives of many black Americans are marred by tragedy, not heroism.
If you doubt my conclusion, consider this. As Jacqueline Smith stands there for 32 years, applauded by the Left and pitied by the Right,ask yourself this question: Would you want your child to emulate her?