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The word "freedom" for many black Americans is inextricably linked with the word "slavery." While it has 148 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, and 47 years since the landmark Civil Rights Act, for many. the words of Martin Luther King in his famous speech still ring real: "The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."(1)____(2)____ Many black Americans still find themselves spiritually and economically slaved on the figurative 2lst-century plantation.(3)____
Why is that still so? After all, for the last 47 years, our leaders have passed on bdl after bill ostensibly to free black Americans from the manacles of poverty and provide ever-stronger safety nets for those disadvantaged.(4)____ Because two very formidable forces have conspired over these last 47 years-almost the span of my complete life-to shackle the economic freedoms and aspirations of the black community: liberal progressive policies, generally supported by Democrats, and the socialist ideology espoused by prominent blacks as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.(5)____(6)____(7)____This is always curious to me that black Americans typically vote Democrat, when it was a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and a Republican from Ohio, Representative James Mitchell Ashley, who came forth the bill to support an amendment to end slavery throughout the United States.(8)____(9)____ Nearly 100 years late, when the initial Civil Rights Bill came before the full Senate in 1964, it was a group of 18 Southern Democrats who argued most fervently against its passage.(10)____
