Concerning President Trump’s Jamestown Speech and Baltimore
Aug. 1, 2019 (EIRNS)— On June 29th, the President met with Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, and other African-American pastors at the White House. Dr. King emerged to proclaim that calling Trump a racist was “fake news.” She extolled Trump’s expressed love for Frederick Douglass. Then, on June 30th, Trump traveled to Jamestown, Virginia, to celebrate one of the birthplaces of the American Republic. Trump recounted the history of the Jamestown settlement which in its first legislative session, where it was so hot that one legislator died, the assembly endorsed building a world-class university in the wilderness.
In that same summer, Trump said, “in August of 1619, the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies arrived in Virginia. Today, in honor, we remember every sacred soul who suffered the horrors of slavery and the anguish of bondage. More than 150 years later, at America’s founding, our Declaration of Independence recognized the immortal truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ Yet, it would ultimately take a Civil War, 85 years after that document was signed, to abolish the evil of slavery. It would take more than another century for our nation, in the words of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to live out ‘the true meaning of its creed’ and extend the blessings of freedom to all Americans. In the face of grave oppression and grave injustice, African Americans have built, strengthened, inspired, uplifted, protected, defended, and sustained our nation from our earliest days.... One fact was quickly established for all time: In America we are not ruled from afar. Americans govern ourselves, and so help us God, we always will.”
The only media coverage given Trump’s speech against racism, was Northern Virginia Delegate Ibraheem Samirah’s interruption calling the President a dyed-in-the wool racist.
Similarly, when Trump called out Democratic Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings for his deficient leadership of Baltimore, whose West Side was dubbed a Third World country by none other than Bernie Sanders, the entire Maryland political establishment arose to denounce Trump.
The story of Baltimore is an old story, one stalking formerly industrial cities throughout the United States. The January 6, 2006 issue of Lyndon LaRouche’s EIR magazine detailed the Baltimore story:
“The deindustrialization of Baltimore—which began in the 1960s, with the shrinkage of the steel, shipbuilding, auto, and other industrial producers, whose employment allowed workers to participate in progress and earn a living wage—has turned a center of innovation and industry since the American Revolution, into a decayed shell, whose population is living out a 21st-century death spiral. The City of Baltimore has been taken apart in the last 40 years, and reassembled, with no high-paying manufacturing industry, and minus one-third of its population. Ninety percent of the city workforce works in the service industry, where most jobs pay $10-11/hour in healthcare, and below $8/hour in tourism. As a result, much of Baltimore’s population lives in ‘slave quarters,’ while servicing the entertainment complexes as ticket takers, food service workers, and janitors. A full 25% of the city’s households are headed by single mothers, who live in a city full of boarded-up houses, like a war zone.”
Lyndon LaRouche campaigned relentlessly against these policies for years.
