Preserving the Legacy of Martin Luther King and The Black Radical Tradition Requires Saving Both from the Congressional Black Caucus More than from white moderates and white supremacists (Or, I said what I said)

Anthony Rogers-Wright

21 Jan 2026

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Preserving the Black Radical Tradition demands struggle not only against white supremacists, but also against the co-opted Black political class who actively support the very evils Dr. King named.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 7006, the Financial Services and General Government and National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2026. The bill provides roughly $6.77 billion for the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, which includes at least $3.3 billion in grants for Israel that would be disbursed within 30 days of the bill’s enactment for the specific purpose of increasing the zionist ethnostate’s advanced weapons systems, which will further assist in its “Greater Israel” pogrom of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ever more land grabs in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. While voting to provide a nation currently undertaking a genocide and illegal occupation of Palestinian people with more funding for weapons of war is immoral in itself, the additional provisions of the bill should have made it a nonstarter and dead on arrival. Because, in addition to more U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to aid, abet, and finance Israel’s war crimes, H.R. 7006 further stipulates:

A complete ban on U.S. funding for UNRWA — the U.N. agency that’s critical to providing humanitarian assistance for Palestinians;
A prohibition on funding for international bodies investigating Israel’s actions — including the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the U.N. Commission of Inquiry; and
Conditions any assistance to the Palestinian people on acceptance of U.S. “benchmarks,” that were developed unilaterally and without the participation or approval of the Palestinian people, and blocks assistance if Palestinians initiate or actively support investigations at the ICC or ICJ into documented and observed Israeli crimes.

The bill easily passed with 341 “yes” votes, proving yet again that providing Israel with anything it wants and all it needs to continue subjugating, oppressing, and murdering Palestinian people is one area where Democrats and Republicans consistently agree. While it’s bad enough that 153 Democrats voted to continue Israel’s genocidal war machine against Palestinians, that 76%, or 41 of the 54 members of the so-called Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) voted for H.R. 7006 is a salient reminder of why the Black left and all people of conscience cannot and must not rely on this cooniferous cadre of Black zionist bootlickers, nor view them as anything more than Blackface vanguards of U.S. imperialism, melanated minions of U.S. international gangsterism, and enemies of the Black Radical Tradition.

One day these trash pandas will honor Civil Rights champions like Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin for not giving up their seats on the bus, and the next they throw Palestinians under the bus while purporting to follow in the footsteps of Dr. King to keep his dream alive, when, in fact, the 41 CBC members who voted for H.R. 7006 represent the totality of what King stood against including the “Three Evils of Society,” named in his landmark August 31, 1967 speech - racism, materialism, and militarism. To this end, voting to provide more funding for the continuation of Israel’s perpetual season of slaughter against Palestine was not just a vote against the tenets and principles of People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs), it was also a vote against Dr. King himself, the life he led, the movement that produced him, and his legacy at once. By voting to advance H.R. 7006, the CBC voted to advance the three evils of society while also dehumanizing the Palestinians as much as the zionist ethnostate and its colonial, acolyte European nation states.

That all five of the congressional kneegroes from Dr. King’s home state of Georgia voted for this legislative atrocity makes one wonder if they are also planning to take steps that will change their state song to “Tel Aviv on My Mind,” as they may as well desecrate the memory of Ray Charles in the process of doing the same to Dr. King. Of course, CBC members of the Georgia delegation could not help themselves, and used the occasion of Dr. King’s day of remembrance to offer insouciant and anodyne commentary on his life’s work and the larger struggle for civil and human rights.

It’s abundantly clear that each of these statements have less to do with the life and work of Dr. King than Barry Goldwater did with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet, Representative Nikema Williams, who less than a week after voting for a bill that represents the direct antithesis of civil, freedom, and human rights, had the audacity to tweet about the question of “community or chaos” at the legendary Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King preached, is more an exercise of caucacity and moral bankruptcy than a demonstration of principled and unbought leadership. For whereas King proclaimed the need for increased programs to center and prioritize the poor, the Congressional Bootlicker Caucus instead center and prioritize white settler colonial zionism, militarism, and imperialism before the well-being of their own constituents and the broader citizens/residents of the U.S.

In the early hours of 2026, the CBC saw to the business of sending a nation committing genocide and illegal occupation $3 billion, while also denying Palestinians the right to self-determination, human rights, and the pursuit of justice, well before seeing to the business of restoring critical health insurance subsidies for poor and working people, while also lowering prices for food and other life sustaining services in the midst of an affordability crisis. These House CBC porch ornaments dare to believe in their “inalienable” right to be spokespersons and advocates for Dr. King and his legacy due to nothing more than identity reductionism and liberal, racial politics. Hence why we must surely judge these kneegroes more by the content of their character as the color of their skin is no more than a disguise. They vindicate the sage words of Franz Fanon who reminded us in Black Skin/White Masks, “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.” In the case of the U.S., these “cultural standards” are the “American” standards, which, in large part, are what drive “three evils of society” that Dr. King named and identified.

Imagine tweeting and making public statements linking King to the pursuit of justice after voting to interdict Palestinians from even attempting to pursue, much less achieve justice, and essentially threatening to starve them out if they do. This is precisely what Brother Glen Ford meant when he wrote, “You can’t shame the shameless Black Misleadership Class.” Ford also reminded us that the House kneegroes of Congress, aka the CBC ,have embraced the racist and white supremacist policies of their Democrat Party massas for quite some time. Ford wrote, “In 2014, 80 percent of the [Congressional] Black Caucus voted to continue the Pentagon program to arm local police departments to the teeth, and in 2018 three out of four Blacks in the House supported making cops a “protected class.”And Ford concludes, “They hate Black Lives Matter and its ‘defund the police’ demand as much as Biden does, and have no solidarity with anyone except their own grasping, self-centered, hustling class.”

The CBC, thus, has no right to claim Dr. King as one of their own, just as it has no right to claim its function as the “conscience of the Congress,” when 76% of its members consciously and consistently just voted to fund the three evils of society identified by Dr. King. The CBC can’t even claim to be aligned with the desires and demands of Black people - for, by voting to advance H.R. 7006, they ignored the 59% of Black United Statesians who believe, “U.S. military aid to Israel should be conditioned to ensure that Israel uses American in a way that is consistent with human rights standards.”

Too many Black Democrats make it far too easy to arrive at the incontrovertible argument that they work more to maintain the zionist hegemony of Israel than to improve the material conditions of poor and working-class Black people. The reason is nothing more than opportunist materialism in the form of blood money doled out to bankroll the “good” kneegroes who are handpicked like pieces of cotton by the zionist industrial complex, specifically the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Democratic Majority for Israel.

Worse yet, the zionist capture of the CBC is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it’s been the modus operandi of this caucus of coonery for quite some time. As Anthony Conwright points out in his recent piece, The Congressional Black Caucus’s Silent Partnership with AIPAC, “The CBC’s silence [on the genocide in Palestine] isn’t accidental: More than half of its current 61 members have been endorsed or funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [who] endorsed 26 of the caucus’s members, raising $4.6 million for them and another $3.5 million for Black Democratic candidates.” Conwright also points out that, “[Hakeem] Jeffries and every member of the current CBC leadership have received money from the pro-Israel lobby—and AIPAC is endorsing Jeffries, as well as five of the seven members of the CBC leadership, in the upcoming 2026 midterms.

For far too many members of the CBC, the arc of the moral universe bends not towards justice, but to selling out via unprincipled and immoral votes, while bending the knee to the zionist industrial complex. Yet many, if not all of them, had the nerve to make specious remarks and statements on MLK day, including four of the five representing congressional districts in his home state of Georgia. None of these representatives, nor the other CBC members that were key to H.R. 7006’s passage have any relationship to Dr. King or the movement for civil and human rights. How can they even claim to be in alignment with King’s assertion, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered?”

Black Alliance for Peace founder and Director of the North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, Ajamu Baraka, recently wrote, “The U.S. state capture of Dr. King was a part of the process of deradicalizing African Americans, an objective of the counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary program of the U.S. settler state.” He continues, “That objective was to not only to neuter the radicalism of Dr. King but also to diminish the radicalism and internationalism of the Black Liberation Movement and transform the consciousness of the colonized Black population from a radical, oppositional force into a domesticated, deradicalized pro-“American” population,” and concludes, “It would be a population that is, more “American” than African, with a psychological and emotional investment in the fiction of “America.”

This is a salient observation, for how else can we describe the vast majority of CBC members than a white supremacist and anti poor and working class formation that has been willingly captured and acquired by the bourgeois elite due to their psychological and emotional investment in the fiction of “American” hegemony, which is to say the ideology of white “supremacy.” To this end, it can be argued that these CBC bootlickers are more disappointing than the white moderate King wrote about from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama as part of a larger critique of white liberalism. Where the white moderate evokes King, both consciously and unconsciously as well as intentionally and unintentionally, to, as Baraka notes, “transform the consciousness of the colonized Black population from a radical, oppositional force into a domesticated, deradicalized pro-“American” population,” CBC members who do the same do so for their own benefit and as a means to misdirect and obfuscate the fact that they are just as complicit in advancing white “supremacy,” imperialism, and colonization as Andrew Jackson and George Wallace.

In fact, by consistently voting to advance the projects of zionism, militarism, and imperialism over the project of PCHRs, the CBC are more responsible for the assassination of Dr. King than his alleged assassin, James Earl Ray. For whereas James Earl Ray allegedly took the man and his life from us, the CBC Black Misleadership class constantly pillage the legacy of Dr. King in myriad ways that Baraka adroitly describes, “...to not only to neuter the radicalism of Dr. King but also to diminish the radicalism and internationalism of the Black Liberation Movement.” Preventing these machinations requires consistency in our principles and unapologetic, merciless consternation as part of our interventions to confront and dismantle the opportunism of the CBC and the entire Black Misleadership Class.

We must not allow for the legacy of Dr. King and the movement he fought and died for to be deodorized, sanitized, bleached, or whitewashed by this collection of congressional Uncle Toms and Auntie Thomesinas who didn’t sell out by voting for H.R. 7006 as much as they allowed themselves to be purchased like the cheap political property they are by the zionist industrial complex and its white supremacist alabaster puppet masters at formations like AIPAC and the so-called Democratic Majority for Israel. For Dr. King to remain the spiritual property of the people and the masses of the colonized and oppressed globally, requires intervention against any and all actors who attempt to elite capture and adulterate his legacy and that of the larger movement for collective liberations be they white liberals or white supremacists, especially if they are doing so in Blackface like the 75% of CBC members who just voted to urinate on King’s lessons and Palestinians alike.

No Compromise

No Retreat

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.

Dr. Martin Luther King

Congressional Black Caucus

Black Radical Tradition

Civil Rights Movement

Palestine

Black Misleadership Class

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