In Atlanta, or Augusta, or Boston, or London, or Los Angeles, or Manhattan, or Portland, or Glasgow, or St. Louis, or Tucson, a man who is connected could witness the following affirmation: 

Blindfolded, the initiate is led into a room. The blindfold is removed and he is left in the dark. Suddenly a spotlight reveals a derelict, a black man, lying on the floor unconscious. A commanding voice addresses the initiate from the darkness, "Behold. Before you is your master. Never let him know it." 

Let the derelict be a man of any hue, and we have a marvelous metaphor for the Affirmative Action movement and the dynamic that both pervades and envelops it. I leave its complete unpacking to the reader. I do just a little here.

There is the story of Satan being briefed by his minions on their activities among humans. Each comes before his throne to tell him about successful incitations to rape, rob and murder. Boring!

Then he's excited. Satan listens to a demon affirm his devotion to disrupting marriages. The master bestows profuse praise upon the little devil for his having grasped the meaning of Affirmative Action and the method by which to perpetuate faggothood.  

James Brown, bred in Augusta Georgia, affirmed: "I don' want nobody to give me nuthin'. Jus' open up the door, and I'll get it myself." In the fifties I stood in line for hours to see James Brown at the Apollo Theater. I have always loved James as a man and as an entertainer. 

James did a little time for wife abuse. Faggot behavior. I connect that with his having made another song: "It's a Man's World (but it ain't nothing without a woman or a girl)." Qualifier notwithstanding, that kind of talk don't sit well with Affirmative Actionists. They have been less than kind to the Godfather of Soul.   

In 1955 A.G. Gaston, another southerner with a southern education, suggested to Dr. King an alternative to the Montgomery boycott. Gaston was willing to organize black entrepreneurs who would either purchase the bus line or start another one. Dr. King rejected the idea. He wanted to seize the teaching moment. He had completed his formal education in the north. So had WEB DuBois, the Harvard educated sociologist, one of the founders the NAACP. 

Booker T. Washington, the freedman, clearly affirmed his faith in a particular kind of black education. To this day his memory is both touted and taunted for his famous "compromise" speech at the 1904 Atlanta Exposition. He decried racial integration and placed little emphasis on the vote. He laid almost exclusive stress on strong economic foundation. 

Washington made a Tuskegee Institute fundraising presentation prior to the exposition. He introduced to his white audience his hero, his symbol of what he envisioned as the product of Tuskegee. His hero was a freedman who had built and sold more than a hundred houses to both black and white clients. This ex-slave and builder had become a wealthy philanthropist by acting affirmatively.

When Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican, came to New York in 1916, he publicly acknowledged his respect for Booker T. Washington who had died a year earlier. But Garvey did not adhere closely to the Washington model. He talked extensively about race and about politics, even world politics. Affirmative Actionists quickly saw to his undoing and the dismantling of the lucrative business enterprise he had built.

Martin Luther King began to include world politics among his topics of discussion, and he was killed. Malcolm X also extended his discussion purview to world politics, and he was killed. DuBois, the Pan-Africanist and ever the incisive commentator on global events, never had a following of significant numbers and was not a threat to the Affirmative Actionists. He died in self-imposed exile in Ghana.    

Elijah Mohammed, formerly Elijah Poole, also was a son of Georgia. He was a Washingtonite and a Garveyite. He focused his Nation of Islam of the fifties and sixties on economic development. He opposed racial integration and participation in electoral politics. What undid his movement was religious morality. 

Garvey talked a bit about a black deity. Washington rarely discussed religion in other than practical terms like cleanliness, honesty, industriousness and thriftiness. Elijah Mohammed talked in those terms, and he enunciated a cosmology as well as a religious morality. Religious morality became the cross for his crucifixion.

Garvey's black deity upset some black clergy and probably nobody else. It certainly was not a problem for the Affirmative Actionists. The cosmological credo of Elijah Mohammed was blatantly racist, but what it stressed most was no social interaction between whites and blacks. No problem.  

Garvey's problem was Pan-Africanism, the international scope of his vision. Initially Elijah Mohammed's economic program disturbed nobody. But then came hints of a geo-political vision, as the Nation's program was presented by Malcolm X, Elijah's heir apparent. 

Affirmative Actionists feared that Malcolm, the internationalist, would one day head the well-organized and economically powerful Nation of Islam. Malcolm, the internationalist, also was a moral idealist. His idealism gave the Affirmative Actionists the wedge they needed. 

Malcolm's idealism (and youthful naiveté) allowed him to publicly denounce his teacher. He was deeply offended by his discovery that Mr. Mohammed was a polygamist. He scolded him for faggot behavior. The ensuing manipulation by the Affirmative Actionists played venerable teacher against favorite student and led to the shooting death of Malcolm and the demise of the powerful Nation of Islam.

The derelict sleeps still. He needs to be roused. Every man needs to confront him. It's time he shared power with us. Men have work to do. The times demand affirmative action.