The Civil Rights Movement was about FREEDOM, not the RESTRICTION of financial choice

There’s payday loan bashing in this story I’m about to share with you, and it’s pointless. It makes it seem like the writer has a political ax to grind and the poor taste to swing that ax during the most inappropriate moments.

Our author, Clifton Lee, writes in Louisiana State University’s Tiger Weekly student newspaper of LSU Professor Marvin Broome, an African-American man who experienced the ugliest that the American Civil Rights movement had to offer. Yet he stood tall and made a difference.

A child of the Deep South, Broome knew racism and segregation. Once he saw Martin Luther King’s televised march on Washington D.C. in 1963, Broome knew that he wanted to be a part of the movement and its resulting history. Against his father’s judgment, he began to organize civil rights events in his home town. Successful boycotts of anti-black businesses and other actions were soon to follow. Yet despite all of the gains Broome and his generation made, he sees a great erosion of the unity black communities in America once shared. He remains hopeful that it can be regained.

Civil rights would INCLUDE having access to payday loans!

Marvin Broome’s story is inspiring. But look what comes out of the blue in this otherwise fine feature piece by Mr. Lee (bold mine):

By working together within the community, Broome and his friends organized a successful boycott of a local grocery store which had a reputation for refusing to hire blacks and scamming them through the usage of payday loans.

This is disappointing, to say the least. The propagandist notion that payday loan stores target minorities never had a leg to stand on. How exactly did this scamming take place? It could be that Lee is referring to just the specific unscrupulous businessman who may have tried to take advantage of black people. But I don’t think so. He appears to be swinging a broad brush (ax!), and by doing so he hacks together an image of the payday loan that is false. It weakens the power of an otherwise good piece of writing.

Related articles

• This Man Didn’t Have a Dream…: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Do blacks, whites agree on MLK’s dream? (cnn.com)
• From ‘I Have a Dream’ to Obama (abcnews.go.com)