Part 1: Undermining Black employment
By Frosty Wooldridge
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Each week, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, majority leaders of the U.S. House and Senate of the United States-shout grandiose proclamations about their efforts to make work, housing and education better for all Americans.
Unfortunately, for the past 20 years, both individuals failed Black America. Reid and Pelosi encouraged, without batting an eye, the slave labor invasion from Mexico. Both voted for insourcing, outsourcing and offshoring of jobs that displaced and undermined millions of Black Americans. Both watched Chinese manufacturing usurp American jobs in steel, auto and, welding and ancillary jobs attached to Detroit, former "Automobile Capitol of the World."
Yes, Reid gave us Wal-Mart with 90 percent Chinese products that put the Chinese to work, but cut the throats of American workers. Every time you save money at Wal-Mart, you put thousands of U.S. workers in unemployment lines-that includes millions of Blacks.
As a college student in Michigan, I witnessed the Detroit riots in 1967 that burned much of the Black inner-city into cinders. The riots in Watts illustrated seething anger among Blacks. The U.S. Army drafted millions of poor blacks to fight in Lyndon Baines Johnson's Vietnam War. Tens of thousands died without a clue as to why they departed this life so early.  Dr. Martin Luther King tried to bring equality for people of color and stop 'separate but equal' drinking fountains and restaurants. Â
Johnson engineered the "Great Society" in order to give Blacks a chance at the American Dream. Schools upgraded, scholarships flourished, and even Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole could eat and stay in the same hotel as whites. Top Black athletes commanded millions of dollars in sports and Black entertainers became millionaires like the Supremes, Richard Pryor and Sammy Davis, Jr.
With the power of the auto industry and manufacturing, Blacks entered-in greater numbers-the middle class of America through the 70s and 80s.
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