Lee Hubbard

“Well friends, he is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide Ph.D., and his name isn’t really ‘Martin Luther King Jr.’” reads a section titled “The Truth About Martin Luther King Jr.: Why he fought and who helped in the fight.” It goes on to say, “What’s left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own.”

A link with the even more misleading title, “An Excerpt from ‘The King Holiday and Its Meaning’: Bring the Dream to life for someone you know: An educational tool” goes to a quote from North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms’ congressional testimony, which alleges that “King associated with identified members of the Communist Party of the United States.”

According to Stormfront founder Don Black, the site has been set up to combat the “propaganda” regarding King and his life. “The establishment media tries to turn Martin Luther King into a saint when the opposite is the case,” he says. Black denies direct involvement in martinlutherking.org. But the e-mail address of the site’s webmaster, Vincent Breeding, is on the Stormfront.org domain.

The site uses government documents, such as Helms’ testimony, and information from the FBI campaign against civil rights leaders, as its sources. Civil rights groups and historians fear the appearance of official sources adds to the potential for gullible people to be taken in by half-truths and revisionist versions of history. The site’s existence raises a perpetual Internet controversy: the potential to spread misinformation to a wide audience.

Roger Vickers is the public affairs officer for the Martin Luther King Center and the King family in Atlanta. He is not particularly alarmed by the site’s misrepresentation of King. “None of the information is new,” said Vickers. “Dr. King has just about been criticized for everything.” He said this “misinformation” can be found in white supremacist books.

Black’s response to the controversy over the site is also as old as the larger debate over the First Amendment freedom to distribute misinformation. “The Internet has opened up doors to people who during the Middle Ages would have been called heretics,” said Black. “The Internet provides an alternative news media. It brings our message to millions of people who in the past didn’t have access to it.”

White supremacy groups on the Internet are nothing new. Groups such as the World Church of the Creator have used Web sites for years as a recruiting tool for new members and as a platform for their views.

But the group behind martinlutherking.org is especially Web savvy. According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups, Stormfront is at the epicenter of the white supremacy movement on the Web. Founded in 1995 by Black, it is, according to Potok, “the oldest and largest hate site on the Net.”

Black is a former Ku Klux Klansman and long-standing member in the white supremacy movement. (He is now married to former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke’s ex-wife.) Black went to federal prison after a failed plot to overthrow a left-leaning government on the black island nation of Dominica. “It was in the prison that he learned computers,” said Potok. “Now he is the chief purveyor of hate on the Net.”

Stormfront’s site counter logs over 2 million hits to date. The site has a White Nationalist News Agency, white heritage e-commerce, it has a bilingual version in Spanish and German and it has links to various white supremacy sites. With the addition of the Martin Luther King site, Black seems to be taking a stab at diversity.

Potok says Stormfront’s use of a Martin Luther King domain marks a new trend with hate groups. “Many of these sites appear to be relatively benign,” Potok says, “but it is the opposite of what it is.”

This new practice of mislabeling sites could mean an attempt by hate groups to sneak past Web filters. Or it could be a way to stealthily go after young people whose parents and teachers try to monitor what they read on the Web.

Another example of the insidious mislabeling on the site is a section called “The Death of the Dream: The Day Martin Luther King Was Shot.” This section uses alleged FBI documents purporting to show that the evening after King visited the U.S. Supreme Court to listen in as lawyers argued New York Times vs. Sullivan, he was in hotel room partying with three white women. The site describes “the clinking of glasses and the sounds of illicit sex.” It alleges that King cried out “I’m f–ing for God” and “I’m not a Negro tonight!” The site goes on to say that King brutally beat one of the women.

The practice of cyber-squatting — picking an Internet domain that is the name of another person, group or product — is also nothing new. Some cybersquatters intend to make a profit by selling the domain to the highest bidder. Other groups, such as Stormfront, pick up names to defame.

This practice has caused civil rights groups in particular to go on the offensive. The NAACP bought the names to nigger.com and various other variations of the word. The Anti-Defamation League has bought the domain name for kike.com and other variations of this and other words offensive to Jews. Unfortunately, the King family let their historic name get away.

“We purchased several names related to Dr. King and the King name, but they [Stormfront] beat us to this one,” said Roger Vickers, the public affairs officer for the Martin Luther King Center and the King family in Atlanta.

Vickers said the King family became aware of the site a few months ago and tried to take action, but he admits there is nothing they can do. Since King is a public figure, the copyright laws that sometimes wrestle domain names from cybersquatters don’t apply in this case. And it’s unlikely that Black would sit down with the King family to negotiate.

Historians point to the need for readers to balance information they receive on the Net — or anywhere else — with a healthy level of skepticism. Kerry Taylor, an assistant editor with the Martin Luther King papers project at Stanford University, didn’t know about the site. But he wasn’t surprised by it. “There is a ton of nonsense on the Web and most people can see the difference between stuff that has veracity and information that attacks,” said Taylor.

Taylor called the site’s content “propaganda” and debunked many of the site’s allegations as complete fabrications. “King was absolutely an ordained a minister,” Taylor said. “He was ordained on Feb. 25, 1948.” As for King’s name, Taylor responded, “Does it matter?” But he called the attack on King’s name “interesting.” He said, “King was born Michael Luther King.” But at the urging of his father, his name was changed to Martin Luther King Jr.

Taylor also addressed the most damaging and long-lasting allegation that has dogged King for years, which was that he was a communist. “He spoke consistently against communism,” said Taylor. “He was open to some socialist ideas but as a Christian, he literally thought that communism and Christianity weren’t compatible.”

Black insists the site sheds light on King’s legacy. “Of course all the information on the site is true,” said Black.

Yet even if all of the federal documents on the site are authentic, their veracity is suspect, according to Taylor. That’s because they are the products of an era in which the U.S. government considered the civil rights movement to be a serious threat to national security.

The FBI once considered King “the most dangerous Negro in America.” The agency went on a smear campaign against King and other black leaders and militants in the infamous COINTELPRO operation, which spied on leaders of the civil rights and other political movements in the 1960s and early ’70s. Agents tracked King’s movements and planted negative stories about him in the press. They even encouraged King to commit suicide in an anonymous note to him.

“What you have to understand is that the FBI material was manufactured,” said Taylor. “J. Edgar Hoover was targeting King. So while there is FBI evidence that he was a womanizer, you have to understand where the information is coming from. It has to be weighed very carefully. It was part of a campaign to attack King. It needs to be considered in that light.”

While Vickers said the King family’s lawyers might look into bringing defamation of character charges against the site, he knows this is a long shot. Even sympathizers to King realize the First Amendment and the freedom associated with the Internet will more than likely prevent such litigation.

“Nothing can be done,” said Potok. “Martin Luther King is a public figure who is dead. The chances of this litigation are small at best. You don’t have to like MLK or to be honest about him on a Web site.”

In a sense, martinlutherking.org does shed light on King’s legacy by exposing the tactics of adversaries like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI when he was alive, and Don Black’s Stormfront since his death.

The digital divide is far more about class than race, they argue, and depicting blacks as hopelessly behind may hurt African-Americans, not help them. Certainly the latest numbers on technology use show that the digital divide cuts many different ways.

Instead of showing a predictable black-white gap, technology research reveals that Asian-Americans, not whites, have the highest Internet and computer use. And while blacks at most income levels lag behind whites and Asians, it’s Latinos, not blacks, who are the least likely to be wired. But no one’s worrying aloud about an Asian-Latino digital divide.

In fact, African-Americans are going online in ever-increasing numbers, boosting their spending on computers and computer-related products by 143 percent in 1999, according to Target Market News. A recent report by the Joint Center for Political Studies found that there’s little difference in Internet usage between upper-middle-class blacks and whites. And at the highest income levels — above $90,000 annually — blacks are more likely to be wired than whites.

“People have legitimate concerns,” says Barry Cooper, the CEO of blackvoices.com. “But if [there] is a divide, it is economic.”

David Ellington, CEO and founder of Netnoir.com, the first major black site on the Web, agrees.

“I don’t feel there is much of a divide anymore,” said Ellington. “The Internet is now becoming relevant in our lives as a result of e-mail and chat sites, and African-Americans are going online in droves.”

So why the agitation about blacks being on the wrong side of the digital divide? Many trace it to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Falling Through the Net,” which was released in the summer of 1999. The report found that overall, blacks and Latinos were 40 percent less likely to have computer access than whites.

Then a Joint Center report on Internet use broke down the data in more detail (but only for whites and blacks). The overall divide, the center shows, has to do with the larger numbers of African-Americans in poverty. The study showed that 11 percent of African-American households with incomes under $15,000 reported using the Internet at home or work, compared with 23 percent of comparable whites. But the divide closed sharply as incomes climbed. Two-thirds of blacks making between $60,000 and $80,000 use the Internet, roughly the same as whites, while a full 83 percent of those with incomes over $90,000 used the Internet more than whites with comparable incomes.

Still, the rhetoric continues to depict the digital divide as a black-white thing. Vice President Al Gore called it the nation’s “No. 1 civil and economic issue.” And in the wake of the alarmist Commerce Department report, Jesse Jackson met with Silicon Valley execs, and called for action to close the divide, especially more minority appointments on their boards.

President Clinton made the digital divide a main topic in his State of the Union address in January. And a few days later, he unveiled “ClickStart,” a new federal program to subsidize computers and Internet connections for the poor. The program will issue vouchers that poor families can use to purchase the equipment and services they need. But some have called it corporate welfare.

Black technology leaders worry that the emphasis on race in the debate over the digital divide is casting blacks in the proverbial role of victim, when this is far from the truth.

“It (ClickStart) will help to a certain degree to get blacks online, but it can come back to bite us,” said Ellington. He worries it positions blacks “as in need of help, and only through the government can blacks succeed.”

There are 5 million blacks online, and with computer prices dropping to the tune of a little over $500, many of the poorest people are making sacrifices to get computers and online service.

Evidence of the sharp increase in the number of African-Americans online can be seen in the rising number of advocacy and promotional campaigns taking off on the Internet and via e-mail. Many credit the underground success of the film “The Best Man,” starring heartthrobs Taye Diggs and Morris Chestnut, to a virtual campaign that relied heavily on e-mail.

“When we showed the film at Urban World film festival in New York, we told people in the audiences to get the word out by mailings, telephone calls, postcards and e-mail,” said Malcolm Lee, the director of “The Best Man” (and Spike Lee’s cousin). The film earned more than $34 million without any major mainstream media support, and Lee credits a grass-roots e-mail campaign that took off among viewers of his film who wanted to support it.

“I believe that black people have proven that when technology becomes relevant to us, we embrace it,” agrees Ellington. “Just look at the two turntables that helped to create hip-hop.”

It may be hip-hop that ultimately closes what’s left of the digital divide for young African-Americans. A growing number of hip-hop sites have sprung up in the past few years, drawing younger people online to investigate. With more and more original music available online, “hip-hop makes computers relevant to a lot of people,” says Dave (Davey-D) Cooks, the publisher of the Davey-D hip-hop report, and founder of his own Web site.

Cooks thinks blacks need to pay attention to how technology is used, rather than wring their hands about the shrinking digital divide. Asks Cooks: “Do you want to give your power to other people or do you want to take your well-being into your own hands?”

“The officer came into my shop and told me to sign a piece of paper, or he was going to arrest me,” says Reece, who reluctantly signed the ticket, which ordered her to appear in court. She was caught in a hair sting. She was fined $1,000 by the state cosmetology board for violating the law. The Department of Consumer Affairs says that hair braiding in California is illegal unless a practitioner has a cosmetology license, which Reece doesn’t have.

“According to the law, any type of treatment of the hair for pay requires a license,” says Consumer Affairs spokeswoman Nancy Hardaker. But the problem with California’s stance is that braiding isn’t taught in cosmetology school. It isn’t even on the state cosmetology test. Cosmetology licenses require 1,600 hours of schooling and may cost as much as $9,000, of which a hefty share goes to the state cosmetology board.

But hair braiders have argued they should be exempt from the onerous licensing requirements. The politics of hair braiding has reached as far as the California Legislature, emerging as an issue of governmental bureaucracy and regulation vs. cultural tradition. The issues stalled in the legislative process this year, but will be resurrected when the Legislature reconvenes in January.

While the political hoopla may be new, hair braiding is an ancient tradition that can be traced back to Africa and has been handed down from generation to generation. Hair braiding weaves existing hair or fake hair into strands of hair, similar to dreadlocks that can be worn down or in various other styles. Although this process can take hours, black women are attracted to braided hair because it lets them wear their natural hair, and it protects them from chemicals that can damage the texture of African-American hair.

Reece began braiding out of the kitchen of her house when she was in high school, and soon became known as one of the best in the area. Braiding hair is big business, and Reece’s emerging reputation became lucrative. Hair braiders can charge anywhere from $75 to $250 to braid a head. Reece eventually opened two small shops — both called Braids by Sabrina.

As business boomed, she began to attract the attention of women within the black community in L.A. She also attracted the attention of state regulators, culminating in the sting last July for practicing without a cosmetology license.

Cosmetology involves the use of chemicals in hair, which is the primary reason the state licenses cosmetologists. Hair braiders argue that licensing doesn’t make sense for them since they don’t use chemicals.

Hair braiders say that the curriculum for cosmetology schools doesn’t even address braiding, and call it “a waste of time. I went to cosmetology school for 1,600 hours and paid over $6,000 and they didn’t teach one thing about braiding,” says Sheron Campbell, a licensed cosmetologist and owner of World of Braids in Oakland. “I don’t see how the state can enforce something they don’t teach.”

“It is ridiculous that the state is trying to regulate an act of culture,” says Stacy Pyles, director of “Combing Out the Kinks,” a film about hairstyling among black women. “Hair braiding is a cultural bond that is taught between mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces.”

But according to Taalib-din Uqdah of the American Hairbraiders and Natural Hair Care Association (AHNHA), laws regulating hair braiders are prevalent across the country.

“At least 46 states and all the U.S. territories have onerous laws and rules that make criminals out of African-style hair braiders,” says Uqdah, who travels the country fighting hair-braiding legislation.

“These state boards of hair are controlled by a cosmetology cartel that wants to control every aspect of hair.”

Uqdah says the laws create an unnecessary hurdle for African-American entrepreneurs, particularly in the era of welfare reform, with more people moving into the workplace. He called the laws a “restriction (of) the economic freedom of people trying to make use of a valued skill.”

After some intensive lobbying in Sacramento, Uqdah was excited about the possibility of passing legislation that could save hair braiders from the “hair police.” Two bills currently pending in the Legislature would allow hair braiders to work without having to get a cosmetology license.

One of the bills was sponsored by Sen. Ray Haynes, a Republican from Riverside. The other was sponsored by Assemblywoman Carole Migden of San Francisco. Both bills have stalled temporarily in the legislative process.

But a legislative solution may be moot. Last month a U.S. District Court in Southern California found against the state and in favor of Joanne Cornwell, a San Diego braider, who challenged the constitutionality of the cosmetology requirement.

“It is irrational to require Cornwell to comply with the regulatory framework,” the court ruling stated. The federal judge declared that California’s cosmetology laws regarding hair braiders wouldn’t “pass constitutional muster,” and that they rest on grounds “wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the state’s objectives.”

“This ruling is about more than hair braiders,” says Miranda Perry, a staff attorney for the Institute for Justice, a Washington nonprofit law firm that represented Cornwell.

“Approximately 500 occupations have some type of licensing scheme. This ruling is important to all type of entrepreneurs across the country because it makes it harder for the state to pass arbitrary regulations that prevent them from making an honest living.”

Consumer Affairs is pondering its next step. “We got word on the interim decision, and we are reviewing the decision,” says Hardaker.

Hair braiders are also wondering what’s next.

“The ruling nullifies the laws in regards to Joanne Cornwell and people situated like her, but I need to see how it plays out,” says Uqdah.

While the ruling could set legal precedent across the country, as the law stands now, braiding for profit in California is still against the law without a cosmetology license.

“As many crimes that are being committed, it appalls me that they would go to such lengths to set me up the way that they did,” Reece says. “I assume they would rather me strip for a living.”

Then on Sunday, tragedy struck, and it seemed like it might knock sense into district leadership. An Oakland police officer, James Williams Jr., was killed by a sniper, and the city came together in sorrow. New Mayor Jerry Brown renewed his commitment to crime reduction, and Oakland School Board President Noel Gallo asked that the Jamal teach-in be canceled, in respect for the family of Williams (Jamal was convicted for killing a police officer). Even Superintendent Quan agreed the Jamal teach-in should at least be postponed.

But Monday night, the Oakland Education Association voted to go ahead with the planned events, although they may have to be held after school hours, pending further discussion with the district. Once again, the decision shines an unflattering spotlight on this district, where two-thirds of students perform below grade level in math and reading, but where district leaders have never met a politically correct publicity stunt they didn’t like.

The facts of the Jamal case are complex. He is on death row for the 1981 murder of Daniel Faulkner, a 25-year-old Philadelphia police officer. Jamal, an award-winning journalist and former Black Panther, was also a part-time cab driver who, while driving his cab late at night, by coincidence, came across Faulkner arresting William Cook, Jamal’s brother. Faulkner was subsequently shot five times in the back. Jamal was also shot, but the gun that fired the shots at Faulkner had Jamal’s fingerprints on it. He was subsequently sentenced to death for Faulkner’s murder.

Several years later, some witnesses changed their testimony and disputed the Philadelphia police account of Jamal’s involvement in Faulkner’s death. Jamal was recently denied an appeal for a new trial by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He is set to be executed as soon as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge signs his death warrant, in the next 30 to 60 days.

No doubt the Jamal case raises important issues. But when the overall grade-point average for Oakland students is 2.17, and the average for black students is below 2.0, it seems to me that the No. 1 issue for the district should be improving students’ education.

The political reasoning behind the teach-in is also damaging to Oakland students. According to Bob Mandel, an adult education teacher who is the ringleader of the teach-in, it is being held because “many of our students will be in the penal system.” In a television interview, Mandel said the teach-in is particularly relevant to black students, who make up more than 50 percent of the Oakland student population, because “one of every four African-American males in this country is in jail or on probation.” But this often-uttered statistic regarding blacks in the criminal system is false. One in four black males between the ages of 18 and 29 is in the criminal system, not one in four overall. (Mandel used a lower figure in a recent op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.) And whatever the actual statistic, the mentality focuses attention on the 25 percent of black men involved in the criminal justice system, instead of the three out of four who aren’t.

Where the Ebonics mess was championed by black ideologues, the Jamal case has become a cause cilhbre mainly for white leftists, who preach that capitalism is evil and that there is no hope in America. Over and over again, white sectarians advance a view of black people as incarcerated, drug-addled welfare dependents to prove this country’s evils. This chatter also gets mimicked by certain black intellectuals, who make six-figure salaries, preaching this bleak stuff at white capitalist institutions.

One of the underlying assumptions of this teach-in is that “they’re going to jail anyway, so we might as well teach them to know about it.” This is on a continuum with the logic that led a white counselor to tell my father to avoid college-prep classes and just learn a trade to get a job.

In today’s society, education is the only route out of poverty and crime. Instead of spending days preparing lesson plans on Mumia Abu Jamal, the public school establishment in Oakland should be focused on preparing lesson plans to increase the learning of students. “Too many times you get liberals who aren’t looking out for the growth and empowerment of the community, and they push their own political agenda,” said the NAACP’s Reeves, a former Jesse Jackson for President staffer who is now a registered Republican.

To their credit, district leaders are now opposing the teach-in, but they should have nipped it in the bud before it became a power play for a union that never misses an opportunity to flex its political muscle. Two years after Ebonics, camera crews are back in Oakland, and they are seeing a political sideshow that is overshadowing the key issues facing the district. While the teachers union is chanting, “Free Mumia,” I’m waiting for someone to start a movement to “Free Oakland Students,” from teachers and district leaders who consistently put ideology before education.