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Beck Dares John Lewis to 'Compare' Himself to Civil Rights Leader?

March 22nd, 2010

Please…

Fox News’s most right-wing nut, off-the-deep-end commentator Glenn Beck criticized Civil Rights leader and Georgia Congressman John Lewis on his show for “comparing himself to civil rights activists?”

“How dare you!” Beck bellows, pointing to the scene on the TV screen with shock and awe.

Guess Beck’s not exactly up on his Civil Rights history after all. Here’s a digital reproduction of an original Spider Martin photograph hanging on my wall from Bloody Sunday on the way from Selma to Montgomery.

That’s none other than John Lewis in the foreground, marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. That’s the day Lewis was beaten with a billy club in a cloud of tear gas, available to see in Spider Martin’s photo archives at SpiderMartin.com.

JohnLewis_MLK65a.jpg
John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Abernathy and James Bevel, 1965
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Civil Rights, Media News, Spider Martin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Yana Davis Says:
    March 23rd, 2010 at 10:12 am

    My suspicion is that a lot of fringe folks are not very well versed in history, even relatively recent history. That’s really unfortunate for people who watch uninformed pundits on cable.

    I have seen huge historical mistakes, intentional or not, on cable news programs across the board.

    MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, for instance, did a show last week about the health care bill in which he claimed Social Security was enacted along with Medicare in 1965.

    Beck probably flew off the handle and didn’t bother to check up on John Lewis’s life or, if he did check up, counted on his audience having no idea of who were the leaders of the Civil Rights movement aside from Dr. King.

    Either way, Beck misled and misinformed his viewers — nothing new in that — but this instance was particularly egregious.

    I wonder if Glenn is related to Dave Beck, the Teamsters’ major domo in the early and mid-20th century, who certainly qualified as one of the most conservative, if not outright corporatist, union leaders of the century.

  2. ann matlock Says:
    March 23rd, 2010 at 9:00 pm

    There is no excuse for anyone not knowing who John Lewis is and what he stands for. Beck is appalling.