On Monday morning, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece Alveda King stopped short of calling for Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) to resign in the wake of the blackface scandal. Instead, she urged him to “stop doing Ku Klux Klanish things” and rescind his support for abortion laws. The blackface controversy emerged with a yearbook photo seeming to show Northam either in blackface or a Ku Klux Klan robe, but that followed a week of controversy over a radical abortion bill the governor supports.
“When the story initially broke, I said, ‘Well, wow! Thirty-five years ago — we need to forgive him.’ However, forgiveness is one thing but how do we move forward is another thing,” King told “Fox and Friends.”
“And rather than to ask the governor to resign, I would ask him to rescind all of the legislation that he has approved that supports the crime against humanity which is abortion,” she declared.
King said she would deliver this message to Northam: “I would say, ‘Stay there, reverse all those actions, stop agreeing to kill little human beings in the womb. You are a pediatrician. You know those are human beings right there in the womb!'”
Alveda King addressed the ugly racial history of abortion — which arguably continues in the present (billboards in Dallas and Cleveland targeted black women with pro-abortion messages last year, and black women have disproportionately high abortion rates). “Stop working with Planned Parenthood — who Margaret Sanger really did speak to the Ku Klux Klan, she did. And so, [I would tell him to] stop doing Ku Klux Klanish things and reverse and rescind all of those ugly laws that he is still supporting today,” she said.
“How is he going to lead the people of his state when he is killing the human beings in the womb in his state and he is a pediatrician?!” she asked, exasperated.
Alveda King insisted that Democrats should move beyond “skin color racism,” because human beings are “one blood.” She cited Acts 17:26, insisting that “God made us all one blood.”
“That’s why my uncle Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. could say we must learn to live together as brothers — and I add as sisters — or perish together as fools,” King declared. “Then you will not commit crimes against your brothers and sisters in the womb, outside the womb, rich, poor, young, old, human trafficking, sex trafficking, abortion.”
As for Northam, “he needs to rescind all of that, he needs to apologize for agreeing to kill little babies, little human beings in the womb. His own — in his own state, those little human Americans, he needs to apologize to them. He really does.”
To my knowledge, Northam has not yet signed any abortion bills, but he does support the REPEAL Act (H.B. 2491), which, as Delegate Kathy Tran (D-Springfield) admitted, enables an abortionist to kill an unborn baby up to the beginning of labor if one sole doctor believed killing that infant would protect a mother’s life or health. The bill even removes language stipulating that in order for a woman to have a third-trimester abortion, having the baby would have to “substantially and irremediably” damage the woman’s health.
To make matters worse, Northam later made remarks effectively endorsing infanticide for babies born alive in late-term abortions. He later doubled down on these comments. Planned Parenthood vociferously defended him, until the blackface-Ku Klux Klan photo emerged.
In the wake of that photo, many local and national Democratic leaders have called for Northam’s resignation. Many Republicans have done so as well. Alveda King’s decision to hold back from this demand is notable, especially given her relationship to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rather than jumping on the bandwagon, Alveda King attempted to use this scandal as an opportunity to demand protections for the unborn. King has denounced abortion as a modern civil rights issue, and the early eugenics movement — which championed abortion and sterilization at the time Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood — was explicitly racist. The fact that billboards target black women for pro-abortion messages today supports King’s denunciation of “Ku Klux Klanish” tactics in favor of abortion.
Most Americans would not connect abortion and racism, but Alveda King is using this opportunity to make that connection clear.
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