Martin Luther King, Jr. was an effective leader in part because he recognized that economic opportunity is among the most important civil rights of all.

Democrats who use race as a weapon, such as Kamala Harris, a U.S. senator who used MLK Day to launch her presidential campaign, are completely out of step with Dr. King’s legacy.

The history books don’t usually mention this, but on the day MLK gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, calling for an end to racial discrimination, nine other civil rights leaders gave speeches that called for economic equality and living wages.

The “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” event was as much about ending economic disparity for African Americans as it was about ending segregation and other forms of institutionalized discrimination that denied us our fundamental civil liberties.

Less than one year after the march, Congress finally addressed the segregation issue, albeit imperfectly, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It has taken us these many decades since then to see meaningful economic improvements in the African American community, with a big leap forward over the past two years, none of which is thanks to race-baiting Democrats like Kamala Harris.

Instead, it’s President Trump who has created the conditions for African Americans to thrive like never before. His pro-growth, America First policies were the main reason the black unemployment rate hit an all-time low of 5.9 percent last year. But Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for our community’s revival even when he was still just a candidate for president.

When then-candidate Trump made his famous “what do you have to lose” pitch to African American voters during the 2016 election campaign, the mainstream media reacted with a mix of horror, outrage, and derision. His argument struck a chord within the black community, though, helping to instill a new spirit of entrepreneurship among African Americans that had long laid dormant under the stifling pressure of job-killing liberal economic policies. In 2018, African American business ownership increased by 400 percent!

The 1960’s civil rights movement that MLK led was made up of ordinary people who went to extraordinary lengths to correct injustices in American society. Some Democrats shared in our success back then, but in the decades since, they’ve done little more than pay lip service to the needs of African Americans.

Apart from being a typical tax-and-spend liberal who supports the sort of economic policies that have kept black America down for decades, Kamala Harris is also a pro-abortion extremist despite the devastating impact abortions have on the African American community.

President Trump, conversely, has done more for African Americans than any president in my lifetime.

The FIRST STEP Act, for instance, represents the first substantial prison reform in a generation, making long-overdue changes to reduce discriminatory sentencing disparities and help former inmates become productive members of society. Without President Trump’s decisive public endorsement of that bill, we would most likely still be living under the rules put in place during Hillary Clinton’s “super predator” era.

Even Democrat supporters such as Kim Kardashian West have discovered that they can work with President Trump. Just one week after West visited the Oval Office, the president commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, who had served 22 years of a life sentence in prison for a first-time nonviolent drug offense.

Similarly, President Trump also granted a posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson, America’s first black heavyweight boxing champion, who was imprisoned during the Jim Crow-era for traveling with his white girlfriend. Several previous presidents ignored resolutions from Congress asking to correct that historical injustice, but Donald Trump knew it was the right thing to do as soon as the case was brought to his attention.

These actions prove that President Trump is a man of action who truly cares about the forgotten communities of this country, and he’s still only halfway through his first term. I have no doubt that he’ll go down as the greatest President in history for black Americans.

Harris seems intent on inflaming racial tensions by insinuating that Donald Trump is a racist, despite everything he has done for minority communities. Perhaps she thinks she can convince people to view her as the civil rights leader of her generation, but that’s a pipe dream.

In fact, Kamala Harris is just another all-talk, no-action politician peddling the same lies Democrats have been telling the black community for years.

Dr. King was a warrior for economic freedom who would embrace the economic renaissance lifting up black communities across the nation today, and not the politics of division and radical left economics. 

Bruce LeVell (@Bruce_LeVell) is a retail jewelry manufacturer of over 25 years, a real estate developer, and the executive director of National Diversity Coalition For Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign. He is a former chair of the Gwinnett County, Georgia Republican Party.

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