This is an excerpt of interview with Eugene Dewitt Kinlow, Outreach Director of D.C. Vote

“I made it home from school and my mom and dad were both crying,” remembers Eugene DeWitt Kinlow about the day King was killed. “That was compelling for me because my dad wasn’t someone show showed his emotions.

“We knew Dr. King was very important to my parents; they were activists involved in the Young Democrats and tied to things that King was doing,” continues Kinlow who was only six years old at the time.

“My mother was getting calls where people were saying ‘That anybody white or near while was going to die.’”

His family eventually fled the city, staying for days with family friends in a Maryland suburb. But growing up watching year after year the left over destruction left an indelible mark, he says.

“As a kid you figure thing burn down and they get put back up,” continues Kinlow, now the outreach director for D.C. Vote. But where riot torn areas were “a permanent scar—not a scab.

“I used to travel to places like H Street NE and I would shake my head. There seemed to be a deep seeded fear. Some people didn’t want to talk about it,” he says, adding that the building—burned and boarded—were “like memorials to the civil rights movement and to Dr. King. 

“The became like stories that got told about what happened. Even in 2008, 40 years later, what is the monument to the civil rights movement? It’s not plain what that is?”

I've known preachers like the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor to Sen. Barack Obama. Like many of them, he no doubt sees his congregation as full of victims, and thinks that his words will inspire them to rise out of their victimhood. I understand that.

Once upon a time, I saw myself as a victim, too, destined to march in place. In the 1970s and '80s, as a clenched-fist-pumping black nationalist with my head wrapped in an elaborate gele, I reflected that self-concept in my speech. My words were as fiery as the Rev. Wright's. And more than a few times, I, too, damned America, loudly, for its treatment of blacks.

But I turned away from such rhetoric. Is it time that Wright and other ministers do, too?

African Americans differ on this question. "Some of these ministers are like some hip-hop artists," says E. Ethelbert Miller, an Afro-American studies expert. "Their language is not healing." Counters former civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot: "I am so proud of Rev. Wright, who speaks with unreserved passion, who accepts no quarter and gives no quarter. I'm glad the church is standing with him."

The recent furor over the incendiary rhetoric of the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago pulled back a curtain on black America, sending many in the white commentariat into shock and outrage. But African Americans have been hearing words like Wright's in churches across the country for decades. And for many of us, the uproar over his comments only underlined the quiet culture war going on within our own community.

For a decade, tensions have been rising over questions ranging from what it means to be black, to whether there needs to be a new, post-civil rights meaning of racism, to what features of black America should be transmitted to the mainstream, to whether there even is such a thing as "black America" anymore. Many of these skirmishes have been relegated to our kitchens and living rooms. But they are increasingly being brought to the public square -- often because a white person, a Don Imus or a Michael Richards, commits some infraction or demonstrates cluelessness about African American culture and its unspoken boundaries.

Now the debate is over Wright -- instigated, as many blacks see it, by the media after the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused news organizations of insufficiently scrutinizing Obama. Reporters went trolling for stories and found Trinity Church and its controversial pastor -- and what may have been a Sunday dinner conversation in black households exploded onto the public stage.

PRESIDENTIAL candidate Hillary Clinton in Ohio and Texas attempted to cast aspersion on Sen. Barack Obama, pointing to a leaked document written by a Candidan diplomat about a conversation with an Obama economic adviser as example of his ethical lapse. But Clinton really does live in the proverbial glass house.

The American public may have forgot the various scandals that wrapped those years that Clinton likes to point to as the foundation for her experience to be commander-in-chief. Surely everyone remembers Whitewater. How about those cattle futures, which delivered huge returns on Clinton's investment. She could never explain how she worked that magic. And then there was the entire impeachment trial. She liked blamed that on some a vast right-wing conspiracy and not the president's inability to keep his pants on.

Last year, a chief fundraiser, Norman Hsu, was on the lam. He eventually was indicted for fraud. The Clinton campaign, which had a longstanding relationship with Hsu, had to return $850,000.

Perhaps the media will do the public a great service and present the full Clinton record.

THE D.C. Council took the first step to do what the state of Massachusetts has yet to do: end the relationship with The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center. The Canton, Mass. facility first came to TBR's attention through an article in Mother Jones magazine. The Center is the only licensed facility in the country that still administers electric shock as a form of treatment to autistic youth as well as those diagnosed as mentally retarded, schizophrenic and bipolar.

Although the Mother Jones article mentioned District residents were being treated at the Center, it did not provide any details. Susbsequent investigations and articles by TBR that appeared in the Examiner newspaper revealed the extent of the city's relationship. Between 2004 and 2007 the District paid $4 million to the Center for the treatment of nine individuals.

District officials including Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, general counsel Peter Nickles and several councilmembers called for the removal of residents from the facility.

Tuesday Councilmember Mary Cheh, along with majority of the council, co-introduced a bill that would prohibit the District from sending any other youth to the facility. The measure is expected to win swift passage.

THE presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton has made much of her connection with poor and working class people. But the media have failed to probe sufficiently this assertion. The truth is just the opposite.

Since Clinton has used her husband Bill Clinton's presidential term to establish her bona fides, an examination of what happened during those eight years is illuminating. For example, Clinton rushed to reform welfare as "we knew it." The result was that tens of thousands of poor families, most headed by women, were tossed out into the cold. Forced to justify why the government of one the richest countries in the world should continue to support them. Clinton joined forces with some of the most conservative congressional representatives to win passage of his measure.

If that wasn't enough, he pushed through the North American free trade agreement, which proved not just damaging for parts of Ohio but also for most of the country's working class. Entry level jobs now are routinely shipped abroad. Clinton says she fought behind the scenes against her husband's administration. If you believe that raise your hand.

If the media believe they should focus attention on Sen. Barack Obama's record, they might also want to give a closer review of just what really happened to poor and working class people during the Clinton years.