January 12, 2023 Show with Virgil Walker on “Did the Civil Rights Movement Fail the Black Community?”

Iron Sharpens Iron Opening and G3 Conference Introduction

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensirenradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 12th day of January 2023.

And I'm so thrilled to have back as a returning guest one of my favorite guests to interview, and that is no exaggeration or hyperbole. His name is Virgil Walker, certainly no stranger to most of our listeners.

He is an author and the executive director of operations at G3 Ministries, and he's the co-host, along with Daryl Bernard Harrison, of the Just Thinking podcast. Today, he is going to be addressing, Did the Civil Rights Movement Fail the Black Community?

And we'll also be announcing the 2023 G3 National Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my old friend,.

Virgil Walker.

Hey, brother. It's a joy to be with you and have opportunity to connect with you, and looking forward to our conversation today.

Well, for our listeners who may have never heard you on the program before, they may be unfamiliar with G3, we do have, it seems, listeners joining the audience that have never listened before every day, and from all different kinds of backgrounds.

Some of them are not even Christians. But tell our listeners about the G3 Conference and G3 Ministries.

Yeah.

G3, the letter G, the number three, it stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory. G3 is an outgrowth of the ministry of Dr. Josh Bice. In fact, he had it on your show yesterday and had a chance to interact with him.

The conference, in and of itself, really began here at Praise Mill Baptist Church. It was a conference that was a theology conference. Dr. Bice had every desire to hold a theology conference for the local church.

And the focus has been all about the local church. That ministry, over the course of the last 10 years, has grown and expanded to include a national conference here in Atlanta, Georgia. Last year, we brought in somewhere in the neighborhood of about 6 ,500 people.

This coming year, in 2023, we anticipate somewhere in the neighborhood of about 7 ,000 people registering for the G3 Conference. It brings phenomenal speakers. Dr. Voti Bakum, Dr. Stephen Lawson. We've had Dr. John MacArthur.

Just a whole host of speakers, internationally well-known speakers from around the country and around the world, Paul Washer and others, Mike Riccardi. I mean, the list just continues to go on and on.

But needless to say, the conference has become a real staple for those, particularly in Reformed circles, that enjoy sound, solid biblical preaching, sound biblical doctrine, and are looking for a place to kind of come, connect with family, friends, and really enjoy an enriching time of growing in the things of the Lord.

In addition, what G3 does, and really the primary thrust that has been ours for the last couple of years, has been to launch G3 Press, where we're able to provide a number of different resources for local church pastors to use.

Books, curriculum, and the like. We have a website that's full of podcasts, blog articles. We want to be a resource center that really provides sound biblical teaching, sound biblical doctrine, that pastors can place in their hands and can trust to be used in their churches for the growth of local churches.

And so we do this for the purpose of educating, encouraging, and equipping local churches for the glory of God, and that's really what G3 is all about.

And this year's national conference, G3 National Conference, will be held from Thursday, September 21st, through Saturday, September 23rd, in Atlanta, Georgia. I intend to be there again manning an exhibitors booth, and this year the speakers include Steve Lawson, Votie Baucom, Paul Washer, Josh Bice, Scott Annual, my dear friend for many years, Dr. James R. White, of Alpha Omega Ministries, who's created the commercials on this program that you have been hearing every day, promoting the conference, and of course my guest today is on the roster, Virgil Walker, and for more details go to g3men .org, g3men .org, and this is an extremely vital aspect of registration.

You must, you absolutely must be in perfect obedience to me and use the registration code G3ISIR, and you'll get a 30 discount using the Iron Sharpens Iron radio discount code G3ISIR. I'm having a competition with other folks in the media who are also promoting this conference, and I don't care how wonderful they are as brothers in Christ and sisters in Christ, and how dear they may even be in their friendship with me, and it doesn't matter how closely I hold them to my heart, I want to utterly annihilate them in this competition.

I want to leave them weeping and on a fetal position on the floor, just screaming in agony that they have been defeated by me, so please help Iron Sharpens Iron radio by using the registration code, the discount promo code G3ISIR, and we'll be repeating that later, and James White will be repeating that in the commercials that you hear as well.

The Dobbs Decision, Abortion, and the Black Church

I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away. This is a very controversial theme, but a theme that needs to be discussed, because it involves so much of what goes on daily, every single day, that we see and hear in the media, in particular on the news, and this issue is, did the civil rights movement fail the black community?

You will very rarely hear anybody in mainstream media, even in conservative media actually, with the courage to actually make a statement like that, well in this case it's a question, but you can hear the answer to the question very soon, that may upset a lot of people, and not only liberals and leftists, it may even upset some conservatives listening.

But first of all, why were you so compelled strongly to write the article, did the civil rights movement fail the black community, and to speak on it today on Iron Sharpens Iron radio?

Yeah, I appreciate the question. It was a while back that you and I talked, and when we did, one of the things that, I'd written an article right after the Dobbs decision came out, and if you remember the Dobbs decision was the decision that said that the federal government would no longer leverage the amendments, the constitution, for the purpose of protecting mothers murdering their children in the womb, and that's what abortion actually is.

So there was no longer a federal protection, a federal constitutional right, if you will, to having an abortion. I think that that decision was rightly decided. I think the Roe v. Wade decision was wrongly decided, but the Dobbs decision righted that wrong, and again, we had to wait, you know, some 46, 47 years before that took place, and millions and millions of lives of children that have been lost as a result.

As I looked across the landscape of culture, one of the things that I noted, and you and I actually, Chris, talked about it on the show, was I was watching many in the culture, many in evangelical culture, who were trying to minimize the excitement for such a decision.

They were trying to say, you know, hey, we need to be temperate in our approach. We need to not be excited about what's taking place. We need to kind of dial things back, and so that, in my mind, that was problematic.

This is where you began to hear some of the mantra that, you know, you're not truly pro-life unless you support life from the womb to the tomb, so to speak, with the idea that there were, in order to be pro-life, you had to advocate for specific social benefits, so you were hearing this language, but I'm in the hotbed of the Black church movement, if you will.

I mean, I'm here in Atlanta, the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, and so I have a front row seat to a lot of what's going on in Black community proper and, more specifically, the Black church. What I saw was absolutely jaw-dropping, and it caused me to write the letter to Black church pastors where I asked the question, you know, what in the world is going on in the mind of Black pastors when they're actually advocating not simply to dial back the rhetoric or to be measured in our joyful expression of this decision, but they were coming to the platform, to the podium, to the pulpit, to advocate for a pro-choice position.

It was men like Raphael Warnock, who claims to be a pro-choice pastor. You have men like Jamal Bryant, who has now openly professed that his church, as he has himself, are now a pro-choice advocating church.

So when I looked at this, I wrote about it in the letter to Black church pastors, and as I continued to watch the midterm election cycle, and I saw what was happening again within Black churches, I thought, what in the world has gone on?

And it caused me to take a close look to examine the civil rights movement. And as I did, I began to find some real questions that needed to be asked and answered as we examined what did the civil rights movement bring and what did it change?

And were there ever areas where things went too far in the civil rights movement? And if you look closely at what's taken place in current culture with the, quote, unquote, new civil rights movement that's advocating not just social justice, but social justice in all of its stripes and shapes, whether it's advocating for issues around CRT, social justice, or the LGBTQIA plus community, there's a whole umbrella of different ideologies now that have advanced their cause using the playbook from the civil rights era, the civil rights movement.

So I think it was imperative, given all of that as background, to take a close look specifically at the civil rights movement and ask the question, did the civil rights movement actually fail the Black community?

And the email address for all of you who would like to join our conversation with a question of your own is chrisarnson at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And a thought just occurred to me after I made the comment that a lot of liberals and conservatives alike will be offended by someone saying that the civil rights movement failed the Black community.

It's kind of interesting why they would be offended because especially liberals believe that things are worse in this nation. I don't agree with that assessment. But they will boldly claim that things are worse in regard to racial relationships in the United States today than they were back in the days of Jim Crow.

And they will really say that we haven't made progress, that we have gone backward, which to me is insane. But it's interesting how they would still likely recoil in anger and disgust by daring to say that the civil rights movement failed the Black community.

And of course there are exceptions. I am sure that there are those who are in the ilk of the nation of Islam and other more radical groups that would agree with that assessment. But tell us about what you think the civil rights movement, at least what was declared by its primary leaders, was the actual goal that they had and where it was right and where it was wrong and why this movement, in your opinion, failed the Black community.

I want to go back to something you said earlier about whether or not people view things as worse today than they were in the days of Jim Crow. And while there are those who are arguing that they are and those who are saying, yes, they are worse than that time, are primarily Black, I would argue that perhaps they're right.

But the manner in which they're right is that it is more acceptable today to be racist, to have ethnic animosity, ethnic hatred toward white people than it ever has been. And so in that way, things are actually worse.

Now, as it pertains to issues related to Jim Crow, there's nothing worse than truly political, systemic. If you want to talk about something that was systemic, the Jim Crow laws in the South were systemic.

They were systemic to the South. Here's the thing. Many, many people who did not advocate were not applauding Jim Crow laws, were embarrassed by some of that behavior. Definitely states that were in the North thought that Jim Crow laws were draconian and backwards.

Now, that's not to say Northern states didn't have their own issues to deal with. But at the end of the day, there was a group of people, who were embarrassed by, weren't advocating, weren't promoting issues related to segregation and Jim Crow, though it was indeed, even at that time, the law of the land.

To the question that you asked me about, about how the civil rights movement failed, I think we have to go back and look at what the intention of civil rights was to begin with. As it relates to the intention of civil rights, I would argue that really it was something that was evolutionary.

It was something that evolved over time. As specific successes began to take place, the ball was then moved forward for more and more successes. Now, indeed, there were things that needed to change. But where things eventually led to really opened the door for a really backwards condition that our country currently finds itself in.

Let me start with the opening of the movement, which was the civil rights movement. It began with Rosa Parks, the black seamstress who is on the Montgomery bus and decides, based upon the Jim Crow laws, that she is going to refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger.

That begins the movement there, so to speak, in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. That system was set up in such a way where blacks were required to sit in a specific place, whites were allowed to sit wherever.

And she just made the decision that she was not going to engage in that kind of draconian law anymore. As a result, she, of course, was jailed. And it begins a process of those who are beginning to gather and stand against the segregation that was a part of the South.

What took place then was very interesting because this particular incident was unlike anything after it related to civil rights. In this instance, black men and women who represented at the time 70 percent of the bus system made the decision that they would boycott the buses.

In other words, they would leave the buses. They would walk off of the buses and no longer participate, engage in, or pay money into that system that was holding them back. The result was they had to figure out their own way of getting to and from their places of work and business and wherever they wanted to be.

What they did was they became very ingenious in that they began to pay each other money, the money that they would have paid on the bus system. They actually paid in fare to one another and began what I would term the very first of its kind kind of black Uber system during the late 1950s and 1955.

What you have there, what they thought, again, was going to be a one-day boycott. They thought that the system would crumble. It turned into a 382-day battle with the city, with even those within the city who wanted it to end because the city was actually losing somewhere in the neighborhood of about $3 ,000 per day in bus fares.

Now, given 1955, if you were to exchange that for today's figures, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of about $31 ,000 per day. Again, the bus system had a 70 black population. And when that walks away, there's a lot of revenue that walks out the door with it.

Black patrons were, again, serving one another, utilizing the economic system within their own community, building that community up. And over the course of time, they advanced the civil suit, the lawsuit that would land on the Supreme Court's desk in the Browder v. Gayle decision that would end discrimination on buses.

When that took place, what happened as a result was two things. One, blacks began to come back onto the bus system, which was a good thing. Integration is absolutely a good thing. But what it missed, what I believe the civil rights movement missed, was the power that they were allowed to have leveraging the capitalist system and utilizing their own money, their own resources to take care of their own needs within their own community.

That component of civil rights was completely ignored. And what was seen as beneficial was only equality with whites from a standpoint of integration and where they could sit on a bus. I think that was incredibly short-sighted to begin with.

But the beauty of even that particular outcome was this. It was that the United States Supreme Court tested the Constitution, and the Constitution of the United States withstood the test. It said, yes, equal treatment is a must.

All are created equal, right, and have certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a result, we want to ensure that any law that's in place is in line with the ideology, with the ideas that are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

We want to remove the barriers that allow blacks to engage in equal treatment. So the Constitution stands the test. But the Constitution, unfortunately for civil rights leaders, was not enough. They now needed to move forward.

And here's where things begin to take a turn for the worst, in my opinion, Chris. It's that they began to push forward with legislation through presidential elections, through government, through politicians that would enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

And what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually does is it brings about a second Constitution of the United States, if you will. It brings about a secondary role that government now has to play as it seeks to mitigate the issues related to Jim Crow, to segregation, to discrimination, and to prejudice and racism.

And what it does is the system that it puts in place is not seeking equality. It is not seeking equality. What it is seeking is equity, and that's incredibly problematic.

Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equity, and Government Power

Amen. We have an anonymous listener who has a question for you. The anonymous listener says, I would identify myself as a right-leaning libertarian, much in the same vein as Barry Goldwater, with the glaring exception that I am very strongly anti-abortion, which Mr. Goldwater was not.

But having said that, this is the reason why I agreed with something that one of Chris Arnzen's guests last year said on this program. He is a black conservative named Vince Ellison, and he wrote a book called 25 Lies Exposing Democrats' Most Dangerous, Seductive, Damnable, Destructive Lies and How to Refute Them.

During this interview, Mr. Ellison told Chris Arnzen that he was very opposed to the civil rights movement's insistence that those people who were white who privately owned businesses must have blacks into their businesses, such as restaurants, and should never have the right to forbid entrance into their businesses.

Now, Vince Ellison was opposed to this, and I am as well, not because we think that is good or wise or intelligent. It is actually evil and moronic for businesses to conduct themselves that way. But having said that, I believe this nation has built within its constitutional framework the freedom of private business owners to choose who they want to serve and who they do not want to serve.

And as bad as their decisions may be, which will probably in this day and age make them go out of business completely if they were to follow those desires, I think that they should have the right to do that.

Mr. Ellison described the alternative where you insist that a privately owned business opens its doors to all as stalking, wherein you are demanding to be near someone and benefit from what they are doing even though you are despised and unwanted.

How do you respond to that?

No, I completely agree, and that's exactly the direction that I head to in my piece, which is what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did was it set up additional government entities that examined companies, businesses.

It set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It sets up affirmative action policies that now not only interact with governmental entities who are hiring or examining their hiring practices. It now says that private industry and private businesses are now by law required, and if they don't, there can be an action filed within the EEOC office.

And now the bully pulpit, if you will, of the government gets the opportunity to engage in an examination of whether or not private industry, private companies are abiding by what they've determined should be law.

The additional problem that that serves is it sets up affirmative action. As a response to that, companies don't want to be investigated by government entities, so what do they do? They establish affirmative action hiring.

People who may or may not, and in most instances are not, as qualified, are able to be hired mainly on the basis of their ethnicity or some other marker that the system has set up, whether it's they're handicapped or they are female.

Whatever minority status is then established is now the required benchmark by which people are hired. They're no longer hired on the basis of who's the most qualified for a role or position. Who's now hired is who has the right skin color, who is the right gender, who is the right victim group that needs to be hired for particular positions and opportunities.

That's what I think is problematic. That's why I say what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did was it set up a separate constitution. Now, no longer are we interested in advocating for equal rights, that all of us would be treated equally, that black, white, red, yellow, brown would be able to apply for the job and let the most qualified person win.

No, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says, oh, no, no, you're going to hire someone on the basis of their skin color because in the past, historically speaking, this particular group had been marginalized.

And that is, in and of itself, racism.

Absolutely.

Every time you're hiring somebody or treating anybody favorably based on the color of their skin, that is racism. It's the very definition of racism. By the way, folks, if anybody later on after this live show is over, if you want to listen to my interview with Vince Ellison, that took place on March 14th, 2022.

And just type into the search engine at the ironsharpensironradio .com search engine, type in Vince Ellison, E-L-L-I-S-O-N, and that will come up. Yeah, I had a good time interviewing Vince. We're going to our first break right now.

It's going to be a bit brief, unlike our midway break. But if you have any questions for Virgil Walker on this subject, did the Civil Rights Movement fail the black community, please submit them to ChrisArnsen at gmail .com.

ChrisArnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. I'm not sure why our last listener remained anonymous.

But, by the way, listener, if you are a first-time questioner, you have won a New American Standard Bible, so email me back with your full name and mailing address, which will not be disclosed, obviously, on the air.

And we'll have Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, ship you out a brand-new New American Standard Bible. Which, unlike my guest Virgil Walker, is the favorite Bible of his co-host Terrell Bernard Harrison.

So send that to us right away. But we're going to our break now. And don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages from our sponsors.

James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here. I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the G3 National Conference.

That's Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd. On a theme that I have been preaching, teaching, writing about, and defending in live public debates for most of my life, the sovereignty of God.

I'll be joined on the speaking roster by Steve Lawson, Voti Baucom, Paul Washer, Virgil Walker, Scott Anuel, and Josh Bice, founder of G3 Ministries. And there's more great news. Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio can get you a 30 discount off the registration fee.

Go to g3min .org, that's g3min .org, and enter promo code G3ISIR. That's G3-I-S-I-R for the 30 discount. Chris Arnzen, I look forward to seeing you all Thursday, September 21st through Saturday the 23rd at the G3 National Conference in Atlanta, Georgia on the sovereignty of God.

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We're discussing, Did the Civil Rights Movement Fail the Black Community? We have another listener. We have Andrew in Brooklyn, New York. And Andrew asks, Did our reaction to Dr. King's assassination set back black America for generations for decades to come?

It was a day all of us, even King himself, knew was coming. So many of the impoverished black communities we see of today, think Baltimore, became so, and he means by that became impoverished, I assume.

They became impoverished after that weekend of riots following King's assassination. He also has another question, but I'll have you deal with that one first, Virgil.

Thanks for the question. It's a complex question. And the reality is that those who were responsible for what took place after King's assassination, particularly what took place in black communities, were blacks themselves.

And so, in fact, most people who had come alongside King, had advocated for civil rights, were kind of shocked by what took place in 68 and 69 and thereafter from a standpoint of the rioting that happened.

And in the mind of the maybe progressive or liberal white person who advocated for civil rights, who said, I'm for civil rights and fought for civil rights. Their thought was, man, we get desegregation happens.

The Civil Rights Act of 64 takes place. The Voting Rights Act takes place thereafter. King, of course, is assassinated. But the thought in the mind of most whites was, hey, we have overcome. There's a lot that has been overcome.

But as I mentioned early on in our conversation, what you begin to see with the civil rights movement is that where they landed, again, was not enough and that they were looking for more. And so after King's assassination, you have these riots.

And the riots do begat poverty. Businesses don't want to come back to parts of the city where people have rioted. It's not in their interest to do so. So, yes, that takes place. But from 1960 until today, you know, you're talking about a 50 plus year time frame where I would argue that it was not the reaction to King, but more importantly, the policies that were enacted as a result of the civil rights movement.

You know, there were opportunities that were provided and businesses that were examined based upon federal government mandates and all sorts of affirmative action was in place. There are all kinds of things that were that were put in place to advance the quote unquote black cause.

But what it did in turn was it created absolute dependency by many blacks upon government. And so what would happen is once that government benefit ran its course through the veins of the black community, they were looking for the next civil rights bill, the next bit of legislation that would be helpful in advancing the cause.

And Andrew's second question was, was all of the good that Dr. King did negated by the fact that he and many of his co-patriots then and now, including one of his successors, Raphael Warnock, never preached the biblical gospel?

Yeah, yeah, that that is something that I will be arguing in my next article. Chris, I've got a I've got an article on tab that will that will publish on Martin Luther King's birthday on the holiday on Monday that will examine King closely and that will examine his his theology.

And really, it was it was mostly heterodox than it was orthodox, meaning that he got he got most things wrong. I would argue that he was not a Christian, but but but be advocated positions that were antithetical to a biblical worldview.

And when you do that, the Raphael Warnock's who follow him make sense. It makes sense that Raphael Warnock would be a pro choice pastor. Why? Because King, who was before him, you know, he was one of he was one of the first people to receive the Margaret Sanger Award, the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood Award.