If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what does one call the ruse of pretending to imitate?

By Lee A. Daniels

There are roughly 38 million African Americans in America.

Why did so few of them show up at the Glenn Beck- Sarah Palin “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday?

Salon national correspondent Mark Benjamin, who was at the event, wrote that “a friend of mine walked the whole stretch of the rally (from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument) and counted 27 African-Americans – three of whom were onstage giving speeches. I could count the number I saw on my fingers.”

And blacks weren’t the only Americans of color absent.

Oh, sure, here and there in the vast crowd – estimated above 200,000 – one could spot very rare splashes of color.

But, in a country with more than 47 million Latino Americans, nearly 10 million Asian-American and Pacific-Islander Americans, nearly 2 million Native Americans, and a large enough number of Muslim Americans for them to be noticeable, why was the Beck-Palin throng so overwhelmingly white?

One would think the Beck and Palin machine could have done better. After all, it’s not as if Americans of color aren’t used to assembling in Washington, and joining hands literally and figuratively with their fellow white Americans. A vast, multiracial throng of Americans assembled just two years ago for the Obama Inauguration. And, as the photographs of the March on Washington of August 28, 1963 show, that event was likely the most thoroughly integrated large gathering America had ever seen to that time.

So, if, as the two principals so piously declared, their rally was intended to pay homage to the 1963 March on Washington and to King, why did it fail so badly to match the striking visual manifestations of the brotherhood King espoused?

The reasons, of course, aren’t hard to determine. They can be summed up in the old truism: actions speak louder than words.

Except that in this instance, the “action” is in words themselves – the words inextricably tied to Beck, Palin and the conservative extremist movement they lead.

Who can forget the wording and the visuals of the signs that were part and parcel of the Tea Party rallies – until their spin doctors warned them they were too revealing? No wonder Beck urged his followers not to bring signs to the Lincoln Memorial Saturday.

Who has forgotten the unambiguous meaning of Palin’s code language during the presidential campaign exalting certain parts of the country as comprised of “real Americans” who are “pro American” and other parts by implication as populated by people who aren’t either?

Who has forgotten Beck’s many diatribes against blacks, gays and lesbians, and President Obama, or his vicious attack on Malia Obama – the latter followed, after a furious backlash, by an unctuous, unbelievable “apology?”

Beck declared in promoting the rally that he and his adherents were coming to Washington “to reclaim the civil rights movement” and that “we will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”

Perhaps he was hoping so brazen an assertion would stun the rest of us into silence. But one commentator punctured that balloon succinctly: “This cuts straight against the grain of history: white conservatives were of course the bedrock of opposition to civil rights.”

One could go on; the commitment to half-truths, outright falsehoods and self-deluding myths of Beck and his followers seems to be fully equal to the virus of bigotry which infected those who opposed King and the Civil Rights Movement forty years ago.

But their hollow rhetoric on hallowed ground Saturday has had one salutary effect. It has made the majestic legacy of the March on Washington of August 28, 1963 stand out even sharper now.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Editor In Chief of TheDefendersOnline.com