DADDY KING'S BILLBOARD
Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr, father of the fallen iconic global human rights leader, a/k/a "Daddy King," having grown tired of needless clamor and controversy about the Ebenezer Baptist Church's budget and expenditures, of which he was then-Co-Pastor, outsmarted, and outmaneuvered his most caustic critics by publicly and prominently posting a church billboard showing how much each member has tithed and/or contributed to the church's treasury. Not surprisingly, those very persons who had given the least to the church, had also been arguing the most! They were who had been keeping up most of the confusion and mess in the temple!
There may be a message in here for somebody ! After the billboard went up, all the traducers shut up! And some of them got up and left!
I had long marveled at the sagacity of Daddy King for coming up with such a creative counter-measure!
Then today, I was blessed to read where Thomas Paine, a too-much-long slighted American "Founding Father," wrote about the value of public financial disclosures on April 4, 1782, over a century before the great "Daddy King" was even alive!
Thomas Paine, iconic pamphleteer, writes, in an essay titled "The Necessity of Taxation,"
as follows:
"The publishing the sums of money received from each State, and expended on their united account, will be attended with several good effects. It will give satisfaction, which is a necessary object in national concerns. It will create emulation and detect delinquency. The opener and fairer public business is transacted, the better it succeeds. When no fraud is intended, there is no occasion for concealment , and it is not only necessary that measures should be just, but that everybody should know them to be so."
P.316, THOMAS PAINE: COLLECTED WRITINGS (1955)
DADDY KING'S BILLBOARD
Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr, father of the fallen iconic global human rights leader, a/k/a "Daddy King," having grown tired of needless clamor and controversy about the Ebenezer Baptist Church's budget and expenditures, of which he was then-Co-Pastor, outsmarted, and outmaneuvered his most caustic critics by publicly and prominently posting a church billboard showing how much each member has tithed and/or contributed to the church's treasury. Not surprisingly, those very persons who had given the least to the church, had also been arguing the most! They were who had been keeping up most of the confusion and mess in the temple!
There may be a message in here for somebody ! After the billboard went up, all the traducers shut up! And some of them got up and left!
I had long marveled at the sagacity of Daddy King for coming up with such a creative counter-measure!
Then today, I was blessed to read where Thomas Paine, a too-much-long slighted American "Founding Father," wrote about the value of public financial disclosures on April 4, 1782, over a century before the great "Daddy King" was even alive!
Thomas Paine, iconic pamphleteer, writes, in an essay titled "The Necessity of Taxation,"
as follows:
"The publishing the sums of money received from each State, and expended on their united account, will be attended with several good effects. It will give satisfaction, which is a necessary object in national concerns. It will create emulation and detect delinquency. The opener and fairer public business is transacted, the better it succeeds. When no fraud is intended, there is no occasion for concealment , and it is not only necessary that measures should be just, but that everybody should know them to be so."
P.316, THOMAS PAINE: COLLECTED WRITINGS (1955)
