Most of y’all know I don’t usually go off the deep end so to speak, but THIS really fired me up… I grew up in the 50s and 60s in the South, and I saw both the good and the bad of the Civil Rights fight(s)… His words in black, mine as always in blue.
From today’s WAPO…
In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school’s first black student, bravely tried to walk to class…
It is worth asking how employing more bigotry as Colbert is doing in this article will do any good? He and his represent the party that promised to lead us to a better place. It amazes me how broad a brush he uses to paint a very large part of the population as racists. I have attended one Tea Party event, and I never saw anyone who had ANY racial motivation whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I saw quite a number of blacks (including a bus load from Georgia), Hispanics and Asians out there next to the capital who were angry about taxes and spending our dollars in a reallocation of wealth, not about race…
The Tea Party’s only goal, is to defend the US and it’s constitution from this administration’s takeover…
Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric…
Nope, never heard any white-power anything, more like when are you, the administration, going to listen to the People that elected you…People are angry, and it’s got nothing to do with race. It has to do with the arrogant, willful imposition of extreme leftist policies by Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al. It has awakened the silent majority in this country, and made them aware that the election of Obama is not be a continuation of Clintonian moderation, but a radical leftist agenda.
They were spotted last weekend on Capitol Hill under the Tea Party banner protesting the health-care-reform bill. Some carried a signs that read “If Brown [Scott Brown (R-Mass.)] can’t stop it, a Browning [high power weapon] can.” Some shouted racial and homophobic epithets at members of Congress. Others assumed the role of rabble, responding to the calls of instigating Republican representatives gathered on a Capitol balcony…
And where is the proof? Who has been arrested? I heard ONE news report of a threat against Stupac, from a women who called him a piece of s**t, but I didn’t hear her ID herself as a Tea Party person…
And what about all the threats against Bush, and the Republicans? That was “politics” and okay??? Can we say DOUBLE STANDARD???
And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace, the Alabama governor dubbed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter in a 2008 Slate article as “the godfather, avatar of a national uprising against the three G’s of government, Godlessness, and gun control.”
Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today’s Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.
Oh really? George Wallace is the ‘father’ of the Tea Party??? George Wallace was a Democrat, Lester Maddox was a Democrat, ALL the members of the KKK were Democrats, Senator Robert Byrd, was a Grand Dragon of the KKK . If it was not for the Republicans there would be no Civil Rights Act – AND the point Mr King entirely misses – I guess any anger that is not the property of the Democrats is racist, homophobic, etc… And Limbaugh is a product of the Tea Party???
They, like Wallace’s followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America…
Um.. like our homes and businesses? Yep, pretty much…
They see the world through the eyes of the anti-civil rights alumni. “Washington, D.C.” now, as then, is regarded as the Great Satan. This is the place that created the civil rights laws that were shoved down their throats. This is the birthplace of their much-feared “Big Government” and the playground of the “elite national news media.”
Um… NO, through the eyes of people fed up with representatives that refuse to listen to those who elected them, and are blithely charging down the path of we know better than you, and pay no attention to the bribes and strong arm tactics behind the curtain…
The angry ’50s and ’60s crowds threatened and intimidated; some among them even murdered. That notwithstanding, Americans of goodwill gathered in the White House to witness the signing of landmark civil rights laws.
So… are we preemptively being accused of murder here???
I know that the folks over a Sipsey Street are NOT fomenting anything other than the brick throwing, and in fact are also denouncing the threats; but they are being lumped in with the Tea Party (by the WAPO no less), even though they are not associated with them per se…
Schoolhouse doors were blocked, and little children were demeaned. Yet the bigots didn’t get the last word. Justice rolled down like a mighty river, sweeping them aside.
And we’re bigots too, in addition to being racists???
They insulted, abused, lied and vandalized. Still, President Obama fulfilled his promise to sign historic health-care reform into law by the end of his first term.
Those angry faces won’t go away. But neither can they stand in the way of progress.
The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.
Hey Mr. King, I’d suggest you get out of your ivory tower and ACTUALLY find out about the Tea Party… I think you would find some of your so called friends from those days who are actually MEMBERS of the Tea Party
sigh…
You can read the entire oped HERE, or go to WAPO’s site and sign in as [email protected] with packing as the password…
Oh yeah, if you would like to comment to Mr. King – his email is [email protected]
