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The NAACP has retracted its original statement condemning comments made by a former Agriculture Department official who resigned after a video clip surfaced of her discussing a white farmer.
The NAACP said in a statement Tuesday that it was “snookered by Fox News” and conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart.
“Having reviewed the full tape by Shirley Sherrod, who is the woman who was fired by the Department of Agriculture, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe that the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans,” the statement from NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said.
Jealous later posted on his Twitter account that he “Spoke to Ms. Sherrod earlier today and personally apologized. Plan to meet with her face-to-face the next time I’m in Georgia.”
The organization also urged Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to reconsider Sherrod’s resignation from her post as the department’s director of rural development for Georgia.
Breitbart originally posted the video, which was quickly picked up by Fox News.
In the video, Sherrod can be heard telling an audience at a March 27, 2010, appearance before a local chapter of the NAACP that she had not given a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” to help him save the family farm.
Conservative media outlets tied the video to the NAACP’s recent resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to repudiate racist elements within it that have displayed such items as images of President Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons. The controversy has led one Tea Party group to oust another because of a blog posting by the second group’s leader.
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams posted on his blog a faux letter from Jealous to President Abraham Lincoln in which Williams ridicules the organization’s use of “colored” in its historic name and uses multiple stereotypes to bolster his point. The National Tea Party Foundation expelled Williams’ organization from its coalition as a result.
Breitbart told CNN’s “John King USA” on Tuesday that releasing the video was “not about Shirley Sherrod.”
“This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party, and this is showing racism at an NAACP event,” he said. “I did not ask for Shirley Sherrod to be fired.”
Sherrod defended herself in a number of interviews Tuesday, saying her controversial comments were taken out of context. She had, she said, used a personal experience from nearly a quarter century ago in which she confronted her own racism and learned to move beyond it.
She insisted she “went all out” to help the man keep his farm and said she resigned only under pressure from the Obama administration, telling CNN she received four phone calls Monday telling her the White House wanted her to step down.
“They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said.
Is Mel Gibson a racist? After his latest public gaffe, it sure seems like it. Gibson, best known for his work in the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies has some explaining to do. Gibson made headlines four years ago during a drunken anti-Semitic tirade towards a Malibu cop. Now, Gibson has been battling his baby momma, and she saved the tapes of his other rants. In a voicemail message, Gibson is heard telling her she’s an embarrassment, a f******g pig, a woman who dresses like a slut and if she gets raped by a pack of n**gers, it’s her fault. What’s up with the racist rants Mel? You make your fortune off of the backs of minorities and Jewish people. Mel, get help! You only have yourself to blame for ruining your career.
Robert Byrd, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, died Monday at 92. While he was most famous as a master of the Senate’s obscure rules, Byrd wore many hats during his lifetime, including that of Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. What are the job responsibilities of an Exalted Cyclops?
He presides over the Council of the Centaurs and writes quarterly reports to the Grand Giant. In the Klan hierarchy, each local chapter, or Klavern, is led by an Exalted Cyclops. This member is typically elected by his fellow Klansmen and serves a one-year term. According to the original 1867 Prescript of the Ku Klux Klan, the Exalted Cyclops reports to a Grand Giant, or provincial leader; a Grand Dragon, or state director; and the Grand Wizard, or national chair. Below the Cyclops on the org chart were the Grand Magi, the Grand Monk, the Grand Exchequer, the Grand Turk, and, finally, the rank-and-file members known as Ghouls or Knights. (Many of these titles have changed over time, and most of the sub-Cyclops ranks have been eliminated.) The Exalted Cyclops’ responsibilities include presiding over Klavern meetings, initiating new members, and appointing Councils of Centaurs—that’s Klan-speak for a jury—to try and punish wayward Ghouls.
Despite the specific duties laid out in the Klan’s founding documents, there’s no way of knowing exactly what Byrd did as Exalted Cyclops. Klaverns have clashed with the central office throughout the Klan’s history, and there’s plenty of evidence that many chapters operated on a much less formal basis than the Prescript and subsequent manuals suggest. The meeting agenda for a typical Klavern in the 1940s, when Byrd was an Exalted Cyclops, would have included a discussion of black or Jewish outrages against native-born white Protestants. Byrd denied that his members ever discussed violence or even so much as held a parade, and there is no evidence to contradict his claims.
There wasn’t much money in it for Byrd, either, since the Klan operated as a pyramid scheme. Each member paid $10 at initiation (that’s about $115 in current dollars), plus annual fees of $6.80. The national, state, and provincial headquarters each got about a 20 percent slice of the action. The Kleagle, or recruiter, also took a cut. The remainder was used to pay out a nominal salary for the Exalted Cyclops, but it wasn’t enough to live on. (Local Klan leaders had other, more regular jobs.) During the 1920s, when national membership topped 4 million, holding high KKK office could be lucrative—the Grand Dragon of Indiana, for example, earned more than $200,000 in 1924. By the time Byrd came along, however, membership had plunged. He managed to rope in only around 150 members, so his Klavern could not have been making much more than a few hundred dollars annually, with most of that revenue paying for recruitment activities and meeting space.
These titles, while odd to the modern ear, were in line with fraternal organizations of the time. Members of the Masons, the forefathers of the fraternal-order movement, aspire to be Worshipful Masters or Senior Wardens. The Lamb’s Club, which first appeared in the U.S. in 1874, is headed by a Shepherd and a Boy. When the Shriners formed in 1870, their leaders were styled the Potentate and the Chief Rabban.
Today’s Exalted Cyclops is responsible for rehabbing the chapter’s image, as the Klan tries to rebrand itself as a community service organization, civil rights advocate for whites, and semilibertarian political action group. (They do advocate placing all HIV-positive Americans in state-owned hospitals.) Several Klaverns now participate in the Adopt-a-Highway program. The group has also adopted the slogan “America’s Oldest Civil Rights Organization.”
thx, brian palmer
White Philly Cop Claims Black Man Shot Him, Later Confesses. Either someone is a white supremacist or someone was in a neighborhood doing something they had no business. Something happened the night Sgt. Robert Ralston shot himself. That’s right! He shot himself! But in his initial account of the events, he told the world that a black man had shot him in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelhipa called Overbrook. He said he was confronted by two men and one ran, but the other shot him. It isn’t clear whether he tried to claim that the two black men were trying to rob him, assault him, or what they were doing to him, but the result was a gunshot to the shoulder…grazing the shoulder.
Racist Michelle Obama Email Costs Tenn. Exec Contract. A Tennessee tourism executive is feeling the wrath after forwarding an e-mail that likened Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee. Tennessee Hospitality Association CEO Walt Baker has apologized to “anyone who is offended by this action” and “the people of Tennessee, and to anybody that has either seen or been affected by this email.” The controversial e-mail, sent to Spyridon, Mayor Karl Dean’s legislative liaison, public relations executives and members of the Nashville media, compared Obama to Cheeta, the chimp sidekick in Tarzan movies. It opened with a quote attributed to comedian Larry the Cable Guy: “I don’t care who you are, this is funny…” and ended with a photo of Mrs. Obama, caught in an awkward moment with her lips pursed, and one of a chimpanzee. Baker also apologized in an e-mail to Nashville Metro Council members Saturday saying the message was not intended to be malicious but meant as “political humor.” The e-mail has already cost Baker’s a deal with the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, reports the Tennessean. On Saturday, the venue said it would drop its contract with the marketing firm. “The attitudes expressed in the e-mail are both appalling and unacceptable,” the head of the NCVB told the Tennesseean, and the mayor called the message “extremely offensive.” Complicating the marketing expert’s PR fiasco is his initial reaction: “It was done in the spirit of having some fun with some close friends,” he told Nashville Scene.
Mark Williams, the tea party leader who wrote a blog post this week calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) racist, has been “expelled” from the National Tea Party Federation.
Williams wrote the blog post on Thursday in response to the NAACP’s Tuesday declaration accusing the tea party movement of tolerating racist elements in its midst (see The Upshot’s rundown on the week of attacks and counterattacks here). It was written as an imaginary letter to President Abraham Lincoln and accused the NAACP of being racist for using the word “colored” in its name. When some reacted to it in outrage, Williams deleted it from his website, declaring it time to “move forward.”
The National Tea Party Federation apparently decided to move forward without Williams. Spokesman David Webb said on Face the Nation this morning that Williams and his Tea Party Express had been pushed out because Williams’ posting was “clearly offensive.”
The tea party movement has been growing in influence in American politics since it began as a series of rallies in 2009. Candidates endorsed by local and national organizations that are a part of the coalition have won surprising victories over establishment Republican Party candidates in states like Kentucky and Nevada.
Part of their challenge, however — especially in handling broader debates about what they “are” — is that there isn’t a single Tea Party that speaks for all tea party activists. Rather, there are dozens of national and local organizations that loosely coordinate and all emerged in opposition to Wall Street bailouts that occurred under Presidents Bush and Obama and what they perceive as the Obama Administration’s efforts to expand the role of government. The question of whether or not it also has racial motivations has dogged it since the beginning.
National Tea Party Federation’s expulsion of Williams and the Tea Party Express could be the first of many internal disputes to define the national tea party identity.
thxs Golis