Scott Terry

Today, Twitter and the internet were abuzz about some questions and comments delivered by a participant at CPAC during a session sponsored by Tea Party Patriots called “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”

Talking Points Memo reported:

CPAC Event On Racial Tolerance Turns To Chaos As ‘Disenfranchised’ Whites Arrive
by Benjy Sarlin
March 15, 2013

A CPAC session sponsored by Tea Party Patriots and billed as a primer on teaching activists how to court black voters devolved into a shouting match as some attendees demanded justice for white voters and others shouted down a black woman who reacted in horror.

(L-R) Tina Brown, Matthew Heimbach, and Scott Terry

The session, entitled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” was led by K. Carl Smith, a black conservative who mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves “Frederick Douglass Republicans.”

Disruptions began when he started accusing Democrats of still being the party of the Confederacy — a common talking point on the right.

“I don’t care how much the KKK improved,” he said. “I’m not going to join the KKK. The Democratic Party founded the KKK.”

Things got heated…

Continue reading…

Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Django Unchained” is a story about an escaped slave who takes revenge on Southern slave owners, and unsurprisingly for a film about slavery and racism, it contains numerous uses of the “N-word.”

Right wing news aggregator Matt Drudge knows an opportunity when he sees one:

Image: ZZ1FF0FE39.jpg

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to a stunningly immoral post on Thomas Jefferson at right wing blog The Volokh Conspiracy, with a moving letter written after emancipation by a former slave: Slavery Is a Love Song.

This is a letter that I often turn to. It was written to Laura Spicer by her husband, who was sold away, much as Jefferson sold people away. After emancipation she repeatedly tried to rekindle their love, despite the fact that the husband had now remarried and formed another family. In this letter the husband tells us what it means to be among the refuse of history:

I would much rather you would get married to some good man, for every time I gits a letter from you it tears me all to pieces. The reason why I have not written you before, in a long time, is because your letters disturbed me so very much.

You know I love my children. I treats them good as a Father can treat his children; and I do a good deal of it for you. I am sorry to hear that Lewellyn, my poor little son, have had such bad health. I would come and see you but I know you could not bear it. I want to see and I don’t want to see you. I love you just as well as I did the last day I saw you, and it will not do for you and I to meet.

I am married, and my wife have two children, and if you and I meets it would make a very dissatisfied family. Send me some of the children’s hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper. Will you please git married, as long as I am married. My dear, you know the Lord knows both of our hearts. You know it never was our wishes to be separated from each other, and it never was our fault.

Oh, I can see you so plain, at any-time, I had rather anything to had happened to me most than ever to have been parted from you and the children. As I am, I do not know which I love best, you or Anna. If I was to die, today or tomorrow, I do not think I would die satisfied till you tell me you will try and marry some good, smart man that will take care of you and the children; and do it because you love me; and not because I think more of the wife I have got then I do of you. The woman is not born that feels as near to me as you do.

You feel this day like myself. Tell them they must remember they have a good father and one that cares for them and one that thinks about them every day-My very heart did ache when reading your very kind and interesting letter.

Laura I do not think I have change any at all since I saw you last.-I think of you and my children every day of my life. Laura I do love you the same. My love to you never have failed. Laura, truly, I have got another wife, and I am very sorry, that I am. You feels and seems to me as much like my dear loving wife, as you ever did Laura. You know my treatment to a wife and you know how I am about my children. You know I am one man that do love my children….

Remember the Tea Party — that reactionary right wing movement that helped lead the Republican Party into the fever swamp of madness?

Well, in places like Tennessee they found especially fertile ground, and that state’s Teabaggers are demanding that school textbooks leave out America’s history of slavery.

A little more than a year after the conservative-led state board of education in Texas approved massive changes to its school textbooks to put slavery in a more positive light, a group of Tea Party activists in Tennessee has renewed its push to whitewash school textbooks. The group is seeking to remove references to slavery and mentions of the country’s founders being slave owners.

According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds said, according to The Commercial Appeal.

During the news conference more than two dozen Tea Party activists handed out material that said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

And that further teaching would also include that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The group demanded, as they had in January of last year, that Tennessee lawmakers change state laws governing school curricula. The group called for textbook selection criteria to include: “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

From PBS:

During the 1850s, Frederick Douglass typically spent about six months of the year travelling extensively, giving lectures. During one winter — the winter of 1855-1856 — he gave about 70 lectures during a tour that covered four to five thousand miles. And his speaking engagements did not halt at the end of a tour. From his home in Rochester, New York, he took part in local abolition-related events.

On July 5, 1852, Douglass gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. It was biting oratory, in which the speaker told his audience, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” And he asked them, “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

Read on…

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro
by Frederick Douglas
Rochester, New York
July 5, 1852

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory….

Frederick Douglass - Circa 1848

…Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

Continue reading at PBS.

As read by actor Danny Glover:

Note that the speech continues beyond Mr. Glover’s interpretation.

Hat tip:

Read Frederick Douglass’ famed fourth of July speech, “What is the fourth of July to a Slave?” demanding abolition: ht.ly/c0CwA

— AfricanBurialGround (@AFBurialGrndNPS) July 4, 2012

Further reading:

In this academic article a scholar examines the context of Frederick Douglass’ famous 4th oj July speech: ht.ly/c0FoB

— AfricanBurialGround (@AFBurialGrndNPS) July 4, 2012

Here’s Ron Paul in a video recently posted at YouTube by one of his fans, explaining why the South was the right side in the Civil War — in front of a huge Confederate flag.

Any more questions about Ron Paul?

(h/t: Andrew Kaczynski.)

Note: in the comments for the video at YouTube, I noticed that Ron Paul followers were urging that the video be deleted before it could damage Paul’s reputation any further — so I downloaded a copy just in case.

And another crazy new story about the Crazy Uncle: Ron Paul Was Implicated In Attempted White Supremacist Island Invasion | News One.

In 1981, a lawyer tried to subpoena Ron Paul to testify in the trial of Don Black, a Grand Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan who would later go on to found the white supremacist, neo-Nazi website, Stormfront. Black was charged along with two other Klansmen with planning to violently overthrow the small Caribbean country of Dominica in what they called “Operation Red Dog.” While a judge refused to subpoena Paul, Don Black would come back to haunt him many years later.

In 1981 a group of American and Canadian white supremacists lead by Klansman and mercenary, Michael (Mike) Perdue planned on taking over a small West Indian country called Dominica by overthrowing the government and Prime Minister Eugenia Charles and restoring its previous prime minister, Patrick Johns into power. The group planned to create an Aryan paradise in Dominica and make money through casinos, cocaine and brothels.

On the day the group of white supremacists were supposed to travel to Dominica, they were arrested by ATF agents and were found with over thirty automatic weapons, shotguns, rifles, handguns, dynamite, ammunition, a confederate flag and a Nazi flag. The plan would be dubbed “The Bayou Of Pigs” after the failed invasion of Cuba.

The leader of the group, Michael Perdue, would plead guilty to planning the coup and turned state’s evidence. Perdue would testify that several other people helped organize and fund the coup and that two Texas politicians were aware of the plan. Among those Perdue implicated were infamous white supremacist, David Duke, former Texas Governor, John Connally and Congressman, Ron Paul whom he claimed knew about the plot. Connally was credited with helping Paul win his first congressional election.

A judge refused to subpoena Paul and Connally despite the fact that Perdue had claimed that both of them were aware of the plot.

The Ron Paul cult member who posted this video to YouTube changed the video to a different one showing Ron Paul interviewed on TV, without the Confederate flag.

So, just as I promised, I’ve uploaded my own copy and replaced it in this post.

It’s no longer surprising to hear Republican candidates like Newt Gingrich openly endorsing a “state’s right” to fly the Confederate flag — the symbol of slavery, sedition, and a war that nearly destroyed the United States.

And in the same breath, Gingrich says he’s “unalterably opposed to slavery.” Well, isn’t that nice.

At an event in South Carolina yesterday, Newt Gingrich was asked by a town hall participant to offer his views regarding the state’s decision to fly the Confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia. The woman’s question was met with a smattering of boos from the audience.

“I have a very strong opinion,” Gingrich said, prefacing his weak response. “It’s up to the people of South Carolina.” (He then qualified his answer by assuring that he is opposed to segregation and slavery.)

Last month we reported that the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles was actually considering the approval of an objectively pro-slavery license plate, prominently featuring the Confederate flag. Today we’re glad to announce that the Texas DMV board voted unanimously to reject the design, after two hours of public testimony in which opponents of the plate far outnumbered supporters.

Supporters of the plates, including Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, argued that it would honor Confederate soldiers and would not be an endorsement of the Confederate government.

“Tens of thousands of Texans marched into battle behind that flag, and we are here to commemorate the soldiers, not the politicians,” Patterson told the board on Thursday.

Ray James, past commander of the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, pointed out that the issue was up for consideration on the day before Veterans Day.

“These veterans need to be honored, too,” James, whose organization requested the plate, told the board.

With any luck, this is the last generation of “Sons of the Confederate Veterans” still confused about who won the Civil War — and why: Texas considers Confederate flag license plate.

HOUSTON — Texas is considering a specialty license plate that would feature the Confederate flag. The idea is to honor Texans who fought in the Civil War, but some people say they are offended by the idea.

Imagine that.

Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles is actually considering the approval of an objectively pro-slavery license plate:

The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles say you can email the agency with comments and suggestions at www.txdmv.gov. Click on “email us” and select the Vehicle and Title Registration from the drop down box.

Another license plate design under consideration by the Texas DMV:

A new poll from Iowa has Michele Bachmann ahead of Mitt Romney; looks like her signature on that incredibly insane “marriage vow” boosted her popularity in the Iowa Tea Party base.

The conservative congresswoman finished first among the GOP presidential candidates in a poll released today by The Iowa Republican, a blog which bill itself as News for Republicans, by Republicans. Bachmann received support from 25 percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney received 21 percent, putting Bachmann’s lead within the poll’s 4.4 percent margin of error.

Bachmann officially launched her presidential campaign from her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, and her first campaign ad touts her Iowa roots. She was also the first candidate to sign a “values” pledge created by Family Leader CEO Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa Christian.