Please, stop this. A few months ago we witnessed the pathetic spectacle of Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Human and Civil Rights, cramming his foot down his throat on Alabama’s new law that seeks to make law-breaking illegal immigrants accountable for their law-breaking. Henderson was able to pull off his dubious achievement by playing what I called the “Bull Connor card.” Eugene “Bull” Connor was the public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s.
He distinguished himself by not only running roughshod over the rights of civil rights demonstrators, but also having members of his police department stand by as a mob brutalized Freedom Riders.
Henderson said Alabama’s new law would take the state back to the Bull Connor days, although no violation of rights on the scale Connor committed has been brought to light. There have been no reports of any police officers in Alabama standing by while illegal immigrants were beaten, either.
Last week it was Robert Rooks’ turn. Drug policies in America, Rooks charged, have “creat[ed] a system of racial disparities that rivals Jim Crow policies of the 1960s.”
Way to go, Bob. Way to insult all those elderly black Americans who endured the indignities, brutalities and humiliation of real Jim Crow. Black Americans of my mother’s era (she was born in 1922 and is still going strong) and earlier had no choice in the racial discrimination they faced.
Back then, Jim Crow was the law in many places. Where it wasn’t the law, it was custom. Black Americans were subjected to Jim Crow whether they were criminals or had never broken the law a day in their lives.
What Rooks is talking about is something completely different. In most cases — and I’d wager I’m talking 90 percent or higher here — the blacks who found themselves in court for drug offenses made the choice to be there by breaking a drug law. There’s no way their situation can even be remotely compared to what their elders and ancestors experienced in the Jim Crow era.
Here’s the kicker: Rooks isn’t just some fly-by-night commentator who popped up out of the woodwork. He’s the director of the NAACP’s criminal justice program.
That’s right: Rooks works for the civil rights organization that’s supposed to be the responsible one, the one we can count on to be reasonable and impartial.
Actually, that was exactly what the NAACP was in its BB era. And yes, “BB” means “Before Bond,” as in now resigned (thank heavens!) NAACP Board Chairman Julian Bond.
Bond took what was a respectable, truly nonpartisan civil rights organization and darn near wrecked it, making it into the Democratic Party’s hatchet wing.
Every year at the organization’s convention, Bond would launch an attack on former President George W. Bush and/or Republicans, hinting that Bush was a racist on one occasion, comparing Republicans and conservatives to the Taliban on another.
Bond is gone, but not, apparently, his penchant for demagoguery. Rooks’ comments appeared on the NAACP’s website. In late July, at the organization’s annual convention, delegates passed a resolution calling for an end to the war on drugs.
There are many good reasons to end the war on drugs. What happened to Mayor Cheye Calvo and his mother-in-law — who live in Berwyn Heights in Prince George’s County — is one of them. But Calvo and his mother-in-law are white. What happened to them fell completely off the NAACP radar.
So the organization continues to whine about racial disparities and play the Jim Crow card. There was a high road the NAACP could have taken.
Too bad it didn’t.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
