Sharpton Is For Sharpton

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Must not disagree with sharpie Sharpton and his NAACP brethren

We read:
"For years, New York City's flagship main Public Library has annually honored a group of "literary lions." Long a civil rights and civil liberties lion, Michael Meyers, born in Harlem, is a former assistant director of the NAACP; personal assistant to its late executive director, Roy Wilkins; and a protege of one of my mentors, Dr. Kenneth Clark. Clark's research influenced the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared public-school segregation unconstitutional. Yet on Feb. 21, at the annual meeting in New York of the century-old NAACP, Meyers, refused permission to speak, was removed by NAACP security.The meeting was held in the midst of a furor of protest by the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black public figures over a cartoon by the New York Post's Sean Delonas showing a chimpanzee shot and killed by the police (as had just actually happened to a pet chimpanzee gone berserk). Said one of the cops: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."Interpreting this as a racist attack on President Barack Obama, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous and its chairman, Julian Bond, had joined the angry chorus of protesters calling for a boycott of the New York Post, and the firing of the cartoonist and the paper's editor. They have worked to make this a national issue if these demands were not met.Meyers, a widely publicized defender of the First Amendment, had publicly objected to "this exercise in sheer racial rhetoric," adding: "Demagoguery is not the standard of effective leadership in addressing serious social justice issues." Meyers has often written and lectured on race relations, police abuse, housing and education. And as a passionate civil libertarian, he said of the rage to punish those connected with the cartoon: "All political pundits deserve a wide berth for social criticism and for parodying and poking fun at and criticizing our political leaders, no matter the skin color or race of the public official.

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Posted by jonjayray at 12:14 AM