Back in the day, I had a cousin who belonged to a wannabe Black Panthers organization. He would come over to our home and engage in all-night debates with my father. They would argue over the ineffectiveness of Martin Luther King's integration dreams and the necessity for blacks to pick up guns and get busy killing some rednecks.
One book he gave my father to bolster his justification for armed answers to America's racial question was a anthology called, "100 Years of Lynching." I "liberated" the book from my father's bedroom and frankly it scared the hell out of me.
Page after page listed newspaper accounts of the horrible, violent and bloody lynching and torture of black men, women and children. Blacks were hanged, shot, burned alive, beaten to death, tortured, and slaughtered in the most shocking ways imaginable [during the Jim Crow era of this century.] I was relieved that things had changed.
Sure, I thought, black folks still caught hell, but things weren't so bad that a white man could kill any Negro at any time for any kind of slight; real or imagined. Things have changed. That was history, not destiny, right?
Fast forward to Jasper, Texas, and ain't a damn thing changed. If James Byrd, Jr., had lived in America 60 years ago he might have been dragged to his death by wild horses. Of course this is America less-than-two-years-removed-from-the-millennium and we've got horsepower to do our dirty deeds now.
The three white men, Lawrence Brewer, Shawn Berry, and John William King, probably didn't set out that night with the idea of killing Byrd. Any black man unlucky to cross their path that night would have done. It would have made no difference to them if the victim had been Colin Powell or Clarence Thomas. The only requirement necessary was that the prey possess more melanin than themselves. When it's time to kill, any nigger will do.
Already the professional opinion-shapers have begun to dismiss this "tragic incident" as just "an isolated incident." The spin has begun.
Jesse Jackson racked up more frequent flier points as he swooped in just behind the news cameras to "help the victim's family and community begin the healing process."
Even the Chicago Bulls rebounding fool and just plain professional fool, Dennis "The Worm" Rodman, added some star power to the affair by offering to pay the funeral expenses of the unfortunate hitchhiker.
"It's not because he's black, and I'm black, and I'm trying to do something for the black community," said The Worm. "It's more just the fact that it's a brutal crime where someone shouldn't have been in that situation. I'd do it for anybody else if it happened that way."
Byrd was only 10 miles from home when he was set upon by the three men. He was walking home from a niece's bridal shower, Saturday night ,when he accepted a ride from the men. He may have known one of them. Sunday the gruesome discovery of Byrd's mangled and battered torso was made. His severed head, neck, and right arm were found along a blood-stained stretch of road.
Police investigators confirm that two of the men have tattoos of the Aryan Brotherhood and another carried a lighter engraved with an emblem of the Ku Klux Klan. The FBI has been called in to investigate if Byrd's civil rights were violated. The fact that his very humanity was violated falls outside of their jurisdiction.
What is the proper response to this sort of horror story?
A few weeks ago some poor, black kid got shot and died outside of a hospital's emergency room because the staff refused to come outside to treat his injuries.
Before anyone could work up a good head of indignation over that shameful act, some 15-year-old in Springfield, Oregon, walked into a school cafeteria packing heat and added two kids to the body-count of his own mother and father.
Meanwhile in Washington, [D.C.,] Kenneth Starr and Monica Lewinsky maintained their stranglehold on the national media's attention. So what else is new?
Remember Joseph Paul Franklin? Failing in his attempt to stalk and shoot Jesse Jackson, he found another "race mixer" to target. The victim's name? The former head of the National Urban League and present Friend of Bill (Clinton, that is,) Vernon Jordan. As he waited in the dark, he shot Jordan in the back, barely missing his spine. In 1982, an all-white federal jury acquitted Franklin of violating Jordan's civil rights.
Franklin would go on to shoot, and paralyze, HUSTLER publisher Larry Flynt. Franklin was angered by a HUSTLER pictorial depicting a white woman having sex with a black man.
Franklin [also] roamed seven states shooting and killing blacks, Jews, and interracial couples, killing at least four, and is the prime suspect in five other murders and several church bombings.
Franklin, a former Ku Klux Klan member, said [when apprehended] he targeted blacks because he was ``trying to create a full-scale race war, you know. But I've kind of changed my opinions on different things. I'm not prejudiced against blacks and Jews anymore. Now I hate everyone equally.''
Franklin is presently on trial in Cincinnati, Ohio, for the 1980 sniper slaying of two boys, Darrell Lane,14 and Dante Brown, 13.
So when the Ward Connerlys, Armstrong Williames, Tom Sowells and the rest of the "race doesn't matter anymore" New Jack black conservatives/apologists make the rounds of the talk shows selling that line of crap, don't buy any of that bullshit. America was, is, and remains a country where race matters...a lot. It can matter to death.
Or just invite Ward Connerly to go hitchhiking some Saturday night on a backroad in Jasper, Texas. Better keep walking if any pickup trucks with three good old boys comes along, Ward. Might be a doggone longer walk in the dark, but a damn sight better for the health.
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