The Rev. Joseph A. Darby, senior pastor of Morris Brown AME Church and first vice president of the Charleston (S.C.) Branch NAACP, is apparently a diversity columnist for the Charleston Post and Courier. In his Jan. 1 column on the Emancipation Proclamation he provided a good example of the new Obamian call for comity and civility:
Our best way of celebrating is to work together for progress across the lines of color, culture, faith and politics that too often serve as walls of division. Our best way of celebrating is to talk “to” each other rather than “at” each other and to seek common ground for the good of all citizens.
Alas, he also provided a typical example of what that means to many Obamanauts, claiming that critics of our African-American president’s first term subjected him to “to an arrogant and unprecedented level of criticism and innuendo” and also claiming that the Tea Party can be described as a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. “The Ku Klux Klan is a shadow of what it used to be,” he acknowledges, “but the sights and sounds of early Tea Party rallies were chillingly reminiscent of the Klan in its heyday.”
His tirade elicited several critical letters to the editor, such as this one, to which the good reverend replied today in his column, “A vile brew still taints the Tea Party.”
Three recent letters to the editor took me to task for something I said in my column on the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation — “The Ku Klux Klan is a shadow of what it used to be, but the sights and sounds of early Tea Party rallies were chillingly reminiscent of the Klan in its heyday.”
The writers of those outraged letters claimed that the Tea Party movement is not racist and is focused on federal government intrusion, excessive federal spending and defending the Constitution. They also claimed that they were critical of President Obama’s policies and not his ethnicity. One of those outraged writers said, “I don’t remember the Ku Klux Klan having the same agenda.” Let me see if I can help him out.
Many Ku Klux Klan members in the days of the 20th century civil rights movement denied that they were racists and claimed that they were simply advocating respectful racial separation. One of their old handbooks stated that: “Every true Klansman is loyally patriotic. This means he is devoted to: (1) The government of the United States of America, (2) His state, (3) His flag, (4) The Constitution of the United States, (5) Constitutional laws, (6) Law enforcement.”
The Tea Party movement espouses those same goals….
I had thought that most Democrats and even NAACP members also supported those same goals, but I stand corrected.
