MUGGED: RACIAL
DEMAGOGUERY FROM
THE SEVENTIES TO
OBAMA (New York: Sentinel, 2012)
BY ANN COULTER
Rev. by Hugh Murray
Flaherty’s White Girl Bleed a Lot is like reading
raw material, recent newspaper reports of Black racist mobs and attacks on
whites printed or shown in local media, and too often, with the racial nature
of the crimes purposely obscured.
Coulter’s excellent book is similar, but significantly different. Coulter has taken the raw material from the
1960s on, boiled down the essential stories of racial crimes and criminal
hoaxes, used her flavorful language to emphasize the meat of the stories, and
then she tops them with sprinkles of her sharp wit.
In this
book Coulter has performed a public service.
She assembles names and events that are fading from memory, spotlighting
the injustices, the insanity, the viciousness, indeed, the monstrous anti-white
racism and its supporters. Coulter
avoids that phrase, but it underlies her exposes of so many crimes against
whites of the past few decades, crimes in which the media, academia, judges,
juries, mayors, chiefs of police, have been all too complicit. Yet, I am bugged, annoyed, by her distorted analysis of the role of the Republican Party on many of these issues.
The
strength of Mugged is Coulter’s summary recounts of the
cases of Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Larry Davis, Lemrick Nelson, Edmund
Perry, Channon Christian and Christopher Newson, Tawana Brawley, the 1972 “incident”
at Minister Farrakhan’s mosque in New York City, the left-wing minister Jim
Jones, Rodney King, OJ, the Duke Lacrosse team “rapes,” Bernard Goetz, and
more.
From her
book I learned that the only person convicted of a felony at the OJ trial was
police detective Mark Fuhrman. As Coulter
summarized it: “In 1995, Americans discovered it was considered a graver
offense to use ‘the N-word’ than to cut off a woman’s head.”(127) Fuhrman was convicted of perjury, while OJ
walked free – to the cheers of racist Blacks throughout the nation. Coulter believes that the OJ verdict wakened
whites to their appeasement of Black crime, and that whites changed their
attitudes, shedding their white guilt feelings thereafter.(p. 15) Unfortunately, I see little sign of the
wakening Coulter writes of. White guilt
liberalism excuses the anti-white racist policies of a failed Black President,
and white guilt helped elect and re-elect him.
I also
learned about the support of Black racist terror by a leading Democratic
politician. Once the Rodney King riots
erupted, a white truck driver, Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck. “As Henry Keith Watson stood on Denny’s neck,
other black thugs repeatedly kicked and stomped him, smashed his head with a
claw hammer, and threw a five-point oxygenator – stolen from another bloodied
white truck driver – at his head. In a
final gruesome act. Damian ‘Football’ Williams picked up a slab of concrete and
heaved it directly on Denny’s head…fracturing his skull in ninety-one places. Williams then did a victory dance around Denny’s
body,…(121) Coulter reminds us of how
Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters quickly defended the actions of Williams
and the other Black racist monsters, demanding that all charges against them be
dropped, trying to sway public opinion in their favor. None of those shown in this atrocity on tape
were convicted of a felony, except Williams, who was convicted of causing
mayhem. Once he completed his short
sentence, Rep. Waters found a job for the concrete-throwing Williams.
Coulter
might have added a few items to her assortment of horrors – like the statistics
showing crime dropped dramatically on New York City subways during the quarter
after Bernard Goetz shot his poised attackers.
But overall, her thumbnail sketches of the atrocities of the past
decades are vivid, concise, and stinging in their cumulated impact.
Yet I have
a major disagreement with Coulter in her analysis. In her view Republicans are the great
defenders of civil rights, and Democrats the champions of segregation and
discrimination. “The entire his of civil
rights consists of Republicans battling Democrats to guarantee the
constitutional rights of black people.”(1)
“Not all Democrats were segregationists,
but all segregationists were Democrats.”(1)
While there is much truth in her statements, the reality was more
nuanced.
Coulter
demonstrates how liberal Democratic icons like Sen. William Fulbright (Ark.),
Sen. Sam Ervin (NC), and Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952 Sen. John
Sparkman (Ala.), were all staunch segregationists. Democratic Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had
even attended a left-wing school and would become the governor who tried to
prevent integration of Central High in Little Rock. It would take Republican President Eisenhower
to send troops to integrate that school, the first time since Reconstruction
that troops were sent South to defend the rights of Blacks. On a personal note, I was born and raised in what
was then the largest city of the South, New Orleans; I participated and was
arrested in the city’s first lunch-counter sit-in in September 1960. Responding to our arrest, the liberal
Democratic Mayor, DeLesseps Morrison officially announced that the city would
not tolerate any further incidents. We
soon became convicted felons. In
November, when the first two schools were integrated, the liberal mayor did
nothing to prevent harassment of those few who sent their children past the
angry mothers to the newly mixed schools.
Though I
took a stand against segregation, one must not take the present politically
correct position that all segregation was evil.
One of the Longs was asked to improve the lot of Blacks in
Louisiana. He agreed to do so, but
warned that they might not like his method of doing so. At a hospital, the governor spotted a white
nurse with a Black male patient.
Horrors! Governor Long assured
the press he would stop such practices by hiring Black nurses. While segregation was separate but rarely
equal, it was better than no services for Blacks, the condition that often
preceded the era of segregation. Moreover,
there were good segregated Black schools, even during the era of Jim Crow. I don’t recall reading of metal detectors at
the segregated Black schools of yore.
Some
Republican sought outreach to the pro-segregationist whites in the South. Indeed, these Republicans often fought the “old
guard” who might have the support the Black and Tan (the Blacks) delegations to
the national GOP conventions. Theodore
Roosevelt may have invited Booker Washington to dine in the White House, but we
know TR was a highly educated man. And
he shared the scientific views of the era, which were quite racist. When he challenged William Taft for the GOP
nomination in 1912, he sought to replace some of the Black and Tans with
whites. When TR lost the nomination to
Taft and established his Bull Moose Progressive Party, there was no outreach to
Blacks, no planks in the new party’s platform about civil rights. When Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the 3-way
election, he demonstrated his progressive and scientific approach by
segregating the federal civil service.
When Quaker Hoover ran against Catholic Smith in 1928, his inroads in
the South were made by many who upheld segregation (and who probably hated
Catholics more than Republicans).
In the
1930s another party rose to champion the rights of Blacks – the Communist Party. In 1931 in Alabama two white women accused
several Blacks of raping them. In the
small town of Scottsboro they were quickly found guilty and 8 of 9 were
sentenced to death. Communist won
control of the case and led a two-pronged defense: 1) obtain superb lawyers for
the court-room proceedings, and 2) agitate about the case outside in Scottsboro
and throughout the world. The party and
its front groups gathered signatures for the Scottsboro Boys from Mms. Sun Yat
Sen (China), Albert Einstein (then German), Maxim Gorki (Soviet), Nobel laureate
Romain Rolland (France), Johnstone Kenyatta (later to be better known as Jomo,
leader of the Mau Mau in Africa), and in the US, Chief Red Cloud, Langston
Hughes, et al. The mother of two of the
accused toured Europe giving speeches on behalf of her sons. Not since the American Civil War had the
issue of the treatment of Blacks in America received such international
attention. Suddenly intellectuals were
concerned about 9 young Blacks accused of rape.
The case went to the US Supreme Court twice.
Coulter may
have exposed a lie by journalist Carl Bernstein about his teenage role as a
civil rights activist. On that, she may
be correct. But Bernstein in his
autobiography mentions another incident that rings true. He wrote that as a young boy he was with his
mother as they engaged in a restaurant sit-in in Baltimore sponsored the Left-wing
(pro-CP) Henry Wallace Progressive Party.
Even weakened in the Cold War era, the Communists were still
demonstrating for the rights of Black people.
To prevent
a Black March on Washington during WWII, Democratic President Franklin
Roosevelt appointed an FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission) with limited
power to investigate racial discrimination in defense industries. States began to consider having their own
FEPC laws and committees. The first to
consider such a law was New York, a state then controlled by Republicans. While most legislative Democrats supported
the measure, many Republicans opposed, fearing it would result in the Hitlerian
reign of racial and religious quotas. It
was only with the strong support of the propose law by Republican Governor
Thomas Dewey that New York won its FEPC.
In other northern and western states the Democrats were more favorable
to the legislation, especially with fines for discrimination. In various states the GOP was less likely to
support the proposals, and would stall, or if they must pass, make them one of
negotiations rather than punishment for offending employers. In California, it was submitted to a popular
referendum; those supporting FEPC were the liberal Democrats and the
Communists; opposed the anti-Communist Republicans. FEPC lost heavily. Republican Governor Earl Warren chose not to
push the issue after the people had spoken.
In 1948
despite Republican Gov. Dewey’s strong stand on FEPC and equal rights, most of
the Black vote went for Democrat Truman.
For the first time a President spoke before the NAACP as Truman made
efforts to win the Black vote. When
W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, broke ranks and openly endorsed the Henry
Wallace Progressive Party, he was fired by the NAACP. Thereafter, the NAACP would basically become
a Democratic Party front group. After Truman
won the election, his Attorney General had Du Bois arrested as a foreign
agent. One of Du Bois’s defense
attorneys was a Black Republican from Mississippi.
In 1948 the
Henry Wallace campaign was an earlier version of the civil rights
movement. Wallace refused to speak at
segregated facilities, and he had to fend off tomatoes and other objects. His campaign manager, Paul Robeson visited
Progressives in Louisiana, and the landlady wanted immediate eviction. (Officials were lenient, and gave them till
the end of the month). Bull Connor in
Birmingham arrested Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, who was running for VP on the
Wallace ticket. Various supporters in
the South of Henry Wallace will turn up later in the official version of the “civil
rights movement.” But under Truman and
the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, those groups that
supported Henry Wallace: the Civil Rights Congress, the National Negro
Congress, the Council on African Affairs, the Southern Conference on Human
Welfare, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (the original snick) were all listed
and collapsed by the mid-1950s.
Coulter is
so determined to distance the GOP from the Dixiecrats that she distorts. In 1952 Republican Eisenhower’s campaign
sponsored a half hour campaign program on national television. It was carried throughout the nation –except in
some southern states where Democratic Governor Robert Kennon and two other
governors gave reason for them supporting Eisenhower. (I saw only the southern version, but I
suspect the northern ad emphasized different points.) In 1952 the county that gave the highest
percentage of its vote to the Republicans, about 95%, was Plaquemines Parish,
Louisiana. This parish was dominated by
Judge Leander Perez, a Dixiecrat. When
singer Ted Lewis played the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blue Room in New Orleans, Perez
was in the audience. As Lewis sang his “Me
and My Shadow” with his Black side-kick, Perez purposely broke glasses where
they were soft-shoeing, so the Black cut his foot. The Judge had a certain reputation. Much later, in spring 1969 Perez died and two
young Blacks in that parish went to a store to purchase liquor. They informed the owner they were going to
celebrate the death of the Judge. They
were arrested and sentenced to 6-month’s hard labor. Because Louisiana kept a States’ Rights Party
on the ballot, I doubt if he supported Nixon in 1960 or 1968.
Coulter seems
embarrassed by Goldwater, who clearly did succeed in winning the Dixiecrat vote
and their electoral votes when he ran for president in 1964. Goldwater was one of the few Republicans who
voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Yet, before the election in the fall, the Democrats in Louisiana
purchased a full-page in local newspapers urging readers to vote for Lyndon
Johnson. It warned that Goldwater had
supported FEPC in Arizona, and civil rights there also. Consider too, that Lyndon was a fellow
Southerner who understood “our” way of life.
Though totally opposed to Goldwater in 1964, I did attend his massive
rally at Tulane Stadium that fall. The
crowd was excited – they wanted to hear him condemn the recently passed Civil
Rights Act. They were utterly
disappointed. Goldwater spoke about
government contracts with TFX planes and other more distant issues. The crowd wanted to explosively cheer him,
but Goldwater gave them no chance. He
avoided the race issue. Goldwater did
carry Louisiana and the other Dixiecrat states, but he did not embrace the
Dixiecrat cause.
Then, there
is the question of Nixon. Coulter
writes: “There was never a period…when race discrimination was a Republican
policy, except maybe briefly when Nixon imposed affirmative-action on the
building trades doing business with the government in the 1960s, but they
deserved it. (A policy for which LBJ is
showered with praise for thinking about – but never actually implementing.)”
(173)
What LBJ
thought about implementing was halted because it was the end of Lyndon’s term
in 1968 and Democrat Humphrey had lost the election to Republican Nixon. Everyone assumed that the “Philadelphia Plan”
of quotas for construction unions was dead because of the election. The unexpected occurred when Nixon and his
Sec. of Labor George Schultz revived and then implemented the Philadelphia
Plan. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had
made quotas and hiring for racial balance illegal. Nixon and Schultz ignored this and demanded
quotas by not calling them such; they were goals and timetables. When the issue came before Congress, it
appeared as if Nixon would lose on the issue.
He sent emissaries to the NAACP requesting its help. While many Democrats and some Republicans opposed,
Nixon’s quota program squeaked past on a narrow vote.
Nixon then
issued executive orders making quota-based affirmative action government policy
in all federal agencies – not just Philadelphia building trades. The notion of quota-justice had been rejected
by most Americans. It was clearly contrary
to the spirit and text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was contrary to the dream bespoke by
Martin Luther King at the 1963 March on Washington – when his children would be
judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. Yet, quotas first became national policy under
Republican Richard Nixon.
Of course,
Nixon could not transform America alone.
The EEOC had been working toward quotas for several years. Many courts opposed this un-American, racist
concept. But when the issue finally
reached the US Supreme Court under the new Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon
appointee, the Civil Rights Act was turned on its head. Its clear language banning quotas and hiring
for racial balance became requirement for racial balance and quotas by other
names. As late as 2003 when affirmative
action again reached the US Supreme Court in major cases, it was Republican
Reagan appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the decision for the majority
of the court upholding the use of race in effect to achieve quota-based
affirmative action.
And even
before Burger, we had the Warren Court!
Earl Warren, California official most responsible for the round-up of
Japanese during WWII (Republicans are always for civil rights??), Earl Warren,
the man who would be VP when Gov. Dewey won the Presidency in 1948, Gov. Warren
would have a career change with Dewey’s defeat. President Eisenhower appointed him Chief
Justice in 1953 and the Warren Court proceeded to follow many ideas on crime
that Coulter decries. The alleged criminal
would soon have more rights with the Warren Court’s rulings. And later Warren gave his presence to the
Warren Report on the murder of President Kennedy. I have written elsewhere criticizing various
aspects of that report. (Indeed, the
first book in which I was mentioned was vol. 26 of the findings, but the index
was so poorly done, I had no idea of that until the mid-70s. Mark Lane may have been a Left-winger, but he
provided access to information covered up by the government.)
Coulter
rightly condemns the Kerner Report of 1969 on the riots of the late 1960s in
America. It “decided that instead of
punishing black rioters, we should hear them out and lavish black neighborhoods
with…government programs.”(256) She
notes that part of the Kerner Report was written by New York City Mayor John
Lindsay. Lindsay would not switch to the
Democratic Party until 1971, so he was still nominally a Republican when he
wrote those views. Lindsay was a
liberal, and elected for his second term as mayor, not on the Republican
ticket, but only on the Liberal line.
Still, he was a Republican and a liberal.
In many
ways Nixon was also a Republican and a liberal.
EPA, OSHA, and other liberal legislation came under Nixon’s watch. Most importantly for this paper, Nixon’s
racial quota policy was expanded to Hispanics, women, this group and that, and
the quota commissars entered the personnel offices of every government agency
and then every private corporation. No
longer were people hired and promoted according to merit, it was by quota, for
goals and time tables, or now, for diversity. No longer hire the best qualified, but the “basically”
qualified, or even the unqualified to fill the quota and avoid heavy government
imposed fines if the government finds lack of racial balance in the
workplace. Individual merit no longer
counts; count only by race and gender.
Under
Republican President Reagan some urged him to rescind with his pen the
executive orders requiring affirmative action.
Reagan did not do so. Under
Reagan when employment tests were administered, knowing Blacks and Hispanics
could not perform as well as whites, but determined to have racial balance,
Hispanics were granted an extra 10% on the exams; Black were granted even
more. Employers were not informed about
the cheating done by Reagan’s government to insure hiring of lesser qualified Blacks
and Hispanics.
Reagan
never rescinded the affirmative action executive order. Neither did Bush I, who even signed the Civil
Rights Act of 1991, providing the first legal justification for quotas. Affirmative action continued under Clinton
and Bush II.
Interestingly,
in the 2012 Presidential campaign President Obama often declared, “It is our
policy to have all the people play by the same rules. That is just.
That is fair.” In reality, that
is the last thing Obama wants. Obama
supports the double standards of quotas and affirmative action. His Administration seeks to expand it, even
suing school districts which suspend and expel a higher percentage of Black
student than whites (though they never want to know if the Blacks are a higher
percentage disrupting classes, cursing, fighting, etc.). The Left wants justice though quotas. Yet, in most cases, quotas are inherently
unjust.
What was
interesting in the campaign is that Republican Romney never called Obama out on
this issue. What do you mean, we all
play by the same rules when Blacks with lower scores than whites are admitted
to university, granted scholarships, given jobs, promoted, etc.? Affirmative action is institutionalized to
prevent us from playing by the same rules.
It is cheating on behalf of pet groups.
It is legalized institutional racism against whites. It became national policy under Republican
Nixon and has continued under every Republican President since – and the
Democrats too.
With the
quota mentality, one has a warped view of justice. Why is the percentage of Blacks in jail so
much higher than whites? They should be
out. They should be given all the
liberal welfare Coulter condemns. But
this is the result of Republican like Warren, Burger, Nixon, Schultz, Reagan,
Bush I, Bush II, Romney. Coulter’s
paragraph on Nixon and the building trades distorts the role of the GOP in
institutionalizing anti-white racism, which then amplifies to justify
anti-white crime.
Mugged is a good book, but Coulter’s
analysis of the GOP is warped.