The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) condemned the Tea Party movement last month for alleged bigotry within its ranks. The mainstream always seems extreme to extremists. As the following top-ten list demonstrates, the NAACP, a hotbed of political hotheads in recent years, isn’t the best organization to be lecturing others about extremism.
10. In March 2008, ABC News revealed that Barack Obama’s pastor had preached that African Americans should sing “not God Bless America, God Damn America,” that 9/11 proved that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” and that the U.S. government invented AIDS. The following month, on April 28, 2008, the NAACP’s Detroit chapter honored the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a keynote speaker at a massive dinner.
9. In 2000, the NAACP filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Mumia Abu Jamal, the former Black Panther who murdered a white police officer in 1981. “I shot the motherf----- and I hope the motherf----- dies,” three witnesses heard a wounded Abu Jamal exclaim in a Philadelphia hospital.
8. The rhetoric of Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP from 1998 to 2000, exemplifies the organization’s migration from the mainstream to the extreme. In his words, Republicans are “the white people’s party” and “a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts,” America morphs into a place where “white supremacy” is “everywhere,” and the George W. Bush Administration exemplifies a regime “whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”
7. On July 1, 1934, W.E.B. Du Bois resigned from the organization he helped found after an ugly feud with the NAACP’s more moderate leaders, crudely accusing Walter White, an African American, of being white. The previous year, Du Bois called for a plan that “will involve increased segregation and perhaps migration” for African Americans. “The thinking colored people of the United States must stop being stampeded by the word segregation,” Du Bois insisted in the January 1934 issue of The Crises, adding four months later: “I fight segregation with segregation.” The parting of ways saved the NAACP further embarrassment. Their founder made an ill-advised trip to Nazi Germany in 1936 that resulted in, among other lamentable items, “The German Case against Jews,” an apologia in which Du Bois excused German anti-Semitism as a “reasoned prejudice” based on “economic fear."
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