Members of the Morehouse College 2002 graduating class sing their school song during commencement ceremonies May 19, 2002 in Atlanta. About 500 men received their undergraduate degrees from the predominately black school. (Photo by Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)

President Obama will deliver the commencement speech at Morehouse College — the storied predominantly black men’s college an alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King — on Sunday. But he won’t find a total respite from controversy.

As Allison Samuels writes in the Daily Beast, Obama’s speech is already being upstaged by controversial comments about the president by a prominent black pastor from Philadelphia. Samuels writes:

While Sunday will mark the first time an African-American president will deliver the commencement college address to a graduating class of all male African-Americans, one alumni of Morehouse felt compelled to pen an scathing editorial about the president for to those “too’ taken in by the symbolic meaning of it all. Writing in the Philadelphia Tribune earlier in April, Pastor Kevin Johnson from Philadelphia didn’t hold anything back in a piece entitled, “A President for Everyone, Except for Black People.” The op-ed compared the number of African Americans who hold senior positions in Obama’s cabinet with earlier administrations and found the result unacceptable. Two of the cabinet’s four African Americans and both of its Hispanic members from Obama’s first term have announced they are leaving. Only one of the two Asian Americans who served during the first Obama term remains.

Demographic strategist Donna Brazile said that with his inflammatory comments, Johnson was playing a familiar role for community activists and pastors. She added that White House office numbers don’t always tell the entire story.

“This president has done a great deal in choosing and appointing a diverse group in the White House and on the Supreme Court,” said Brazile. “But civil rights activists and pastors such as Johnson will always want more and that’s their role and that’s fine. The next president will be expected to do even more than President Obama has. But let’s not forget what Attorney General Eric Holder is going through and what a lot of minorities are forced to go through when the are tapped for positions. It can be brutal the scrunity and many turned that opportunity down. So it’s not always what it seems.”

Still Johnson’s sharp words made much sharper by the fact that the pastor was also scheduled to speak at a Morehouse baccalaureate event just the day before Obama momentous speech for the graduates. Johnson’s tersely written piece quickly threatened to derail the historic weekend for many Morehouse alumni and African-Americans thrilled to welcome the first African American President in a year that commemorates the 150th year of the Emancipation Proclamation, Morehouse’s 100th anniversary, and the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream’’ speech.L

Read the whole piece at The Daily Beast.

Article source: http://thegrio.com/2013/05/18/black-pastors-stirs-controversy-ahead-of-obamas-morehouse-commencement-speech/

(AP Photo/The Seattle Times, Alan Berner)

Right wing talker Glenn Beck is at it again…

The former Fox News host, who runs his own multimedia company and hosts a popular conservative talk radio show, has in the past accused President Barack Obama of hating white people and “the white culture,” and tried to wrap himself and the tea party movement in the mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Now, Beck is going after another of his favorite targets: the NAACP.

Responding to comments by NAACP Chairman Emeritus Julian Bond, who on MSNBC and in statements to theGrio, blasted Republicans for hypocrisy in attacking the IRS for reviewing tea party groups who sought tax exempt status from the IRS, but who had no such objections to the tax agency auditing the NAACP under George W. Bush. The NAACP faced a two-year IRS probe, launched, the agency said, because of statements by Bond that were critical of Bush and the Iraq war. And starting in December of 2000, Republican lawmakers in Washington wrote then then IRS commissioner, demanding that the NAACP be stripped of its tax exempt status over criticism by Bond and others of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision that decided the presidential election in Bush’s favor.

Bush told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts recently that he thinks it was “entirely legitimate to look at the tea party” groups who were seeking special tax status under the IRS’ 501(c)4 code.

“I mean, here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who tried as best they can to harm President [Barack] Obama in every way they can,” Bond said during the broadcast last Tuesday. “They are the Taliban wing of American politics and we all ought to be a little worried about them.”

And Bond summed up his views on what he calls the hypocrisy of the right in comments to theGrio, saying: “Black people audited — no big deal. Overwhelmingly white and racist Tea Party audited? Super outrage!”

In response, Beck unleashed a tirade against the NAACP during his radio show on Saturday, urging his listeners to “dismiss” the NAACP and adding:

…they are a joke, and an affront to everything that Martin Luther King and anybody who ever… Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, you are an affront to their memory.

Beck had some choice words for the Obama White House too, claiming their “revenge, vengeance and spite” were akin to police brutality against blacks, and he went on to detail who he believed were the real targets of lynchings and racist persecution during King’s day, and asserted that neither Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nor any of the other historic figures would have “had anything to do” with the NAACP today.

From Mediaite:

Martin Luther King marched with an awful lot of white people…20 percent of the lynchings in the south, 20 percent of the lynchings by the KKK, where of white people. And you know what? I contend, the white people that were lynched are exactly the type of people that would be in the Tea Party today.

Beck’s ongoing history problem

Beck might need to hire a fact checker

The NAACP “was the first organization to really speak vehemently for black citizenship on a national level,” says historian Blair L.M. Kelley, who teaches history at North Carolina State University. “And it was a direct carryover of the legacy of Frederick Douglass.”

As for Beck’s convoluted formulation, throwing Douglass and Booker T. Washington, both born into slavery, 38 years apart, Kelley says Beck gets it wrong again, along with the actual history of the NAACP.

“So W.E.B. Dubois starts up something called the Niagara movement in response to Booker T. Washington’s attempts to blame lynching on the victims, and to discount racial terror in his effort to accommodate white supremacy” in the late 19th and early 20th century, Kelley says. But the Niagara Movement, which was all-Black, failed because Booker T. Washington, who was a favorite of white intellectuals and political leaders, including President Teddy Roosevelt, at the time, “essentially silences him.”

“So Dubois goes on to find some white activists, who were the children and grandchildren of abolitionists, who partnered with him, and they were the founders of the NAACP.” In fact, Kelley says, Dubois was the only black person in the earliest years of the NAACP who had a visible position. “So it is an interracial organization,” Kelley says. “It is now, and it always has been. The NAACP welcomes white members. It’s an organization that is interested in justice and equality for citizens in the U.S., period. So it’s completely ridiculous that an organization that grows out of interracial work at the turn of the century — at the nadir of race relations — somehow today becomes symbolic of black hate.”

Throw in the fact that King was himself a longtime member of the NAACP, including serving on the executive committee of the organization’s Montgomery branch well before the famed boycotts, and Kelley says, Beck is “speaking from an alternate universe.”

Bond and current NAACP president Ben Jealous could not be reached for comment.

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Article source: http://thegrio.com/2013/05/18/glenn-becks-latest-ugly-attack-on-the-naacp/

Members of the Morehouse College 2002 graduating class sing their school song during commencement ceremonies May 19, 2002 in Atlanta. About 500 men received their undergraduate degrees from the predominately black school. (Photo by Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)

President Obama will deliver the commencement speech at Morehouse College — the storied predominantly black men’s college an alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King — on Sunday. But he won’t find a total respite from controversy.

As Allison Samuels writes in the Daily Beast, Obama’s speech is already being upstaged by controversial comments about the president by a prominent black pastor from Philadelphia. Samuels writes:

While Sunday will mark the first time an African-American president will deliver the commencement college address to a graduating class of all male African-Americans, one alumni of Morehouse felt compelled to pen an scathing editorial about the president for to those “too’ taken in by the symbolic meaning of it all. Writing in the Philadelphia Tribune earlier in April, Pastor Kevin Johnson from Philadelphia didn’t hold anything back in a piece entitled, “A President for Everyone, Except for Black People.” The op-ed compared the number of African Americans who hold senior positions in Obama’s cabinet with earlier administrations and found the result unacceptable. Two of the cabinet’s four African Americans and both of its Hispanic members from Obama’s first term have announced they are leaving. Only one of the two Asian Americans who served during the first Obama term remains.

Demographic strategist Donna Brazile said that with his inflammatory comments, Johnson was playing a familiar role for community activists and pastors. She added that White House office numbers don’t always tell the entire story.

“This president has done a great deal in choosing and appointing a diverse group in the White House and on the Supreme Court,” said Brazile. “But civil rights activists and pastors such as Johnson will always want more and that’s their role and that’s fine. The next president will be expected to do even more than President Obama has. But let’s not forget what Attorney General Eric Holder is going through and what a lot of minorities are forced to go through when the are tapped for positions. It can be brutal the scrunity and many turned that opportunity down. So it’s not always what it seems.”

Still Johnson’s sharp words made much sharper by the fact that the pastor was also scheduled to speak at a Morehouse baccalaureate event just the day before Obama momentous speech for the graduates. Johnson’s tersely written piece quickly threatened to derail the historic weekend for many Morehouse alumni and African-Americans thrilled to welcome the first African American President in a year that commemorates the 150th year of the Emancipation Proclamation, Morehouse’s 100th anniversary, and the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream’’ speech.L

Read the whole piece at The Daily Beast.

Article source: http://thegrio.com/2013/05/18/black-pastors-stirs-controversy-ahead-of-obamas-morehouse-commencement-speech/