We read:
"For years, New York City's flagship main Public Library has annually honored a group of "literary lions." Long a civil rights and civil liberties lion, Michael Meyers, born in Harlem, is a former assistant director of the NAACP; personal assistant to its late executive director, Roy Wilkins; and a protege of one of my mentors, Dr. Kenneth Clark. Clark's research influenced the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared public-school segregation unconstitutional. Yet on Feb. 21, at the annual meeting in New York of the century-old NAACP, Meyers, refused permission to speak, was removed by NAACP security.
The meeting was held in the midst of a furor of protest by the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black public figures over a cartoon by the New York Post's Sean Delonas showing a chimpanzee shot and killed by the police (as had just actually happened to a pet chimpanzee gone berserk). Said one of the cops: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
Interpreting this as a racist attack on President Barack Obama, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous and its chairman, Julian Bond, had joined the angry chorus of protesters calling for a boycott of the New York Post, and the firing of the cartoonist and the paper's editor. They have worked to make this a national issue if these demands were not met.
Meyers, a widely publicized defender of the First Amendment, had publicly objected to "this exercise in sheer racial rhetoric," adding: "Demagoguery is not the standard of effective leadership in addressing serious social justice issues." Meyers has often written and lectured on race relations, police abuse, housing and education. And as a passionate civil libertarian, he said of the rage to punish those connected with the cartoon: "All political pundits deserve a wide berth for social criticism and for parodying and poking fun at and criticizing our political leaders, no matter the skin color or race of the public official."
Source
Posted by John Ray.
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