Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media by Ishmael Reed Read Free Book Online Page A

Glass-Steagall Act, which permitted the kind of wildcat speculation that has led to millions of Americans losing billions in equity.
    Carl Bernstein, appearing on Air America Radio on January 9, 2008, described Clinton’s New Hampshire attacks on Obama as “petulant.” Bill Clinton’s behavior demonstrated that regardless of his admiration for jazz, and black preaching, he and his spouse will go South on a black man whom they perceive as being audacious enough to sass Mrs. Clinton. In this respect, he falls in the tradition of the southern demagogue: grinning with and sharing pot likker and cornbread with black folks, while signifying about them before whites. Though his role models are Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, he has more in common with Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge ( The Wild Man From Sugar Creek ), Louisiana’s Huey Long, and his brother Earl, Edwin Edwards, who even hinted that he had black ancestry to gain black votes, Alabama’s George Wallace, Texas’s Pa Ferguson, and “Kissing Jim” Folsom, who wrote, You Are My Sunshine . He employs the colorful rhetoric of the southern demagogue, the rustic homilies (“till the last dog dies”), the whiff of corruption.
    Having been educated at elite schools where studying the War of the Roses was more important than studying Reconstruction, the under-educated white male punditry and their token white women failed to detect the racial code phrases that both Clintons and their surrogates sent out—codes that, judging from their responses, infuriated blacks, caught immediately. Blacks have been deciphering these hidden messages for four hundred years. They had to in order to survive.
    Gloria Steinem perhaps attended the same schools. Her remark that black men received the vote “fifty years before women,” in a New York Times Op-Ed (January 8, 2008), which some say contributed to Obama’s defeat in New Hampshire, ignores the fact that black men were met by white terrorism, including massacres, and economic retaliation when attempting to exercise the franchise. She and her followers, who’ve spent thousands of hours in graduate school, must have gotten all of their information about Reconstruction from Gone With The Wind , where moviegoers are asked to sympathize with a proto-feminist, Scarlett O’Hara, who finally has to fend for herself after years of being doted upon by the unpaid household help. Booker T. Washington, an educator born into slavery, said that young white people had been waited on so that after the war they didn’t know how to take care of themselves, and Mary Chesnutt, author of The Civil War Diaries , and a friend of Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s family, said that upper class Southern white women were so slave dependent that they were “indolent.” Steinem and her followers should read, Redemption, The Last Battle Of The Civil War , by Nicholas Lemann, which tells the story about how “in 1875, an army of white terrorists in Mississippi led a campaign to ‘redeem’ their state—to abolish with violence and murder if need be, the newly won civil rights of freed slaves and blacks.” Such violence and intimidation was practiced all over the South sometimes resulting in massacres. One of the worst massacres of black men occurred at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. Their crime? Attempting to exercise the voting rights awarded to them “fifty years” before white women received theirs. Lemann writes “burning Negroes” met “savage and hellish butchery.”
    They were all killed, unarmed, at close range, while begging for mercy. Those who tried to escape, were overtaken, mustered in crowds, made to stand around, and, while in every attitude of humiliation and supplication, were shot down and their bodies mangled and hacked to hasten their death or to satiate the hellish malice of their heartless murderers, even