MARK WILLIAMS'S APPALLING MORAL HIGH GROUND ENVY

I explained last night why I believe Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express wrote his now-deleted racist letter mocking the NAACP's Benjamin Jealous out of a delusional belief that he and his fellow tea partiers are actually African Americans' best friends. In the comments to my post, Kathy at Birmingham Blues wrote this about an Alabama rally by the Tea Party Express last November:

When the Tea Party Express came to Birmingham last year, Williams bragged on his blog about its appropriation of Kelly Ingram Park, staging ground for civil rights protests and boycotts. He actually said Martin Luther King would have been proud.

Kathy links to her blog, where she wrote at the time:

This is an overwhelmingly white movement whose express (excuse the pun) purpose is to de-legitimize the country's first African-American president, and they were going to gather on the sacred space that served as a staging ground for the boycotts and protests of the civil rights movement. After a bit of thought, I figured it was a purposeful choice, one intended to co-opt the spirit of a struggle for equality that actually cost people their livelihoods -- and their lives.

Turns out I was right. Tea party leader Mark Williams wrote about the location on his blog on Monday, noting

Could there be a better venue to celebrate our freedoms and rise to the defense of civil rights for all? I hope that the symbolism is not lost on people but what happened there today would have to make Dr. King and the victims of Bull Connor proud.

Williams includes, without a hint of irony, a picture of black protesters being sprayed with fire hoses in 1963 juxtaposed with a picture of Monday's crowd -- overwhelmingly white, enjoying the protection of the Birmingham police department, disrupted only by a tiny group of counter-protesters, and limited only by the ending time on their legal permit.

Yes, the Williams post is really that shameless (click to enlarge):





And yes, he wrote this:

Could there be a better venue to celebrate our freedoms and rise to the defense of civil rights for all? I hope that the symbolism is not lost on people but what happened there today would have to make Dr. King and the victims of Bull Connor proud.

People like Mark Williams deeply, deeply resent the fact that those who fought this fight for fundamental civil rights had, and still have, the moral high ground. It appalls them that a movement that was black and that has long been affiliated with progressivism has that status, and they have no access to it. They'd love to find a way to trash the reputation of the civil rights movement the way they manage to trash everything else that's progressive, but they can't seem to do it, and it makes them crazy and hateful. So they want to expropriate the moral standing of the civil rights movement. And why not? They're white, they're not city slickers, and they're not on the left; there isn't anything good in this country they shouldn't have first dibs on, right?

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From Talking Points Memo:

Williams often makes a big production about how racist he isn't. Here's a taste, back from a February Williams email to colleagues that landed in TPM's inbox:

I was in the streets marching for civil rights while asshole southern sheriffs were swinging nail studded baseball bats at black's heads....

I'd quote more from the e-mail, but, um, really? You were marching in the South in the civil rights era, Mark? It says here that you were born in 1956, and that in 1973 you were in high school. Did you get a note from your parents so you could be excused from third grade to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge?