The NAACP’s Fomenters of Fear

This week, the NAACP made national front-page headlines with a local press release demanding that the feds investigate the hanging death of a local man in Port Gibson, Miss. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP Mississippi State Conference, immediately invoked the specter of a “hate crime.” In response, the Obama Justice Department flooded the zone with a whopping 30 federal agents.

News outlets grabbed the bait. USA Today asked ominously: “Was it a lynching?” The discovery of ex-con Otis Byrd’s body swinging from a tree by a bed sheet “brought back unpleasant memories of America’s violent, racially charged past,” the paper’s video reporter asserted. Voice of America similarly intoned: “Mississippi hanging death raises lynching specter.” The Los Angeles Times leaped into the fray with: “Why this story haunts the nation.”

Whoa there, teeth-gnashing Nellies. Didn’t we just recently witness the implosion of an NAACP-incited non-hate crime with the same exact narrative? Why, yes. Yes, we did.

As I reported in January, the group was here in my adopted hometown of Colorado Springs hyping a so-called “bombing” at the city’s chapter office. Local, state and federal NAACP leaders, amplified by political and media sympathizers, claimed the alleged hate crime “remind(ed) me of another period” (Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis); “undermines years of progress” (Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee); “harkens to bad old days” (MSNBC); and “evokes memories of civil rights strife” (Time magazine).

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