Mugging Frederick Douglass

Mugging Frederick Douglass

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 7/4/2003

IN HIS DRIVE-BY shootings of black progress, Clarence Thomas speeds away, spitting at his victims and spewing quotations that stun the onlookers as much as the original attack. No other thug commits black-on-black crime in the name of Frederick Douglass.

Last year, Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, voted to uphold the Cleveland school voucher program even though predominately white suburban systems refused to take them and the $2,250 voucher barely covered one class at wealthy, predominately white private schools. Despite that, Thomas quoted Douglass, the slavery abolitionist, as saying, ''Education ... means emancipation.''

Last week, when the court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan's law school, Thomas dissented, saying, ''Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.'' Thomas quoted Douglass as saying in an 1865 speech in Boston: ''The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us ... I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! ... If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall ... All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... Your interference is doing him positive injury.''

Thomas figures if he can get people to believe that unassailable black heroes would smile upon his assault on black people, he will not be arrested as the cowardly black hitman for organized racism. Organized racism, led by conservative think tanks and right-wing politicians, has been trying this for over a decade, trying to kill affirmative action by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 line about not judging people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. They always dump the King that said near the end of his life, ''America is deeply racist, and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially ... White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.''

Despite what King really thought, organized racism has often succeeded in getting white Americans to view affirmative action as reverse discrimination, even though white Americans retain a vast, disproportionate grip on valued jobs and college admissions. Their task has been made all the easier by a battle-shy Democratic Party and a nation whose attention span is so short that less than two years after 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists, the people have already stopped asking the White House, ''Where's Osama?''

So Thomas is not unique in twisting the words of black icons. But because he is the only black person on the Supreme Court, and because opponents of affirmative action are so eager to find black thugs to darken their white crimes, Thomas's twisting of Douglass takes on a supreme meaning. Douglass and King exhorted African-Americans to work hard to break down barriers and make no excuses. They also held America accountable for racism.

Douglass indeed told a crowd in Boston in 1865, ''Let him alone!'' He indeed said, ''Your interference is doing him positive injury.'' But Thomas dropped the sentences in between, the sentences where Douglass held America accountable. The full quote was: ''Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner-table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot-box, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone - your interference is doing him a positive injury.''

It is no wonder Thomas dropped those lines. White America collectively kept interfering, keeping black children out of schools, restaurants, ballot boxes, and good jobs for another century. We are still not being left alone. George W. Bush became president as many African-Americans in Florida shouted interference at the ballot box. Just when affirmative action has helped African-Americans get in the front door of the workshop, a lot of white folks holler white rights.

Thomas also did not quote the very end of the speech he tried to use to trash affirmative action. Douglass said the Civil War swept away many delusions that an African-American was too lazy to work, too cowardly to fight, or was ''a perfect lamb or an Uncle Tom, disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands and be whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him.''

Thomas dared not quote that, for he is the antithesis of Douglass's boast. In his decisions and dissents, Thomas has been the perfect lamb for organized racism. Whenever required, he puts on his robes and whips out a pen to gun down black people. Ironically, the title of that Douglass speech was ''What the Black Man Wants.'' What most black men want is for Thomas to stop playing the Tom.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.