By Brian Carnell

Thursday, July 13, 2000

I know I should not have been surprised by it, but I was in fact shocked to see FrontPageMag.Com reprinting Al Benson Jr.'s vicious attack on the NAACP, The NAACP's Red Roots. Benson's argument (if you could call it that) is that the NAACP was and is simply a Communist front group.

"Many think that the NAACP was, in the beginning, a worthwhile organization that has just outlived its usefulness," Benson writes. "While some good, honest folks hold to this opinion, I do not share it."

The article only goes downhill from there. Apparently Benson thinks his readers will be shocked to learn that the NAACP was the brainchild of leftists intellectuals like Jane Addams and |John Dewey|. Benson even takes a swipe at the abolitionist movement noting that early NAACP official Oswald Garrison Villard was the "grandson of the infamous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison." Infamous? While Garrison has always been a somewhat controversial individual, especially as his views about nonviolence shifted over the years, he is clearly one of the great Americans of the 19th century who more than anyone made the case against the morally bankrupt institution of slavery in the South. To attempt to slander someone as a radical because he could trace his lineage to Garrison is beyond bizarre.

There is the obligatory attack on WEB Dubois, Langston Hughes and others who were connected with the NAACP and were fellow travelers and defenders of the Soviet system at one time or another. The problem here, of course, is that Benson's characterization of men like Hughes and DuBois is just as one dimensional as the portraits of them by those on the Left who want to remember Hughes and DuBois only as fighters for civil rights and gloss over or completely ignore their support for Communist regimes (is it really shocking that even great men and women are flawed?)

Typical of any true believer, for Benson even evidence that disproves his thesis actually proves it. Like many groups on the liberal-left spectrum, the NAACP did not want to be perceived as being Communist and on several occasions purged its leadership of more extreme Communist supporters. To Benson, however, this is further proof of just how insidious a group the NAACP is:

The organization has, from time to time, gone through the sanitized ritual of "opposing Communism" but this has been a self-serving action designed to keep the support of those that are astute enough to see communism as a problem. ... Although the NAACP has taken several twists and turns over the years to try to "cover its six" as the military saying goes, the record of its early affinity to the Left and the affinity of the Left for the NAACP is a matter of record.

Of course part of the reason early civil rights groups became affiliated with Leftist groups is because there were not exactly a large number of right wing groups agitating to lower legal and extra-legal barriers directed at blacks. All Benson would need do is examine the difficulties encountered by groups trying to get state and federal governments to stop things like lynchings to understand why civil rights leaders were predisposed to the Left.

Which ultimately brings us to the real sin that the NAACP has committed in Benson's eyes -- they have attacked his precious Confederate symbols.

The organization's blatant attack on all Confederate symbols would certainly have the unqualified support of the Left and can truly be construed as nothing more than updated racism.

This is such bizarre reasoning I do not even know how to begin to parse this madness. It is amusing, though, to see Benson address the problem that his beloved Confederacy was fighting for the continued expansion of slavery by resorting to a typical liberal left argument -- according to Benson everyone was doing it!

Let it suffice to say that slavery existed in all 13 colonies, both North and South, and that all slave ships flew the United States flag after we won our independence from Great Britain. Lots of "good" Northern folks got rich off the slave trade.

True enough, but the Northern states quickly banned slavery after the Revolutionary War as being incompatible with the sort of free society the Constitution created. Moreover, while lots of "good" Northern folks did get rich off the slave trade, they were not still defending the moral abomination as the Confederacy.

David Horowitz rightly complains when his critics smear him as being a racist, but what does he expect people are going to think of him when he hires editors for FrontPageMag.Com who let this sort of crap get by them.

Benson says that, "Where they [the NAACP] have come from is where they are going, (ever leftward) and we had best continue to being taken there" but despite the disagreements I have with the NAACP's statist views, choosing between their vision and Benson's would be no contest.

Source:

The NAACP's Red Roots. Al Benson Jr., FrontPageMag.Com, July 7, 2000.

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