K Carl Smith and his brother probably thought they were on safe ground with a such a timely and catchy lecture, called, “Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You’re Not One?” At the Conservative Political Action Conference, this could have been easily misunderstood as a lecture featuring Donald Trump talking about his relationship with the blacks. After all, K Carl Smith and his brother are black men claiming to be Republicans in what is supposed to be an outreach year for the GOP, and they’re trying their best to spread Frederick Douglass’s message of Capitalism, states’ rights, property rights, and small government. What could go wrong?
On their website, they have Frederick Douglass all figured out, and, in a video clip comparing “Douglass vs. Obama,” they break it down:
Frederick Douglass: Admired The Founding Fathers.
Obama: Hates them.
Douglass: Respected the U.S. Constitution.
Obama: Rejects The U.S. Constitution
Who can argue with such logic? This is History According To Wingnuts 101 where Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were Conservative Republicans fighting the tyranny of big government.
Perhaps the man himself, Frederick Douglass, can shed some light on the subject? In a speech given on July 5th 1852, while living under the freedom and liberty that The Founders bequeathed to him, titled, “The Meaning Of The Fourth Of July For The Negro,” Frederick Douglass reminds the Smith brothers what life was like in the glorious land of founding freedom and capitalism:
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
It would be years later when Frederick Douglass, recruiting for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first African American regiment recruited in the North against the Confederacy, would see his fiery words of small government and property rights put into action.
But not to be shown up by some uppity production of touchy-feely Right Wing Frederick Douglass, today’s Republican Party, the party of overt minority voter disenfranchisement, showed up to object to the idea that slavery was ever really that bad, and to argue that segregation should be reinstated, and, while claiming to be a direct descendant of Jefferson Davis, Terry Scott, wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt and a George Wallace button, challenged K Carl Smith, who was in the middle of speaking about Frederick Douglass forgiving his slavemaster, and asked him, “Did he thank him for giving him shelter?”
Good people. This is the year 2013, so, the Frederick Douglass Brothers didn’t have much of an answer, but you know who did? Frederick Douglass. In a speech given November 4th, 1841, called, “The Church and Prejudice,” as if right on cue, Douglass responds from the grave:
Thus you see, my hearers, this prejudice goes even into the church of God. And there are those who carry it so far that it is disagreeable to them even to think of going to heaven, if colored people are going there too. And whence comes it? The grand cause is slavery; but there are others less prominent; one of them is the way in which children in this part of the country are instructed to regard the blacks.
“Yes!” exclaimed an old gentleman, interrupting him–”when they behave wrong, they are told, ‘black man come catch you.’”
Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place! They assign us that place; they don’t let us do it for ourselves, nor will they allow us a voice in the decision. They will not allow that we have a head to think, and a heart to feel, and a soul to aspire. They treat us not as men, but as dogs–they cry “Stu-boy!” and expect us to run and do their bidding. That’s the way we are liked. You degrade us, and then ask why we are degraded–you shut our mouths, and then ask why we don’t speak–you close our colleges and seminaries against us, and then ask why we don’t know more.
But all this prejudice sinks into insignificance in my mind, when compared with the enormous iniquity of the system which is its cause–the system that sold my four sisters and my brothers into bondage–and which calls in its priests to defend it even from the Bible! The slaveholding ministers preach up the divine right of the slaveholders to property in their fellow- men. The southern preachers say to the poor slave, “Oh! if you wish to be happy in time, happy in eternity, you must be obedient to your masters; their interest is yours. God made one portion of men to do the working, and another to do the thinking; how good God is! Now, you have no trouble or anxiety; but ah! you can’t imagine how perplexing it is to your masters and mistresses to have so much thinking to do in your behalf! You cannot appreciate your blessings; you know not how happy a thing it is for you, that you were born of that portion of the human family which has the working, instead of the thinking to do! Oh! how grateful and obedient you ought to be to your masters! How beautiful are the arrangements of Providence! Look at your hard, horny hands–see how nicely they are adapted to the labor you have to perform! Look at our delicate fingers, so exactly fitted for our station, and see how manifest it is that God designed us to be His thinkers, and you the workers–Oh! the wisdom of God!”–I used to attend a Methodist church, in which my master was a class leader; he would talk most sanctimoniously about the dear Redeemer, who was sent “to preach deliverance to the captives, and set at liberty them that are bruised”–he could pray at morning, pray at noon, and pray at night; yet he could lash up my poor cousin by his two thumbs, and inflict stripes and blows upon his bare back, till the blood streamed to the ground! all the time quoting scripture, for his authority, and appealing to that passage of the Holy Bible which says, “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!” Such was the amount of this good Methodist’s piety.
Sounds like someone has some unresolved issues with slavemasters.
It turns out, Scott Terry was there as part of a group called, Towson’s White Students Union– a White supremacist outfit that recruits fresh young minds for all sorts of upstanding activities, including getting their guy, Rand Paul, elected president and being labeled a hate group, even boasting on their website: “Despite being named as part of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map, the Towson White Student Union has been enjoying itself.”
It seems so.
But that’s not even the worst part. That came when The Traveling Frederick Douglass Brothers eventually swallowed their pride and pretty much apologized for offending those white men, issuing a statement that actually blamed the African American woman in attendance for starting all the trouble.
The Ghost of Frederick Douglass could not be reached for comment.