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AmSpecBlog
Katon Dawson and His GOP Mission
Katon Dawson felt working for the GOP was necessary given what happened to him early on:
I've always been involved in politics. And I guess it goes all the way back to my school career and education. I, in the 1960s was a product of school segregation, where we took our schools and completely disbanded them, and made racial equality. Fifty-Fifty. And the kids had no choices. They closed Booker T. Washington, Blease, down here. A pretty good school. Closed it and sent the students to A. C. Flora, across town. And they did it over the summer because the laws had been changed by the politicians. And, the day that school opened, we were on CBS news with the busses turned upside down, and one of them lit on fire. By folks who didn't want to go to school there. Not folks who did.
The end of that story was, I was standing in a bathroom in public school... This scar over here [pointing to his forehead] was from a baseball bat. I will tell you it was a pretty harsh environment. Government reached into my life and grabbed me and shook me at the age of fifteen. I remember how blatant it was that government just thought that they knew better, that government just thought they knew better what to do in my school. And I can't say it was so much racial. I can say that people had a lot of stuff thrust on them because politicians thought they knew better.
Emphasis mine. Notwithstanding whether there might have been better ways to integrate schools than federal fiat (I've heard arguments to that end, but I'm not convinced), why is Katon Dawson on record saying this? That government reaching into his life during this time was something terrible. Is that something the GOP is going to want to defend if Dawson is elected?
UPDATE: David Weigel says, "To be fair to Dawson, he has been endorsed by two of the three black members of the RNC, and getting brained by a baseball bat is no fun."
When has "Some of my best friends are Black" ever resonated in a debate?
J. Peter Freire is contributing editor of The American Spectator. Freire first came to the Spectator as an intern and editorial assistant under a journalism fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Since then, he has written for the New York Times, Reason, and Human Events. Prior to returning to The American Spectator, he was editor of Brainwash, an online journal of opinion from America's Future Foundation, worked for the Evans-Novak Political Report, and researched and wrote for the New York Times. Freire studied English Renaissance literature and political science at Cornell University, where he served as senior editor and columnist at the Cornell Review. He is also a 2008 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow and the CPAC 2009 Journalist of the Year.
You can reach his Twitter page by clicking here, or follow him @JPFreire.