(ThyBlackMan.com) At first the mass media just about completely ignored Ron Paul, and when they did mention him it was merely to say he had not a snowball’s chance of winning the nomination. Now, though, now they are giving him much more air play focusing on derogatory comments attributed to him more than 20 years ago, comments which he disavows and says he actually did not write. I say this not to excuse him. However, whether he did or did not pen these remarks, we must note that he does not now espouse those views. And while we certainly should take them into account in judging his viability for the presidency, we must put them in their proper context. . .
Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ, is down in the history books as a champion of the Black community, having pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which broke the back of legalized segregation in America. In so doing, Johnson alienated his fellow white Southerners, and most of them left to join the Republican Party. Nonetheless, LBJ was undeterred and continued to speak out against bigotry until the end of his days. 
However, no one in the media has ever, to my knowledge, made mention of the fact that Lyndon Johnson in 1957 as a top adviser to President Eisenhower spoke out sharply and vociferously against Eisenhower’s proposed civil rights legislation. LBJ cautioned Eisenhower to scuttle his plans to pass the same legislation that he would later go on to sponsor seven years later.
Note how Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, as Majority Leader in the Senate, pushed through many measures aimed at ending inequality, and for this he is fondly remembered. The fact that he was once a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, while sitting in Congress, was not mentioned by the media 20, 30, or even 40 years later!
Did you know that Ronald Regan in 1980 kicked off his successful campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi? This was the town where three civil rights workers were savagely tortured and killed by a mob led by police in 1963. Many in the Black community, and many fair minded people of all races, felt that this was a signal to white racists that Reagan wanted their support. However, this was never, to my knowledge, ever discussed in the mass media.
Let’s take a look at Bill Clinton, America’s saxophone playing “First Black President,” who today has his office in Harlem. Clinton interrupted his campaign for the presidency in 1992 to rush back to Little Rock to sign the papers to put to death a young Black man so brain damaged that when they took him out of his cell to walk the Last Mile, he told the jailers not to throw away his food, he was coming back to finish it. This was the same Bill Clinton who so greatly intensified the War on Drugs, which is really a War on Black America, that the number of Black inmates in prison, during his tenure, for mere drug possession increased many, many times over. No one in the mass media has charged him with being a racist for any of this.
The differential in prison time for the possession of crack cocaine, as opposed to powdered cocaine, is 17 to 1. (Whites tend to use powder and Blacks crack.) But none of our presidents or anyone of those individuals sitting in Congress who passed these drug laws, and kept them on the books for more than 20 years, is accused by the press of being racist.
So, yes, some derogatory statements appeared under Ron Paul’s name decades ago, but why are others’ transgressions quickly forgotten while his are being dug up and paraded around? And speaking of the Drug War that is actually a War on Black America, Ron Paul is the only candidate in the race, including President Obama, who has called for the immediate repeal of these unjust, racially inspired and racially enforced drug laws. So, yes, take into account what Ron Paul may have said decades ago, but note carefully what others are saying, and not saying, today.
