Tea Party rejects NAACP’s call to condemn racist signs and language at rallies

HONOLULU—At Tuesday’s NAACP convention in Kansas City, over 2,000 delegates unanimously passed a resolution calling on Tea Party leaders to actively condemn those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.

The resolution began as a reaction to last year’s national media reports of Tea Party members using racial epithets at the Congressional Black Caucus during a health care protest and using anti-gay slurs to describe Congressman Barney Frank, an openly gay member of Congress. The NAACP was also concerned about signs and chants used at Tea Party rallies, often aimed at President Barack Obama, that were overtly racist.

In a statement, the NAACP said that the language of the proposed resolution has been misconstrued by some conservative blogs to imply that the NAACP was condemning the entire Tea Party movement itself as racist.

Missouri’s St. Louis Tea Party organization, for example, created a counter resolution that calls the NAACP resolution “bigoted, false, and inflammatory” and goes as far as to request that the IRS reconsider the NAACP’s tax exempt status for being partisan. The Tea Party resolution states: “It is a hallmark of America that we settle our disputes civilly and avoid the gutter tactic of attempting to silence opponents by inflammatory name-calling.”

Sarah Palin reacted to the NAACP’s resolution on her Facebook page: “I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow ‘racists.’ The charge that Tea Party Americans judge people by the color of their skin is false, appalling, and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand.”

Because debate over the NAACP resolution was mostly closed to the public at the Kansas City convention, it is still unclear what the language in the resolution actually says. Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, told Associated Press that the final version of the resolution “calls on the Tea Party and all people of good will to repudiate the racist element and activities within the Tea Party. ... I hope it will empower the Tea Party to actually look at itself and see that there are those who are noticing things that I think most Tea Partiers don’t want.”

The resolution was amended during Tuesday’s debate to specifically ask the Tea Party itself to “repudiate the racist elements and activities of the Tea Party,” the NAACP said in a statement.

“We take no issue with the Tea Party movement,” said NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy. What we take issue with is the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in their movement.”

The NAACP resolution will not become official policy until approved by the National Board of Directors, who will meet for a full vote in October in Baltimore, Maryland. A formal copy of the resolution will be released at that time.

The NAACP was founded in 1909, partly in response to the continuing practice of lynching and the 1908 race riot in Springfield. The NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization with more than 500,000 members. The NAACP’s mission is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of minority group U.S. citizens and eliminate race prejudice.