Jackson Free Press

A disturbing meeting took place at the Madison County Cultural Center Monday night. It was a tea-party-organized forum to call for the state of Mississippi to adopt an anti-"illegals" law such as the one the state of Arizona recently enacted, and which is now caught up in legal battles over its constitutionality. Never mind that a judge stopped much of that law, which would allow authorities to make any Latino-looking person show their immigration papers on demand. Never mind that Mississippi does not share a border with Mexico. Never mind that the emotional arguments against "illegals" aren't fact-based (especially those dealing with their economic impact on the U.S.)

Never mind all that. What matters for Mississippi, not to mention Jackson and our neighbor Madison, is that this kind of politically driven fervor against people based on their skin tone and geographic origin is disturbing, dangerous and harks back to a not-so-distant past when white Mississippians spread falsehoods about black people in order to justify unequal protection under the law.

(And it should come as no surprise that many of the same people want to do away with the 14th Amendment that gives Equal Protection to discriminated-against groups. Convenient.)

Most disturbing about this Madison meeting is that it is was sanctioned by upstanding and supposedly reasonable members of the greater Jackson community. Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant was there, not long after he started throwing around the disparaging label of "anchor babies" for children of undocumented workers who are born in the U.S. and are, thus, just as much an American citizen as Bryant or you or us. Mayor Mary Hawkins-Butler was there as well.

Sadly, these people clearly think traveling this hateful road is good politics. So did members of the Citizens Council and the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) when they met in government-owned buildings throughout Mississippi to "protect" white citizens from African Americans who supposedly wanted their jobs and resources. They told lies then, and immigration fear-mongers are telling lies now.

Predictably, conservative radio trash-talker Kim Wade spoke, and he didn't hold back on the real reason behind this immigration hysteria. He made it plain to the JFP and to the audience there: "They" will come here, register to vote and then vote for Democrats.

Old enough to remember those words from the 1960s (except, then, it was the Dixiecrats spreading fear of then-progressive Republicans)? The fight against giving blacks the right to vote (presumably for the "other") was loud and vicious then, and led to violence. Now, people like Wade, who is black, is trying to get blacks to turn against "Hispanics" (his word) in order to keep them from coming here and taking voting power away from his Republican and tea-party friends.

Truth is stranger and scarier than fiction. Republicans and Democrats alike must reject this hate rhetoric and the people spreading it.