| Crispus Attucks, the namesake |
It took a while, but the spirit of Crispus Attucks — the first casualty of the Boston Massacre, who happened to be black — has finally worked its way into the Tea Party: Founded by über-conservative pundit and apparent uppercase “C” fan, Anita MonCrief, Houston’s Crispus Attucks Tea Party will host its inaugural meeting Jan. 18.
The group’s “primary objective is to break the cycles of dependency and decay that continue to anesthetize and hold captive too many black families and neighborhoods,” according to a press release.
Co-founder and spokesman E.L. Johnson elaborated for Hair Balls: “The need that we see is quite apparent when you visit any one of the predominantly black areas — any of Houston’s wards, if you will — ….the social programs and social justice theories and experiments have been devastating to those communities. Almost every one of them looks like a war zone.”
Despite the liberal, government-program “propaganda” being “pumped”
into those neighborhoods, the residents are largely conservative,
Johnson says.
“So the Crispus Attucks Tea Party is an effort to provide safe harbor for the conservatives living in those areas,” he says.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting at This Is It Soul Food will be
MonCrief and newly elected State Rep. James Earl White. (The chapter’s
literature points to White as the perfect Crispus Attucks teabagger,
noting that White won in an East Texas district “which was a Ku Klux
Klan territory and is a predominantly white House district….Texas and
America are entering a period where ‘content and character are indeed
more important than color.'”)
MonCrief, who describes herself as an “ACORN whistleblower,” will be
moving to Houston from Washington, D.C., to better guide the chapter,
Johnson says. He wouldn’t say how many members they’ve rounded up so
far, but since it’s just getting off the ground, we assume it’s going to
take a little while to build. For one thing, Johnson says he hasn’t had
a whole lot of luck with black clergy, although he really wants them to
work hand-in-hand with the new chapter.
All we know is, if the group continues to hold meetings at kick-ass restaurants like This Is It, they’ve got a bright future.
This article appears in Jan 6-12, 2011.
