JACKSON - As much as we have moved forward, the victimization crowd continues the relentless dirge of governmental dependency - this time the litany has been couched as reparations.
This traveling road show came to Mississippi to gauge black public opinion about financial restitution for African-American descendants of slaves.
Those beating the drum for reparations have used a strident cadence for doing nothing more than "shaking down" the federal government and Corporate America.
One of the louder voices is Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman, a chairman of the National Reparations Convention Committee, who is seeking compensation for so-called economic, social and financial transgressions caused by slavery.
Tillman incredibly noted that blacks - during a telecast of "Statewide Live" on ETV - who dared oppose reparations were in some way being traitorous to the race. There are no bounds that an activist will go to advance an absurd agenda, and Tillman and her followers are certainly no different.
Using a brand of back-alley, in-your-face politics, Tillman attempted to mask her bigotry and contempt for America with doing something for the downtrodden.
"I am not against anybody," she said. "I am just pro-black."
As an elected official, Tillman had the unmitigated gall to imply that the progress of blacks has been retarded over the past decade.
She had the nerve to continue the lunacy in a state that has the highest percentage of black elected officials in the nation.
During the two days of so-called "public" hearings, she impudently trucked out Mamie Till Mobley, the 80-year-old mother of Emmett Till, who was savagely murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for reportedly whistling at a white woman, and Maria Johnson, who maintains her son, Raynard, was lynched in Marion County in June 2000, to give testimony supporting reparations. No forensic evidence was ever uncovered to support Johnson's contention.
The human parallel in each case goes well beyond reparations, because Till's death was a homicide, and Johnson's death was ruled a suicide.
But Tillman wasted little time in attempting to weave support for a baseless reparations hypothesis.
"You don't have to hate anyone to fight for your own," Tillman said.
"They are snatching our black men and throwing them in jail, just like in slavery."
What is distressing is that there are people out there who believe the racial tripe Tillman spews.
It is of little consequences to Tillman and other ultra-liberals that many blacks have been able to surmount the human impediments of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and bigotry, and are realizing the American Dream.
Their sole mission is to be paid - it doesn't really matter who is going to ante up the ransom. Each American - no matter the hue - should be outraged at this shameless attempt at what amounts to extortion.
So troubling is that Tillman and her cronies often profess to speak for black America about the righteousness of reparations. But not everyone agrees with this flawed logic.
"It's a sort of a continuation of the grievance politics that black American leadership has fallen into," said Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The reparations scheme, Steele said, is little more than black liberals claiming "victimization and hoping to get from the larger society some preferential treatment."
