MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid Defends Obama Tying Christianity to Slavery, ISIS

‘Race-based atrocities aimed at preserving the pre-Civil War racial order they were committed by people who considered themselves good Christians’

“While the president is catching unending grief for the Crusades part, what about the second half of that passage? The part not about the 11th century, the part of the president's statement that's especially interesting today. When a group called The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has released a report cataloging an inventory of 3,959 victims of racial terror lynchings in twelve southern states from 1877 to 1950.

They include a lynching in Kirvin, Texas, where three black men, two of them almost certainly innocent, were accused of killing a white women and, under the gaze of hundreds of soda-drinking spectators, were castrated, stabbed, beaten and tied to a plow and set afire in the spring of 1922. And one-time massacres of large numbers of African-Americans such as occurred in Arkansas in 1919 and in Louisiana in 1887. And the time in Paris, Texas, when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire in the city fairgrounds in 1920.

And while those were race-based atrocities aimed at preserving the pre-Civil War racial order, they were committed by people who considered themselves good Christians. Members of the Ku Klux Klan who could bomb Sixteenth Street Baptists Church on Sunday morning, killing four little girls and still show up for service and sit in the front row without drawing so much as betted eye.

In fact, when Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail in April of 1963, five months before the church bombing in the city nicknamed Bombingham, and keeping in mind that then as now the Klan affirmatively called itself a Christian organization, he wasn’t writing to Americans in general, he was writing to fellow members of the Christian clergy, urging them to stop turning a blind eye to the racial terrorism around them.

He was doing what Americans are calling on Muslim leaders to do right now, urging his co-religionists to stand up to terrorism.”

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