Let’s get something perfectly straight: Herschel Walker is by no means an ideal political candidate. The Republican Georgia Senate hopeful has enough baggage to fill a convoy.
But according to the New York Times, Walker’s biggest, heaviest baggage of all may be his race. Or, rather, his being a race traitor:
"Herschel forgot where he came from." Polls show Herschel Walker getting less than 10% of Georgia's Black vote in his Senate run. There are many possible explanations. But in his hometown, Wrightsville, they have roots in one seismic spring stretch in 1980.https://t.co/pEUaOcBsj1 pic.twitter.com/hKZwBSMAhU
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 2, 2022
It was outside the courthouse in 1979 that the Rev. E.J. Wilson, a Black pastor and civil rights activist new to town, began organizing protests calling out the indignities of being Black in Wrightsville.
Schools had been integrated, but plenty else felt separate and unequal. City jobs and services mostly went to white people. The police force was white. There was an all-white country club but no public parks or pools. Black neighborhoods had dirt roads and leaky sewers. There was still an all-white cemetery, Mr. Wilson pointed out.
…
In May, Sheriff Attaway and his deputies, guns drawn and bracing for a riot, rolled down South Valley Street into a Black neighborhood where Mr. Wilson’s red brick church still stands. They went door to door, arresting and jailing about 40 people, some for days, most without charges.
Mr. Walker never got involved.
“I’d like to think I had something to do with it,” said Gary Jordan, a white man who coached Mr. Walker in track and football, starting when Mr. Walker was in fifth grade. “I said, ‘You can’t get into shape marching. You’ve got to run. And practice is at 3.’”
Mr. Walker had several other white mentors in town, including an owner of a service station where Mr. Walker worked and a farmer who had employed his parents. Another was a math teacher, Jeanette Caneega.
“As a student in school, his role in society was not to solve the racial problems of the world,” she said this summer.
“I don’t want to be divisive,” Gary Phillips, Mr. Walker’s high-school football coach, who is white, said, “but as an 18-year-old Black kid in Wrightsville with a lot of pressure on him, can you see how or why he might have decided that this is not the best thing for me, to start getting into this?”
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Congratulations to New York Times writer John Branch for working so hard to prove that Herschel Walker betrayed his black community by not getting involved in protests while he was a high school student.
The New York Times got a white reporter based in California to do a story that Herschel Walker isn’t black enough. Amazing. https://t.co/P8KOcn5eOM
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 3, 2022
Why focus purely on substantive criticism of Herschel Walker when they can go to his hometown and look for residents to beef up the New York Times’ argument that Herschel Walker isn’t sufficiently black?
You are very bad people.
— Khloe31 (@kristinatk23) October 2, 2022
At least they didn’t call him the black face of white supremacy like the LA Times did to Larry Elder.
— Justine (@BruinJustine) October 3, 2022
The bar is low, folks.
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