In my new book, “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities,” I make the argument that those who could flee the growing disorder of post-1960s urban America, fled.
Only whites were shamed for fleeing, but blacks fled as well. In the book, I tell the stories of Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy, Kanye West’s mother, Donna, and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson.
All made the conscious decision to pull their children from harm’s way when their neighborhood and its schools broke down around them. “Call it black flight or whatever,” said West after her son was mugged, “I was ready to go.”
One story I did not tell involved famed civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. I did not tell it because it had faded from public consciousness as the media surely intended it to.
The New York Times broke the story on Aug. 31, 1994, headlined, “Rosa Parks Robbed and Beaten.” That the editors relegated the story to the bottom lower corner of page 12 told the savvy reader that this was a crime to which attention ought not be paid.
“A lone man broke in the rear door of Mrs. Parks’s home in central Detroit between 8 and 8:20 this evening,” the Times reported. “When she went downstairs to investigate, a man was inside her house, reeking of alcohol, and he struck her.” Parks was 81 at the time.
After a brief hospitalization, the Times tells us, Parks “moved into a high-rise apartment building.” In fact, Little Caesars founder Mike Ilitch rescued her from her neighborhood and quietly paid her rent until Parks died in 2005.
The absence of any reporting on the attacker’s race alerted the reader that he was not white. The Times would later report that the perp in question, Joseph Skipper, was sentenced to 8 to 15 years for the assault and robbery.
Times columnist Bob Herbert was one of the rare black voices to call attention to the core problem behind Parks’ beating. “We bought into her defiance. Oh yes, we liked that so much we made it fashionable,” he wrote.
“By the mid-’60s defiance had swept the land,” he continued. “But we never mastered the inner strength, the core values and the self-respect that gave the defiance of Mrs. Parks such power.”
This was not a message that held much interest for the vestiges of civil rights establishment or their cheerleaders in the media. They much preferred the myth of white guilt and black innocence.
Upon Parks’ death, Skipper, still in prison, played right into that myth, making a great show of his contrition. As the Times reported, “He dreams of redemption.”
Said Skipper, “I will go down in history as the man who robbed Rosa Parks. I’m sorry that she died. I was hoping to get out in time to tell her I was sorry.”
Skipper eventually got out, but he did not waste a lot of time apologizing. In the first few weeks of 2020, he went on a spree of break-ins and home invasions in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was 54 years old.
In the most serious case, Skipper broke into the home of a 74-year-old woman, assaulted her and robbed her of $50, roughly the same amount he took from Parks.
In the summer of 2020 George Floyd provided a lot of cover for America’s chronic felons, at least the black ones. Racial profiling, systemic racism, mass incarceration – these were the problems plaguing America.
In institutions throughout America, the petty tyrants of the DEI movement drilled these messages into the heads of white people too “fragile” to protest.
They taught their captive audiences about Rosa Parks’ brave stand in 1955 during the Montgomery bus boycott, but the part about her beating, the part about Skipper’s return to his pathetic tradecraft, these they overlooked.
“We are in the dark night of the post-civil rights era,” Herbert concluded his 1994 column. “The wars against segregation have been won, but we are lost. With the violence and degradation into which so many of our people have fallen, we have disgraced the legacy of Rosa Parks.”
Barack Obama has had nearly 20 years to say something nearly half that brave, but he has not and never will.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities,” is now available in all formats.
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