Most Americans can see there is a vast difference between a time in America where racist mobs lynched innocent black men, and today. But NPR is full of liberals who like to engage in the slur that nothing has changed in American race relations. Now, apparently, the racist mobs are the police.
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On Friday’s Morning Edition, NPR did a story on the revival of anti-lynching plays, where an actor named Edmund Alyn Jones blurred yesterday into today: “I think the revival of these plays that happened a long time ago gives us enough distance to say oh, that's awful. Oh, wait a minute. That looks a lot like what's happening right now. Oh, I see.”
NPR anchor David Greene introduced the subject: “Art can be a window into a nation's social climate. Take the early 1900s when black playwrights created a genre known as anti-lynching plays. With the recent deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police, some of these plays are being revived in New York.”
Reporter Hansi Lo Wang elaborated:
WANG: In the play, a young black man is thrown in jail for brushing up against a white woman on the street - a theme Jones sees playing out today.
JONES: A young man now, if he's dressed a certain way or he's in a neighborhood that he doesn't belong in, that is the modern-day equivalent of bumping into that white lady.
HARGE: Someday you encounter the wrong person and your life is over. And that kind of idea feels very relevant to the world we particularly as black people are living in.
WANG: Courtney Harge is acting in and directing Blue-Eyed Black Boy. She says Walter Scott, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other unarmed black men killed by police were on her mind as she prepared for this series of four plays. Rehearsals for the next one will begin after this Sunday's show. It's called Safe, about an African-American woman who makes a tragic choice after giving birth to a baby boy. Just before he's born, she sees a young black man being lynched outside her home.
HARGE: And asks herself how do I bring a child into this world and try and keep them safe when they are looked at as threats just by existing? Is it cruel in some way to bring a child into this world that way? And it's an answer I don't have.
WANG: But they're questions in a play from 1929 that, Harge says, are just as pressing almost 90 years later. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.
No one in this NPR story would acknowledge that Michael Brown was reaching for police officer Darren Wilson's gun -- shortly after robbing a store. Instead, they assumed that today's black men are always just as innocent as lynched men from yesterday.
