Former NAACP Leader: ‘The greatest danger to the lives of young black men are young black men’

Bryant

Alex Pappas
The Daily Caller

Former NAACP leader C.L. Bryant is accusing Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton of “exploiting” the Trayvon Martin tragedy to “racially divide this country.”

“His family should be outraged at the fact that they’re using this child as  the bait to inflame racial passions,” Rev. C.L. Bryant said in a Monday  interview with The Daily Caller.

The conservative black pastor who was once the chapter president of the  Garland, Texas NAACP called Jackson and Sharpton “race hustlers” and said they  are “acting as though they are buzzards circling the carcass of this young  boy.”

Jackson, for example, recently said Martin’s death shows how “blacks are  under attack” and “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately  killing us is big business.”  (SEE  ALSO: Jesse Jackson says Trayvon Martin ‘murdered and  martyred’)

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, killed Martin, a 17-year-old  black man who was unarmed at the time of his death, last month. Zimmerman has  claimed to have shot Martin in self-defense and has not been charged with a  crime.

But Bryant, who explores the topic of black-on-black crime in his new film “Runaway Slave,” said people like Jackson and Sharpton are being misleading to  suggest there is an epidemic of “white men killing black young men.”

“The epidemic is truly black on black crime,” Bryant said. “The greatest  danger to the lives of young black men are young black men.”

Bryant said he wishes civil rights leaders were protesting those  problems.

“Why not be angry about the wholesale murder that goes on in the streets of  Newark and Chicago?” he asked. “Why isn’t somebody angry about that six-year-old  girl who was killed on her steps last weekend in a cross fire when two gang  members in Chicago start shooting at each other? Why is there no outrage about  that?”

Bryant said he worries that “people like Sharpton and those on the left” will  make Martin’s death a campaign issue in the presidential race.

He speculated that they will “turn this evolving tragedy of this young man  into fodder to say… if you don’t re-elect Obama then you will have unbridled  events or circumstances like this happening in the streets to young men wearing  hoodies.”

(RELATED: Herman Cain criticizes ‘swirling rhetoric’ after Martin  shooting)

He also criticized President Obama for his “nebulous statement” responding to  Martin’s death that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

“What does that mean?” Bryant asked. “What was the purpose in that?”

Read more:  http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/26/former-naacp-leader-accuses-sharpton-and-jackson-of-exploiting-trayvon-martin/#ixzz1qPSlROy9


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