By Janell Ross and Vanessa Williams:
The attack on John Lewis, however, underscores Trump’s tense relationship with black voters and seemed to echo some of his past confrontations with African Americans.
Trump started his presidential campaign with huge disadvantages among African Americans, in part because of his years-long questioning of whether President Obama was born in the United States. Trump also drew criticism for taking out a full-page ad in New York newspapers in 1989 urging the death penalty for five black and Hispanic teenagers accused of raping a woman in Central Park. Even after the young men were exonerated, Trump criticized the city for awarding them damages for the years they had spent in prison and continued to argue that they were “guilty of something.”
In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump began appealing to black voters to give him a chance. Speaking at rallies, to overwhelmingly white audiences, Trump described black people as living “in hell,” stuck in crumbling, crime-ridden neighborhoods and failing schools. “What do you have to lose?” he asked.
For some people, Trump’s attack on Lewis — as well as his inaccurate description of Atlanta, a longtime haven for middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans — brought it all back.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, said that if Trump was serious about reaching out to the black community, he would have to take responsibility for a campaign whose tone was “divisive at best, seriously offensive at worst” and “dangerous” with reports of an increase in racist behavior and actions directed at minorities by some whites. She said he will have to meet with and apologize to the civil rights community and young activists in the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The burden of proof is on you. It’s not on everybody else to warm up to you because you’re the president,” she said of Trump. “Because the rhetoric came out of his mouth, the burden of proof is on him to show that he’s changed, he’s sensitive and he cares about those issues.”
The Full Story (January 15, 2017)
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