Oct 20, 2010

NAACP report claims 'links' between some Tea Party factions and racist groups

01:18 PM
By Dusty Compton, AP

The NAACP issued a report today on Tea Party Nationalism that raises concerns about alleged links between some Tea Party Factions and "acknowledged racist hate groups" but is careful not to indict the entire movement.

Read the full report here.

"We know the majority of Tea Party supporters are sincere, principled people of goodwill," NAACP president Ben Jealous says in a foreword to the report.

But, he says, the study "exposes links" between "certain Tea Party factions" and acknowledged racist groups. "These links should give all patriotic Americans pause," he says.

The full report itself argues that some Tea Party groups "have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots" and have attracted recruiters from some white nationalist organizations.

"The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are in their numerical majority, angry middle-class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them," the report says.

It says that only the Freedomworks Tea Party, which has headquarters in Washington, D.C., "has made an explicit attempt to narrow the focus of the movement as a whole to fiscal issues -- an effort that has largely failed, as this report documents."

In July, the NAACP convention passed a resolution calling on Tea Party groups to repudiate any racism in their ranks.

"The resolution kicked off a heated rhetorical battle between the NAACP and the movement, which insists it is not racist," CBS news notes.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... t-groups/1