In a historically ill-advised blog post published Monday morning, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee revealed how low he was willing to go to score political points: that is, by comparing Ferguson protesters to white segregationists.
He wrote:
Some [protesters] are threatening violence if they don't get an indictment. I'm old enough to have seen this mob justice mindset before -- from lynch mobs who didn't like the legal process, so they took the law into their own hands. The real heroes of racial justice were peaceful protesters like the Rev. Martin Luther King. Today, every town has a street named after him. You don't see any monuments to Bull Connor or the killers of Medgar Evers.
Eugene "Bull" Connor was commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, known as an ultra-segregationist with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. He is known for encouraging violence against the Freedom Riders in 1961. Medgar Evers was a black rights activist who lived in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1950s and early '60s. He was threatened by white segregationists (one threw a Molotov cocktail into his home) and was eventually shot by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council and KKK, as he got out of his car.
Protesters have been speaking out, demanding justice for Michael Brown, a black, unarmed teenager who was shot by white cop Darren Wilson. Ashley Yates, a leader of Millennial Activists United, a group active in Ferguson, told the New York Times of the protesters' main goal: "This is not your momma's civil rights movement. This is a movement where you have several different voices, different people. The person in charge is really -- the people. But the message from everyone is the same: Stop killing us."
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