Posted on 10/23/2002 9:13:14 AM PDT by aomagrat
The NAACP urged DaimlerChrysler not to invest in South Carolina and said Tuesday it will do the same with other major industrial prospects, extending its campaign against the Confederate flag to a new economic front.
James Gallman, president of the South Carolina branch of the NAACP, said he asked the group's national office to write the German automaker urging it not to build a plant near Summerville because of the group's boycott of the state over the flag issue.
DaimlerChrysler acknowledged receiving the letter, but insisted it was not a factor in the decision to choose Savannah as the site of a $754 million, 3,300-employee cargo van plant.
"That is so ludicrous," said Othmar Stein, the company's chief spokesman for commercial vehicles in Stuttgart. "I don't believe that played any role whatsoever. This is a business decision."
Gallman said the letter marks an expansion of the boycott beyond tourism to industrial recruitment.
"Our request was they not come into South Carolina and subject their minority employees to the kind of blatant racism and poor race relations we have in South Carolina," Gallman said.
The NAACP's involvement was disclosed Friday by Georgia Gov. Roy E. Barnes. He said the civil rights organization made DaimlerChrysler aware of the flag controversy in South Carolina, as well as its resolution in Georgia.
But Morton Brilliant, a spokesman for Gov. Jim Hodges, said DaimlerChrysler officials never raised the flag issue.
S.C. Commerce Department officials called DaimlerChrysler after Barnes's comments, but were told the flag controversy had no bearing on the decision, said Jim Morris, commerce's chief of staff.
"Gov. Barnes is using that for political hay in his race in Georgia," Morris said. "To suggest we've done the right thing in Georgia, they are still screwing up in South Carolina, it's just not true."
Hodges and Barnes, both Democrats, are seeking re-election.
The Confederate battle flag flies on a pole in front of the State House following a compromise by the General Assembly that removed it from atop the Capitol dome in 2000.
Supporters say the flag honors South Carolina's Confederate veterans of the Civil War. The NAACP considers it a symbol of slavery fit only for display in a historical setting.
The group launched a tourism boycott of South Carolina in January 2000. The impact has been minimal, state tourism officials said.
Georgia legislators changed that state's flag in January 2001 at Barnes' urging, avoiding an economic boycott threatened by the NAACP. The new flag replaced the Confederate emblem - added in 1956 - with small depictions of the state's five previous flags, including the one with the Confederate emblem.
S.C. House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, said the NAACP's appeal was wrong even if it had no influence.
"They should be ashamed for taking credit for preventing good-paying jobs from coming to South Carolina," Wilkins said.
Gallman said the group will target every "major company" considering a move to South Carolina. The state chapter will contact the national office in Baltimore, which will then contact the company.
In the case of DaimlerChrysler, Gallman said, the letter was sent around August by the NAACP's national chairman, Julian Bond.
Gallman said he didn't have a copy of the letter. Bond did not immediately return calls.
Bond, a civil rights movement leader who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, represented Atlanta in the Georgia legislature from 1966 to 1987 as a Democrat.
Wilkins, the House leader, and S.C. Senate Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, said neither body will take up the flag issue in the next session.
McConnell, who owns a Civil War memorabilia shop in Charleston, said he doubts the group would have any effect on DaimlerChrysler or another company, but even if they did, he would not change his position.
"I would never agree to move the soldiers' flag from the soldiers' monument for any plant," he said. "The flag isn't going anywhere else. They can continue to complain all they want to."
S.C. Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Richland and a former supporter of the flag compromise, said the issue won't go away until the flag does.
"Leaders of South Carolina have to decide what's important to us: attracting companies or flying a Confederate flag at the Capitol," he said. "They're going to see more of this, instead of less."
True. If most black people who think of the NAACP as their voice would look into the history of the organization, they would disown it. It has historically been funded and controlled by white socialists and communists. Early on, all its officers were white and its founder truly despised and envied Booker T Washington who spoke out about Dubois' methods of agitating for legislation instead of working within the economy and pulling oneself up by one's own efforts. The founder of the NAACP died in Africa, the guest of a communist dictator and was a member of the communist party. Today's NAACP is controlled by muslims who hate the US, Christianity and white people, not necessarily in that order.
As to what this gooner said:
"Our request was they not come into South Carolina and subject their minority employees to the kind of blatant racism and poor race relations we have in South Carolina," Gallman said.
There's no barbed wire keeping him in the Palmetto State. He can go elsewhere when he pleases. I wish that everyone who feels the way he does would really boycott South Carolina and take their whining acts to New York or somewhere.
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