Harold's Left:
Who would've thought that a rapper named "C- Murder" would be going to jail for... murder of all things. The brother of Rap mogul Master P, C-Murder has been in and out of jail nearly his entire adult life. Just last week he was convicted of two separate offenses. He was given a life sentence for the 2002 murder of 16-year-old Steve Thomas after an altercation outside a nightclub. He was also charged 10 years for shooting up a night club in Baton Rouge. So, sounds like a class act huh? Apparently the NAACP thinks so.
The NAACP in Louisiana is going to fight C-Murder's life conviction on the legal grounds that one of the jurors felt she was rushed into the guilty verdict. So here's my thing. If there is some legal justification for overturning the sentence, fine, let the defense lawyers handle that. However, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People get involved with this, it implies that there is some underlying racial issue at hand, when there likely is not. To me it just seems more likely that an idiot rapper named C-Murder of all things, who has been in and out of jail his entire life, killed someone and deserves to be punished. It's not like we are talking about Corey Booker here, we are talking about C-Murder. Now, does that mean he does not deserve the fairest trial possible? He absolutely does. We all know that black men are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and sentenced for crimes in this country. Yet, when the NAACP gets involved, that is an entirely different issue.
The better question is: Does the NAACP not have better things to fight for than C-Murder? What about the regentrification stuff going on in New Orleans that is essentially blocking blacks from living certain areas of the city? What about the education crisis going on with black and poor youth in Louisiana and other parts of the country? The fact now is that the NAACP only does about two or three important things per year: The NAACP Image Awards, where they celebrate black celebrities (I think we can leave that to BET, although it is needed, it's not the mission of the NAACP), their annual convention (which feels more like a networking event for the black elite than anything else), and lastly a couple of misguided stories like this, trying to cover for a quasi-celebrity named C-Murder.
For an organization with such a rich tradition and names like W.E.B DuBois and Thurgood Marshall, I am truly saddened that this important group is no longer a relevant player in the American progressive movement. They certainly used to be, it was through their brilliance and resolve that Brown v. Board happened, among other things. It is a shame that an organization so important has not learned to ditch old strategies with the changing times, and moreover, is not equipped to keep pace with any of the more influential progressive groups.
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