The 67-year-old “Duck Dynasty” star was suspended by A&E Wednesday for calling homosexuality sinful — and putting gay people in same category as terrorists. While those quotes quickly went viral, it wasn’t his only brow-raising statement in the interview; he also implied that African Americans were happier living under Jim Crow laws.
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once,” the reality star said of growing up in pre-Civil-Rights-era Louisiana. “Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word!”
Robertson continued, “Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
Needless to say, that hasn’t gone over well either. A spokesperson for the NAACP shared a copy of the letter that they, along with the Human Rights Campaign, sent to “Duck Dynasty” network A&E. In addition to asking for the network to “denounce and repudiate Robertson’s comments,” they demanded that Robertson “apologizes for his vitriolic comments.”
“We want to be clear why Phil Robertson’s remarks are not just dangerous but also inaccurate,” the letter stated, in part. “Mr. Robertson claims that, from what he saw, African Americans were happier under Jim Crow. What he didn’t see were lynching and beatings of black men and women for attempting to vote or simply walking down the street.”