"CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King, in her live coverage of the inauguration of President Donald Trump, said: "I have to say, I'm looking at this crowd, I do not see many people of color. Does any -- does anybody else besides me observe that? I'm fascinated by why that is."
The implication, of course, is that Trump, despite getting a greater percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate in the last 48 years, is racist.
ABC's "The View" co-host Sunny Hostin, who is black, had the opposite complaint. She slammed black entertainers, like rappers Snoop Dogg and Nelly, for appearing and performing at Trump inaugural events. Noting that Trump's inauguration fell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Hostin played a video clip of black former Bill Clinton aide Keith Boykin, who said, "You dishonor (King) when you go and perform for this man, this man who did nothing but dishonor black people."
In the clip, Boykin also said: "If you look at Donald Trump, the man who would refuse to rent to black people in the 1970s, who tried to lead a lynch mob against five black and brown kids in the 1980s for the Central Park case, who refused to allow black casino workers to have a prominent place in his casinos in Atlantic City in the 1990s, who spent five and a half years lying about Barack Obama's birth certificate in the 2000s ..."
Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright, the mentor of Boykin's former boss Clinton, was a "devout segregationist" as described in a 2016 Washington Examiner article titled "Mentor was a segregationist: Bill Clinton now says he likes #BlackLivesMatter." And Fulbright was Clinton's mentor before he had renounced segregation.
As to Trump's supposed refusal to rent to blacks in the '70s, Boykin refers to a consent decree entered into by the Trump organization when Donald Trump was 26 and the business was run by his father. The Trump organization agreed to change practices but admitted no guilt.
By the way, in 1974, now-Sen. Chuck Schumer, then a freshman New York assemblyman, proposed a racist scheme to rid blacks from a neighborhood in New York. Read the article "Race to the Top" by Jay Homnick in The American Spectator. Democrat Schumer's blatantly racist scheme generates no interest from a media always eager for examples of Trump and Republican racism.
About Trump's "lynch mob" against the Central Park Five, he took out ads denouncing them, though not by name. Despite their later "exoneration," the Central Park Five were guilty. Neither documentary filmmaker Ken Burns nor film producer Ava DuVernay, both of whom made films "proving" the defendants' "innocence," ever interviewed the lead detective, who is black. I did. He insists they are guilty. The lead prosecutors stand by the convictions.
My video on this case can be found on YouTube: "The Truth About the Central Park Five."
Trump has denied allegations made by at least two former employees that he discriminated against black casino workers. Since then, Trump was praised by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, as well as other prominent New York City blacks and black entertainers -- until Trump ran for president as a Republican.
In 2016, New York entertainment reporter Liz Crokin said: "I've had the opportunity to cover Trump for over a decade, and in all my years covering him I've never heard anything negative about the man until he announced he was running for president. Keep in mind, I got paid a lot of money to dig up dirt on celebrities like Trump ..."
As for Trump "lying" about the birthplace of Barack Obama, "Game Change," the book about the 2008 Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton presidential primary campaign, outed the Clinton campaign, not Trump, as the first to peddle the rumor that Obama was born in Africa.
As for Gayle King and her concern for the black community, never mind the epidemic of fatherlessness, the disproportionate amount of crime committed by and against blacks, and underperforming urban schools. No, the real problem is the lack of "people of color" at Trump's inauguration.
Trump is racist for not having more blacks at his inauguration. But blacks who appeared at his inauguration are sellouts. Trump can't win.
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