Racism Is Racism
Racism is racism, and it is ugly wherever and whenever it is evidenced (see “Critics Blast Cherokee Nation for Ousting Freedmen from Tribal Rolls,” April 5). It makes no sense for the Cherokees to admit and then oust Freedmen from their rolls. Of all that the Cherokees have picked up from the White man, greed and racism against Black people are the most non-Indian characteristics of all.
— Jim Charles
This story is uniquely disappointing for me because my personal genealogy traces my great-grandmother back to the Cherokees of Alabama. She, her Black husband and 10 children were a part of the Great Black Migration from the rural South to the urban North, relocating from Dothan, Ala., to Newark, N.J., in 1919. We knew a lot about her because she was our family matriarch until her death in 1975 at 100 years of age. What kind of an anti-Black attitude does this referendum indicate, just at a time when I believe that African-Americans are becoming interested in extending the wisdom and practical knowledge of the world’s most successful civil rights movement to their “brothers and sisters” in greatly depressed Native American communities?
— Janice Harris Jackson
New Jersey NAACP State Education Chair
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