Adele M. Stan: Rand Paul Explains Black History to Black People!

If, in his speech to the students of the historically black Howard University on Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky, sought to demonstrate he was down with the concerns of African Americans, his approach left a bit to be desired. He explained black history to black people. He suggested that he was brave to have shown up. He quoted a poem that is said to be the lament of a sexually frustrated middle aged man. Paul went on to deny killing budget autonomy for the District of Columbia, despite the three poison pill amendments he added to the bill. During the question and answer period, he chided a young voting rights activist for comparing voter ID laws to the obstructions African Americans faced at the polls, during Jim Crow. And he said he had nothing against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite being on record as opposing the provision that desegregated the lunch counters, that were occupied at great peril by the Freedom Riders, who fought the South's Jim Crow laws. In short, Rand Paul delivered a pretty embarrassing performance, but perhaps not in ways that the audience for whom his speech was intended, Republican primary voters would notice. Not that all was lost for Paul, amid the audience in the auditorium of Howard's School of Business. His proposals for ending the mandatory minimum sentences, that have led to the incarceration of massive numbers of African Americans for non violent offenses, and against military intervention abroad, were well received. In apparent preparation for the presidential bid he's contemplating, Paul addressed a polite but skeptical audience in a speech that was part damage control, part condescending history lesson, and part appeal to African Americans to embrace his neo-libertarian philosophy. The damage Paul needs to control, is that he did to himself, when he went public during his successful 2010 campaign for US Senate, with his true feelings about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically the part that integrated lunch counters, restaurants, and other privately owned establishments that are open to the public, which, he said, he opposed. But in his speech to the largely African American audience at Howard, Paul suggested that his position had been twisted and distorted by his political enemies. Just a couple of minutes into his speech, Paul referred top the controversy, attempting to frame it with a TS Eliot poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prusock, in ways I found incomprehensible!