A conservative African American pastor who founded a Tea Party organization in South Central L.A., says he agrees with Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich that many blacks lack a work ethic. The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson’s solution: send them back to the plantation.
Peterson explained his plan to The Huffington Post’s Black Voices, saying, “one of the things that I would do is take all black people back to the South and put them on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working. I’m going to put them all on the plantation. They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”
He made the comments when asked to comment on Gingrich’s back and forth with Fox News correspondent Juan Williams, who questioned Gingrich about what he called potentially insulting comments about the poor and minorities during a Republican presidential debate Monday in South Carolina.
Peterson told Black Voices Newt is absolutely right:
“Newt said that he would have black children, minority children work as janitors at school. Working as a janitor would build character, more so than the handouts so many of them like.”
“I know some people take it personally because a whole lot of folks don’t like hearing the truth; they like to be in denial,” he added. “Not all black people, but most black people know, and white people know, and black people say it more in private than they would in public, but for the last 50 years or so, generations and generations of black people have relied on the government or someone else to take care of them.”
“Many black women have had babies out of wedlock and passed that on to their daughters that if they have babies out of wedlock, they’ll get food stamps, free houses and your rent paid,” Peterson said.
According to the report, Peterson himself grew up on an Alabama plantation where his family had once been enslaved, and where members of his family had later worked as share croppers.
He is no stranger to controversial rhetoric, having slammed the NAACP for what he called “spreading lies” about racism within the tea party and being hypocrites for not speaking out when “black thugs attack white Americans and commit crimes in flash mobs across the country.”
Last summer, Peterson organized a South Central Los Angeles Tea Party rally, through his organization, Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (B.O.N.D), which was aimed at denouncing the NAACP, which Peterson called a “political pawn of the liberal-elite, white, racist Democratic Party and not really for the people.”
Peterson told Black Voices he hopes that black people will ultimately “hear the truth” and “pull away from the Democratic Party and its godless leaders.”
