Before Trayvon Martin had even been buried, his parents were seeking to cash in on his death, to the tune of millions of dollars.
They contacted a black lawyer, Benjamin Crump, who had engineered a race hoax in the boot camp death of black juvenile delinquent Martin Lee Anderson and gotten a $7.15 million settlement from the state of Florida. [Trayvon Martin Case Repeats 2006 “Playbook” for Martin Lee Anderson by Dan Riehl and Lee Stranahan, Big Journalism, April 2, 2012.]
Crump’s method is extra-legal but typical of the tactics developed since the 1960s by the trial lawyer-Ralph Nader alliance: he gets his journalistic and political allies (e.g. Al Sharpton) to steamroll the authorities with race hoax demagoguery, forcing them to settle before trial. Thus the hoax, and Crump's limited litigation skills, are never actually tested in court.
Black race hoaxes have become a big, well-organized business. They divert millions and even billions of dollars from Americans to blacks and their non-black allies—in addition to the trillions that have already been seized and directed blackward, via government coercion, from white taxpayers. [See my America’s Debt to Blacks Already Paid in Full, Middle American News, August 2001.]
From 1954 to 1987, the occasional hoaxes, often involving false charges of “police brutality", were typically more about power, and helping black criminals, than money. (For example, Howard Beach.)
The mid-1980s saw the entry of Al Sharpton and “activist attorneys” Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason.
Mason helped engineer the first (to my knowledge) Columbia race hoax. On March 22, 1987, during three separate attacks at Columbia University, a mob of seven young black men students and non-students beat up a total of five white Columbia men students.
A group called Concerned Black Students at Columbia [CBSC)], represented by Mason, transformed the black racist attacks into one in which
"a mob of white students had kicked and stomped a single black student and then went on a rampage shouting, 'We're going to kill you f*cking n*ggers!'"
Although 22 witnesses had already contradicted the black attackers’ claims, the latter were never arrested, and indeed, demanded that their white victims be arrested.
When CBSC engaged in rioting, Columbia responded by promising more Affirmative Action in admissions and hiring.
The Columbia race hoax received months-long coverage by the national Main Stream Media [MSM]; once the hoax was exposed, the MSM went silent. Campus racial socialists then used the (non-existent) “hate speech” at Columbia as a pretext to ram through unconstitutional, illegal speech codes on college campuses nationwide.
As Thomas Short recounted in Commentary magazine, (A "New Racism" on Campus?, August 1988), the combination of MSM support for the Columbia hoaxers, and the lack of legal consequences for their crimes, encouraged black students at six other East Coast university campuses, including Duke, to take over campus buildings in spring 1987. In each case, the black students decried (non-existent) "resurgent [white] racism" on campus, and demanded and got expanded affirmative action for blacks.
The expanded Affirmative Action cost each institution additional millions of dollars per year in the short run alone, and contributed to continuous hikes in tuition—and more hoaxes (here and here)! Whites had to pay for ever more questionable black students (on scholarship), staffers, faculty and administrators. Meanwhile, qualified whites lost out on the admissions and jobs slots. (American Renaissance’s Henry Wolff has just demonstrated that this reparations-regardless-of-the facts process is still at work: That UC San Diego-Obama DOJ Settlement: Racial Socialism Via Sweetheart Deal, May 28, 2012)
Next came the November, 1987, Tawana Brawley Hoax. A 15-year-old, chronic runaway ran away from home again, and then concocted a bizarre, utterly ridiculous story—which was immediately refuted—of being kidnapped by as many as seven generic “white cops” who, Brawley claimed, had kept her outside in the late November cold for four days, continuously raped and sodomized her, and scrawled racial epithets on her body with dog feces.
Sharpton, Maddox, Mason, and the MSM promoted the Brawley hoax nationally. Its short-term economic costs: millions of dollars for the months-long investigation and grand jury, and what was estimated to be some $300,000 that supporters had sent to Brawley. (For two or more people to get others to send them money, using deception and chicanery, constitutes the federal felony of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Needless to say, no-one was prosecuted, although Alton Maddox did have his law license suspended.)
Two different neighbors eventually testified before a grand jury that in February, 1988, each had overheard Brawley’s mother, Glenda, make incriminating statements to the latter’s live-in boyfriend, Ralph King:
“You shouldn’t have took the money because after it all comes out, they’re going to find out the truth,” and “They know we’re lying, and they’re going to find out and come and get us.” [Evidence Points to Deceit by Brawley, [no byline], New York Times, September 27, 1988.]
“They” found out, alright. But they never came.
The 1987-1988 campus and Brawley hoaxes seem to have been some sort of watershed. Thanks to the cowardly, decadent white authorities who refused to prosecute the hoaxers (with the interesting exception of cases involving insurance fraud), and to the active collaboration of the Main Stream Media, black activists saw that they could get away with just about anything. The hoaxes have been non-stop ever since.
In 1995, liberal Laird Wilcox wrote the book, Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America. Several years later, he lamented that there had been so many hoaxes since then, that no single book could possibly track the phenomenon.
That hoax was engineered by an employee at KTLA News who edited the tape of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers, by cutting out the opening sequence of King charging the officers. (Cf. NBC/ Trayvon Martin). The KTLA employee has never been identified.
In the business sphere, Jesse Jackson Sr. sowed the seeds, and reaped the crop for making the race hoax standard behavior among blacks. Beginning in the early 1980s, he extorted tens of millions of dollars out of corporations for himself, and for millions more for blacks dependent on him as Affirmative Action hires and “diversity consultants.” [Jesse Jackson’s Shakedown Methods by Kenneth Timmerman, World Net Daily, March 11, 2002.]
The problem is, you can’t just hire unqualified blacks to no-show jobs. They demand constant promotions, and to be given the joint to run it into the ground, as well.
In reality, thousands of black Floridians had voted illegally. Convicted felons who were ineligible had voted. Students at “historically black” black colleges, who claimed to have been disenfranchised, had in fact voted twice—using both their home and college addresses. (This is the background to the current war between the Obama Administration and Florida’s Republican Governor). The hoaxers simply sought to steal the election for Vice-President Al Gore—in order to steal billions more dollars from white taxpayers. [The Great Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax by Nicholas Stix, Middle American News, February 2001.]
The Florida Hoax cost millions of dollars in investigation and litigation.
The USDA’s sweetheart settlement has cost the predominantly white tax base over $2 billion so far.
Although the black attackers were getting pro bono legal representation, they nevertheless solicited “legal” support, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars via wire fraud. But none went to jail—in significant contrast to George Zimmerman, whose bail has just been vindictively revoked in a technical dispute over his internet-based defense fund.
Black race hoaxes now color all black-white relations. For example, John Derbyshire reports he once worked at a Wall Street firm that paid everyone, including typists, handsomely. A low-level black female employee who had been a good worker, and who had never caused any problems quit—and immediately shook down the firm for a hefty payoff, via a frivolous “civil rights” lawsuit. [Race On Wall Street, National Review Online, January 5, 2001]
No one has ever, to my knowledge, calculated the cost of black race hoaxes. And, of course, they come on top of the trillions of dollars of government transfer payments.
But the real cost is political, cultural, and moral. These hoaxes are an extension of the Cultural Marxist totalitarian will to power. They make peaceful white and black co-existence impossible. They entail, ultimately, the destruction of America.
Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, the New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
