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This is a perfective example of political correctness gone amok.
Juan Williams, a best syndication author of assorted books on the civil right motion in America, was fired from his occupation at National Public Radio for remarks he made on the O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel. Williams, an African American and self-proclaimed moderate liberal, spoke in answer to a question from Bill O’Reilly as to whether O’Reilly was right when he said the former week on “The View” that Muslims attacked us on 9/11. After O’Reilly made his remark, both Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, stood up in anger and stomped off the set.
“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot,” Williams answered. “But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves primary and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
In addition to his television, radio and newspaper work, Williams has written various books including the biography “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” and “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.” His impressive resume includes working for the Washington Post for 21 years as an editorial writer and op-ed columnist, in addition to appearing regularly on NPR Radio for the past 10 years. Yet all this meant not one thing to the bigwigs at NPR Radio, who plainly were looking for a reason to fire Williams.
Williams’ comment was made on a Monday night. But it wasn’t until he got a phone call on Wednesday afternoon, that he knew he had been given the ax. On the phone, a high level manager told Williams he was being fired because his remarks on The O’Reilly Factor this past Monday were inconsistent with NPR’s editorial standards and practices, and undermined his believability as a news analyst with NPR. Williams asked for a face-to-face meeting, but was told that the decision already had been made and not one thing he could say would make them alter their minds with regards to his firing.
But wait, then it gets worse.
When NPR CEO Vivian Schiller was asked regarding Williams’ firing, she said she regretted that NPR executives did not meet with Williams in person to talk about their decision. But that Williams remarks represented the latest in a series of deeply troubling incidents, and that Williams had antecedently been admonished that the things he said antecedently violated NPR standards. Williams has since refused that any former discussions in regards to his conduct ever took place with anybody at NPR.
But then Schiller said inexplicable, that Williams’ remarks were among “him and his shrink.” indicating that Williams either had already had, or must seek psychiatric help. Williams took outstanding offense to Schiller’s remark and well he should. Schiller has since apologized, but according to Williams, she did not apologize to him.
Yet things did not turn out so bad for Williams in the long run. After he was fired from NPR Radio, Fox News awarded him a three-year contract reportedly worth $2 million.
Still, the question remains – did Williams’ remarks cause his firing? Or was it done for a great deal of other reason; for instance, his cosiness with Fox News, where he appeared often as the liberal viewpoint on a largely conservative television station? NPR, for all it’s claims of fairness, has a decidedly left wing bent, and according to Williams, they were just looking for a reason to fire him, because they abhorred the fact he was seen so oftentimes on the hated Fox Network.
The facts seem to point to the latter. Case in point.
In 1995, Nina Totenberg, who likewise is an employee of NPR radio, said when it comes to Senator Jess Helms that if there was “retributive justice” in the world, Helms, or one of his grandkid deserved to get AIDS from a transfusion, because Helms was a rigorous contestant of gay rights. Despite that hideous remark, Totenberg is still NPR’s legal affairs correspondent.
Why wasn’t Totenberg fired? Certainly what she said was much more outrageous than anything Williams ever said. Could it be that Ms. Totenberg is a regular on the liberal network MSNBC, and has never appeared on Fox?
The feisty Williams did not go away quietly. In an consultation on Fox and Friends, Williams said the government ought to end all funding for NPR. He said, “If they want to compete in the marketplace, they must compete in the marketplace. They don’t need public funds. I think that they will have to go out there. They think their product is so great, go out and trade the product.”
NPR reportedly gets only 2% of it’s funding from the government. In fact, ultra-liberal financier George Soros not so long ago gave $1.8 million to NPR to hire 100 reporters all over America. Is this Soros’ way of buying political (read “liberal”) influence at NPR? Sure sounds like it.
So perchance Juan Williams is right. Maybe NPR has a far left agenda, and if you don’t run with their liberal football, they have no place for you at National Public Radio.
If that’s the case, the next sound you listen will be the coffin closing on fair-minded journalism in America. And for that reason alone, the government must vote to end all funding to NPR Radio, just as a matter of principle. I’m sure this will come up on Congress’ agenda after the new year. It will be interesting to see how they vote on this issue. And who votes for and against.
Williams’ firing has caused outrage in both Democratic and Republican circles. It’s rather possible that de-funding NPR may get bipartisan support. As well it should.
Thurgood Marshall Revolutionary Juan Williams
This New York Times Notable Book of the Year, 1998, is now in trade paper.
From the bestselling author of Eyes on the Prize, here is the definitive biography of the outstanding lawyer and Supreme Court justice.
ReviewWashington Post correspondent and TV commentator Juan Williams has invented an illuminating look at a true giant of 20th-century American politics. Williams retells the story of Thurgood Marshall’s successful desegregation of public schools in the U.S. with his victory in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, followed by his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1967 for a 24-year term. But he also recounts how W.E.B. Du Bois, then the head of the NAACP, gave a cold shoulder to the younger Marshall (who at long last helped oust Du Bois from the organization), and describes the tug of war among Marshall and FBI conductor J. Edgar Hoover, as well as the mind games Lyndon Johnson played on Marshall before nominating him for the Supreme Court. Readers also learn regarding Marshall’s kinship with his replacement, Clarence Thomas, which was breathtakingly civil given their contrary views on affirmative action. Williams has captured a heap of examples of Thurgood Marshall’s heroism and humanity in this comprehensive yet readable biography of a complex, combative, and courageous civil rights figure. –Eugene Holley Jr.
From Publishers WeeklyThirteen years before getting the initial African-American justice on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall’s place in American history was secured, with his victory over school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Williams (Eyes on the Prize) offers readers a thorough, straightforward life of “the improbable leading actor in creating social change in the United States in the twentieth century.” Although he was refused access to the files of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where Marshall devoted more than 40 years of his law career, and worked without the joint operation of Marshall’s family, Williams has managed to fill in the blanks with over 150 interviews, including lengthy sessions with Marshall himself in 1989. Marshall is portrayed as an outspoken critic of black militancy and nonviolent demonstrations. Williams mentions, but does not dwell on, Marshall’s history of heavy drinking, womanizing and sexual harassment. But his private contacts with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, even while that institution was working to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, receives critical attention. This kinship “could have cost him his believability among civil rights activists had it become known,” writes Williams. Likewise, it would appear that his extra-legal activenesses and charges of incompetence and Communist connections would, if publicized, have held him from the Supreme Court, as he himself admitted. Nevertheless, this work will stand as an accessible and fitting tribute to a champion of person rights and “the architect of American race relations.” Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalThese two books when it comes to a giant in U.S. legal and political history mirror each other in myriad ways, detailing the history of the NAACP, the rise of Jim Crow, lynchings, etc. Ball’s (political science, Univ. of Vermont) study holds more legal lingo, which makes for a less interesting read, while Williams’s portrait is more revealing of the private side of the justice.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Thurgood Marshall Revolutionary Juan Williams Picture
Thurgood Marshall Revolutionary Juan Williams Picture
Thurgood Marshall Revolutionary Juan Williams Picture
Thurgood Marshall Revolutionary Juan Williams Photo
Most helpful client reviews
20 of 21 persons found the following review helpful.
 A unfeigned American Revolutionary
By A
Despite the great number of biographies and reporting in regards to the justices and inner working of the Supreme Court, no recent release tells the unfeigned story behind the story — the humane lives behind all the politics and power. However, in a new biography when it comes to the basi African-American Supreme Court justice, Washington Post writer and Fox News commentator Juan Williams makes Thurgood Marshall come alive beyond the legal arguments and politics. Williams takes the reader allround the course of Marshall’s life, and ironically focuses only the final four chapters on his Supreme Court years.
Using this technique for the life story of most past and present Justices would be a meandering re-telling with regards to growing up in a political family, attending esteemed schools, and making a large total of cash before landing a coveted occupation on the high bench. But Marshall’s life is so exclusively dissimilar from most of the men (and they have been almost totally men) that have wielded this extreme judicial power over the country. And it is that distinctive life story that allows Marshall to transform the nation.
Starting with his rise from a meager beginning in Baltimore, Williams guides us through the arousing and attention holding history of Marshall’s activist family – from the defiant runaway slave for one grandfather to the other grandfather, a surly Civil War veteran who challenged the brutal racism of the local police. It was in this 19th century city of Baltimore, full of free blacks who owned their own businesses and ran their own private schools, that formed the community that gave birth to Thurgood Marshall. These activists, who demanded that their rights be valued even in a time of Jim Crow oppression, would nurture Marshall’s social consciousness.
Marshall’s childhood is filled with his own battles versus the system of segregation that oppressed so some African-Americans throughout the country. Particularly poignant was the story when it comes to Marshall, working as a deliverance boy for the duration of high school, being pulled off a trolley car and called “Nigger” because he stepped in front of a white woman. Marshall, strong-willed even as a teen, would not take that kind of abuse, and a huge fight broke out amongst Marshall and the white man who had grabbed him.
But Marshall’s struggle versus Jim Crow only increased after he went away to college. Attending Lincoln University, he fell into a friendship with the poetical Langston Hughes, who was likewise a student at the all-male school. Their discussions in regards to American society lead Marshall to take more inviolable views on race. But it wasn’t until he graduated college and wanted to attend law school that the revolutionary spirit entirely took hold of Thurgood Marshall. The University of Maryland would not grant him to attend because of their racist policies. So Marshall was forced to take the train every day from Baltimore into Washington to attend law school at Howard University. There, the tough-minded dean, Charles Houston, took the bright young student beneath his wing and gave Marshall the training and the desire to do something radical – commence the long procedure of ending segregation.
Williams recounts the a lot of years of Marshall’s work with the NAACP, where as the lead attorney he won assorted noteworthy cases ending discrimination in everything from housing to voting to bussing to teachers salaries. But it was his work in Brown versus Board of Education that genuinely broke the back of segregation and made Marshall, as Williams contends, one of the most crucial lawyers of the 20th century. Williams goes through assorted of these historic cases, but the most compelling tales implicate Marshall’s defense of poor black men who had been accused of rape or murder and are rushed into kangaroo courts by southern, all-white law enforcement. Marshall’s triumphs and failures all come out in these stories filled with both outstanding humor and immense tragedy.
Thoroughly researched and with an impressive set of interviews, including over half-dozen of Marshall’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, we get to see the full side of Thurgood Marshall. From his fights and surprising friendship with FBI conductor J. Edgar Hoover, to his contest with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is clear through this parade of the famous and notorious that Thurgood Marshall had such a unfathomed affect on this country. It is unfortunate that at the time of his death, he felt so forgotten and unappreciated.
This lengthy biography covers so a lot of primary issues of American life and law. While readers will not find theoretical legal analysis, they will become absorbed in a rich narrative filled with lively characters. But most importantly, this book of Marshall’s life brings into focus something that has been lost in recent shouting matches with regards to Louis Farrakhan, affirmative action, and other issues of race that divide us. And that simple truth is that person rights must be afforded the fullest protections of the law. That was Marshall’s life work and that is his legacy.
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
 A Complex Personality who changed the direction of history
By fourants@california.net
Williams surely perceives the value of Marshall’s outstanding contributions to the long overdue progress of African-Americans. Often over shadowed by King and Malcom X, Marshall accomplished much with his work in the courts to pave the way for the end of segregation. The subdivisions leading up to Brown were compelling and helped fetch the reader back to time that is very dissimilar than today, but not too long ago. People unfamilar with the reality of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s will find this book invaluable. However, the strength of this book is that it paints Marshall not only as a outstanding man, but a man with flaws. His dealings with other leaders, specially his conflicts with other great African-American leaders, his late night drinking, his womanizing all make him more humane and more compelling. Not only was Marshall a significant fiqure in the Civil Rights movement, but he was likewise human, a man that readers may relate to and understand.
14 of 16 humans found the following review helpful.
An unbelievable account of an astounding life
By Christina Sorenson
This is one of the most fantasti books I ever read. Thurgood Marshall is one of the most dynamic figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Williams not only gives an magnificent and engaging account of Marshall’s life, he represents the time in a manner that without apparent effort imagined. I was not alive for the duration of this amount of time of time, but reading Williams’ book made me feel as even though I had experienced it. So often, when an author veritably likes and admires his subject, the work that results is biased and not well-rounded. You may tell when you are reading something that is one-sided and too tributory to be accurate. Williams’ wonderment for this outstanding man shines through in his book; however, it is by no means a song to Marshall. Williams’ is reasonable in his dedication to not only Marshall’s courage and brilliance, but also his fallibility and humanity. This is what brings the history to life. When you finish reading this book, you will feel as even though you recognise Thurgood Marshall.
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