Georgia State Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur) admitted that he wasn’t sure whether “Uncle Tom” was a real person or a fictional character when he used the label to attack sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday.
Jones took to the State Senate floor to argue against a Republican-led proposal to place a statue of Thomas – a Georgia native – on the grounds of the state Capitol, and he compared Thomas to a slave who had “sold his soul” to his white master.
“We cannot avoid that conversation so I’m not going to avoid it either,” Jones said of the discussion surrounding the statue.
“In the black community we have an expression – and I don’t want to use this label too deeply here because I’m just trying to tell you what we have in the African American community when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery and that person betraying his own community – we have a term in the black community,” Jones began. Read more…
