Last week, I saw how so many people were eulogizing Jerry Falwell as some strong man of conviction and character. I saw him as a charlatan and a crackpot. Remember, this was the guy who saw some grand gay conspiracy in the “Teletubbies” and blamed what happened on 9/11 on gays, abortionists, pagans, feminists and the ACLU.

However, some are willing to look more deeply at the life of Falwell and call him on his use of his position as a minister to justify overt racism.

Thankfully, George Curry is willing to call this out and discuss an undeniable part of Falwell’s legacy — his flaming racism.

“Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church,” Max Blumenthal writes in an insightful article in The Nation magazine. “This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naively unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race -not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called ‘values’ issues - that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.”

Four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated public schools, Falwell gave a speech titled, “Segregation or Integration.”

His message was unmistakably clear: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

So, let’s be real. The foundation of Falwell’s success was built at the expense of the rights of black people so, expect no tears here now that he’s gone.

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