Curtis Gatewood is currently the field director of the North Carolina NAACP.  He has described the killing of mass murderer Micah X. Johnson by the Dallas Police as a ‘lynching’:

Make no mistake, by taking this Black ‘suspect’ and demonizing and using a killer robot to blow him up in this unprecedented and barbaric manner and without a trial in a court of law is the truest and most literal example yet of a high-tech lynching.

In the period 1882 through 1964, according to the archives at the Tuskegee Institute, 4,742 American citizens were lynched.  Each and every one was a captive, executed, often tortured, without any due process of law legitimizing their sentence of death by mob.  Of those, 3,445 were black and 1,297 were white.  The majority of them, black and white, were Republicans.  The Ku Klux Klan, the terror wing of the Democratic Party, used lynching in the South as a political tool to:

...put black people back into their place as the labor force of the South…and to drive out of business the political force, the Republican Party, that was trying to take them to higher places.

Efforts by Republicans, including passing anti-lynching legislation in Congress several times during the administration of Democratic President FDR, were repeatedly defeated by filibuster by Democrats in Senate.

Those lynchings are not ancient history.  Some occurred in the years after Curtis Gatewood, himself a registered Democrat, was born.  Gatewood dishonors the memory of every one of those innocent victims, black and white alike, who were killed because they stood in the way of those who would deny Americans the rights endowed to them by their Creator.  History does not record anyone being lynched while in the act of committing mass murder.  No one was ever lynched because there was little or no recourse left to stop that person from killing others.  The admirable Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who is black, explained the decision to use explosives on a robot to eliminate the threat posed by Johnson without putting any more lives at risk.  That was a moral decision.  Curtis Gatewood’s implication that the police were somehow obligated to risk their own lives and those of others, so that Johnson could be taken alive is amoral.  Fourteen people had been shot; twelve police officers and two civilians, several were dead and dying, and Johnson was still armed and threatening to kill more.

Curtis Gatewood is a man who spreads hate.  That was the purpose of his lynching statement. David Cole writing at Taki’s Magazine had exposed him on that more than a year ago.  However, every time Gatewood says or does something for which he should, at the least have been removed from leadership at the NC NAACP, that organization simply shuffles him around from position to position.  His hate speech is protected hate speech.

In this age of the ubiquitous cell phone camera, there is now a video on YouTube of some very brave French policemen advancing on the terror truck in Nice, firing to stop the driver who had already killed several dozens.  In the hate spewing mind and fear inducing rhetoric of Curtis Gatewood, what we see there is an execution, a lynching, because obviously the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a member of a minority in France, was not taken alive and handcuffed so as to be given his day in court, just like Micah Johnson.

Gatewood went on to say:

Yes, I’m coming to the defense of the defenseless.  That includes [Micah] X. Johnson who has been accused of shooting about 12 police officers…Even if [Micah] was carrying a gun or [rifle], that in of itself does not prove he murdered the police officers.

As Gatewood waters the seeds of paranoia, fear, and hate, with implications of a police conspiracy to frame an innocent man, there are the words of someone who was there that deserve far more attention that this charlatan seeks.

Shematia Taylor attended the march in Dallas with her four sons.  With all that has happened and how it has been presented in the media and elsewhere, it is understandable that a mother of four teenaged black sons could be sufficiently concerned about the subject of police using unwarranted excessive and deadly force on young black men.  As she and her sons were getting ready to leave the protest, she heard two shots fired, and saw a police officer near her get shot.  She later said "As he was going down, he said, 'He has a gun. Run.'"

As the family fled, she was shot in the leg.  She knocked her fifteen year old to the ground and covered him with her own body.  Then, as bullets filled the air around them, a police officer jumped on top of both of them as they lay in the street.  She recalled that:

And there was another one at our feet.  And there was another one over our heads.  And there were several of them lined against the wall and they stayed there with us.  And I saw another officer get shot right in front of me…They had no regard for their own life.  They stayed there with us.  They surrounded my son and I…I want to say thank you to the officers…They were really heroes for us.  They saved my life, my son's life and I want to say thank you to them first and foremost.

In another interview, contrary to the hateful and dangerous perception that Gatewood desires to spread, Mia Taylor said of the police:

I am forever indebted to them.  There was no color there.

The New York Post reported Mia Taylor wiping away tears as recalled being in the hospital and full of joy at finding out all her children were safe, when she overheard a police officer tell another about one of their colleagues who had been killed.

I saw an officer tell another officer that an officer didn’t make it.  And I [was] celebrating my kids…It hurt.

Reverend Curtis Gatewood is a minister, but one who spreads hate. Mia Taylor, however, is in my mind a child of God.  To her was given the grace to see, even in the darkest of times, that which can bind the wounds and broken hearts of so many, and bring us together, rather than pry us apart, and offer her heartfelt testimony to that.

The Southern Poverty Law Center will never place the North Carolina NAACP on its list of hate groups, but by the standard it claims to set, it should.