From Sidney Poitier’s Cold, Dead Hands
This weekend the world said goodbye to longtime actor, one-time civil rights activist, and lifelong gun nut, Charleton Heston. Now that we’ve gotten the obvious jokes about gun-control advocates racing to his grave out of our system, and then taking a cue from FOL* Tim Wise, we realize a larger question remains: Would the NRA have championed, say, Sydney Poitier, as one of their own if he said that the only way the government could take his gun would be to pry it from his “cold, dead hands?” Would they have made him their president and chief spokesperson? And so the conversation on race continues. Here’s a picture of Mr. Heston when he still believed the pen mightier than the sword. Enjoy!
*Friend of Liberadio(!)
This post was written by Mary Mancini
This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 10:02 am and is filed under Charleton Heston, National Rifle Association, Sidney Poitier, Tim Wise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:45 am
I don’t understand. Are you saying that if Poitier had made the exact same journey as Heston he would not have been accepted by the NRA on racial grounds?
The Right loves tokens. Loves them. The NRA would not for one second have hesitated to embrace Poitier as its token spokesman if he was even slightly down with the cause.
April 10th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Wow, what Kleinheider says… though I’m not nearly as cynical as Klondike. Sidney Poitier played the refined, dignified black man, a non-threatening black - To Sir with Love, Guess who’d Coming to Dinner, Lilies of the Field - the NRA would have been salivating to get some one like him as a spokesman.
Maybe I am just as cyncical.