Finally, someone has rushed (well, more like sauntered) to defend the honor of Charlotte, my beloved Queen City.

For a minute I worried that nobody cared that local NAACP President Kojo Nantambu described our town as a “racist bastion,” a place crawling with bigots. It seemed all anyone wanted to talk about was Mr. Nantambu’s call for an economic boycott.

Typical Charlotte.

Never mind that our lady friend has been called a tramp... so long as the guy at the other end of the bar keeps buying her drinks.

On Thursday, Mayor Anthony Foxx waded in.

“I... disagree that Charlotte is a racist community,” he said in a statement released to the media. “By using labels such as racist to characterize our entire city, all of us are implicated, including me, and such a harsh, irrevocable verdict leaves us nowhere to go as a community.”

Well spoken, Mr. Mayor.

If you read my column earlier this week, you know that I, unlike many of my readers, believe that Mr. Nantambu played a crucial role in helping us debate how we will honor, or not honor, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday -- a debate that would not have happened without his voice.

Where I take strong issue with Mr. Nantambu is with his reckless use of words like “racist” and “bigot” – words that conjure up the worst images of white America... you know, Bill James.

To call Charlotte a “racist bastion” was absurd on its face.

In addition to an African American mayor, we also have a black county manager and a black police chief. Five of our 11 city council members are black, not counting the mayor. So are three of our nine county commissioners. The majority owner of our NBA franchise is black. And 62 percent of our county voters pulled the lever in 2008 to make Barack Obama the nation’s first African American president.

That’s hardly a vision of 1963 Birmingham.

Men like C.D. Spangler and Leon Levine have given millions to help African American children struggling in local schools. And Charlotte physician Michael Friedland, because of his love for education and devotion to public schools, established a college scholarship fund for children who attend some of our city’s poorest and worst-performing schools – and that certainly ain’t Ballantyne, Mr. Nantambu.

Those are just a few of the people on all sides of the racial divide who sometimes work against narrow interests to make our community more accommodating to all.

Is Charlotte perfect? Far from it.

Does Charlotte have racists? That’s a pretty safe bet.

All the same, when one of our respected leaders speaks out so recklessly, people of goodwill must have the courage to say “enough,” race and politics notwithstanding. Besides, we as African Americans must keep our powder dry for when the real racist wolf is howling at our door.

***
Glenn Burkins is editor of Qcitymetro.com. Email editor@qcitymetro.com.

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