I'll probably hate myself tomorrow morning for doing this -- I guess the rest of you can start right now -- but somebody has to say something good about the late Gov. Spiro Agnew. The man certainly wasn't getting much love at the University of Baltimore yesterday.
On Thursday, the University of Baltimore -- Agnew's alma mater, ironically enough -- began a three-day symposium called "Baltimore '68: Riots and Rebirth." On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Riots broke out nationwide. Rioters in some cities -- including Washington -- got the jump on the rest of the country and started their civil disorder soon after the news broke. Rioting in Baltimore started April 6.
On April 11, Agnew called a group of Baltimore's civil rights leaders and black elected officials to a news conference. What he said to them has become the stuff of near legend. Most of the black leaders walked out of the news conference and excoriated Agnew for his remarks.
Yesterday was no different.
Agnew was the topic of a panel discussion that focused mainly on those remarks and the reaction to them.
"Look around you," Agnew said near the beginning of his speech, "and you may notice that every one here is a leader. ... If you'll observe, the ready-mix, instantaneous type of leader is not present. The circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting type of leader is missing from this assembly. The caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of leader is conspicuous by his absence. That is no accident, ladies and gentlemen. It is just good planning. All in the vernacular of today -- `That's what it's all about, baby.'"
That may have been Agnew's first mistake: Trying to get in touch with his inner Negro while addressing a group of blacks. Before he was done, he would make others.
First, he praised those leaders who condemned activist Robert Moore for saying that the Baltimore police were "enemies of the black man." Then he condemned the leaders for, he claimed, meeting secretly with Moore and cutting a deal not to criticize him publicly.
"You ran," Agnew told the leaders, who had caught some heat for condemning Moore. "You were beguiled by the rationalizations of unity; you were intimidated by veiled threats; you were stung by insinuations that you were Mr. Charlie's boy, by epithets like `Uncle Tom.'"
