*During a recent interview with The Breakfast Club, psychologist Dr. Umar slammed ESPN host Stephen A. Smith for defending Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones after an old photo emerged showing Jones at a pro-segregation rally at his high school in 1957.
At the time, Jones was 14 years old and for this reason, many Black professional athletes and sports commentators have come to his defense and praised Jones for giving Black males jobs in the NFL. They cite this as proof that he is not a racist.
“I’m looking at the picture of Jerry sitting in the back, and it was in Arkansas, back in 56-57 whenever that was. Everybody in the south was a certain way back in those days. That’s just what it was; everybody in the south was somewhere. I don’t see Jerry in front of that line like I see that dude with the cigarette,” Michael Irvin stated on 103.5 ‘The Fan’.
Smith also defended Jones during an episode of “First Take.”
READ MORE: Unearthed: 1957 Pic of Jerry Jones in Crowd Blocking Black Students from Entering School | VIDEO
This part had me rolling ???? what?? pic.twitter.com/2SKrNkUrup
— Rainy (@therainvvs) December 9, 2022
“I’m pretty pissed off,” Smith stated. “I’m pissed off but not for reasons that people would think. I am very, very fond of Jerry Jones, and I’m not hiding that from anybody. Is his record perfect? No, but I’m pissed off because he doesn’t deserve what just happened. He doesn’t deserve it. One report, our report, said he was 14 years old. Another report said he was 15 years old. At minimum that’s 65 years ago.”
“You’re going to bring up a photo of him when he was 14, 15 years old? Sixty-five or sixty-six years ago? This is where cancel culture gets into the mix,” Smith continued. “You’re making an attempt to eradicate him, what he stands for and all he has done.”
Smith went on to stress that no one is going to “cancel” Jones.
“I don’t have a problem with the photo. If he was 30, 35, 40 years old, that’s different!” Smith ranted. “We’re going to lean on somebody when he was 14? Born and raised in the South, and we’re going to pick it up 66 years later to say, ‘You know something, you ain’t hiring a black coach.’ I think that’s pretty low.”
Smith was immediately labeled a coon for his comments, and he responded to the critics on his podcast.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the year was 1957. Jerry Jones was 14-years-old when this happened.” He later asked, “you gon’ pull up a picture of a 14-year-old kid and use that to denigrate him when the picture was a still picture of him standing in the crowd and looking… that’s that reason that we wanna sit up there and assume anything about Jerry Jones? I’m not that guy.”
When Dr. Umar appeared recently on The Breakfast Club, he reacted to Irvin and Smith’s remarks and said Stephen A. deserves 50,000 lashings for caping for a white man.
“He got black men defending him,” Dr. Umar said. “Why are we protecting white privileged men.”
Umar, reacting to Irving’s comments about Jones not being front and center in the photo of the anti-black school protest, added, “just because he’s in the back of the line, he’s less racist than the one who’s on the front of the line?”
On his “Know Mercy” podcast, Smith issued a response to Dr. Umar.
“All I have to say to Dr. Umar Johnson is this,” Stephen A. began, as reported by Hot New Hip Hop. “I don’t know any human being alive I would wish 50,000 lashes on. Respectfully, how low can you go? Never met you, don’t know you. Educated brother. I wish you nothing but the best. But you would wish that upon another human being? A brother? Really? That’s how low you would go?”
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