Roy Innis, a politically conservative civil rights leader who tussled philosophically – and physically,in one memorable televised encounter involving the Rev. Al Sharpton – with other activists during an embattled, decades-long tenure at the helm of the Congress of Racial Equality, died Jan. 8 at a hospital in New York City. He was 82...
Mr. Innis traced his philosophy to the shooting deaths of two sons – Roy Innis Jr., who died at 13 while playing outside in 1968, and Alexander Innis,who died at 26 in 1982 in what the Associated Press described as an apparent robbery.
“After the murders of my sons I did not want other parents to go through what I went through,” Mr. Innis told Newsday in 1993. “My sons were not killed by the KKK or David Duke. They were murdered by young, black thugs. I use the murder of my sons by black hoodlums to shift the problems from excuses like the KKK to the dope pushers on the streets.”
...Gun control, he told blacks, “was not meant to protect your safety; it was meant to deprive you of your freedom.”
He was a board member of the National Rifle Association.Affirmative action, he argued, worked against the advances of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in employment...
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