Today at CPAC: African-Americans should be "allowed to vote in Africa"

At a CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) panel today on minority outreach, there was a heated moment when one participant suggested that slavery had been good for African-Americans.

Scott Terry, from North Carolina, asked whether it would be possible for the GOP to endorse blacks and whites living "separate but equal."  The moderator of the panel, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass in which Douglass forgave his former master, to which Terry said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?”

ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Just another day at CPAC folks...

(via ThinkProgress)