Paint HIm With His Foot in His Mouth

Gregory Grant, the president of the local chapter of the National Action Network, an advocacy group headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton, saw in it an offensive stereotype in a city that already had its share of racial problems.

“We’re telling our young people to take the gold teeth out of your mouth and pull your pants up and be a responsible citizen, and then you paint one on the wall,” Mr. Grant said. “I immediately responded in a very violent, negative-type way.”

He began hearing from others with similar concerns, and got in touch with officials from Rhodes College, where a group of students was overseeing the mural, which portrays a diverse group of the city’s residents, arguing that they might as well have painted a black child eating a watermelon . . .

So Mr. Grant got hisself fahr'd up and made some angry phone calls . . . only to find out it was a portrait of a real person.

Mr. Grant said, “I thought it was an artist’s rendition of what he thought an African-American in Memphis should look like.” Instead, he said, “This is a real live beautiful African-American woman.”

By the time the 152-foot-by-58-foot mural was unveiled Sunday, Mr. Grant and his allies had become supporters. The lesson, he said, lay in taking the time to talk and listen. “This will help to heal some of the wounds that we’ve had all the way back to the ’50s and ’60s,” he said.

No, it won't. And you still look like a fool all the same for getting upset over a gold tooth. Actually, the muralist's name is Jeff Zimmerman. Now, I am going to go out on a limb here, but I am guessing that Mr. Zimmerman is White. And what got Mr. Grant really fired up was that a White man painted a Black woman with . . . a gold tooth. Dang, might as well put the red bandana on her head, too, or have a child eating wa . . . well, you know.

But going back to Mr. Grant's initial complaint, about Al Sharpton and he trying to tell the young people to take the gold teeth out, assuming someone might not know this is a portrait of an actual person, doesn't his complaint still hold water? Why doesn't he lecture Savannah Simmons - the woman who allowed her image, complete with a gold tooth, to be used - about presenting a more inspiring image to those young people walkin' around with their britches drooping?

You know, maybe I am jumping to conclusions. Maybe this is not about ire at a White man's depiction of a Black woman. Maybe this is part of the new era of Obama . . . Sharpton is trying to clean up the "Black image" - and you just can't have anything "ghetto" anymore.

Oh, Ms. Simmons, 80, had her reason for her gold tooth:

Indeed, it would be a mistake to assume that Ms. Simmons’s own gold tooth had anything to do with fashion. When she got dentures, she asked her dentist to add a gold tooth in memory of her father, who had one in the same location.