At an August 20, 2011 meet and greet at the Old Town Bistro in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Gov. Rick Perry seemingly likened the struggles of the civil rights movement to fighting for lower taxes and deregulation.
Watch:
As AMERICAblog’s Kombiz Lavasany wrote, “The statement is historically inaccurate, Martin Luther King Jr. fought for unions and regulations.”
QUESTION: And coming to the Old Town Bistro you’re actually visiting a very important place in Rock Hill and the nation’s civil rights history. This year we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Friendship Nine sit-in here. Care to comment on that?
PERRY: Listen, America’s gone a long way, standpoint of civil rights and thank God we have. I mean we’ve gone from a country’s that made great strides in issues of civil rights. I think we all can be proud of that. And as we go forward, America needs to be about freedom. It needs to be about freedom from overtaxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. And Americans regardless of what their cultural or ethnic background is they need to know that they can come to America and you got a chance to have any dream come true because the economic climate is gonna be improved. God bless you and thank you all from coming and being with us.
Published: Aug 22, 2011