You may not recognize Ben Crump’s name or face, but there’s no way you don’t recognize his handiwork.

A lawyer for the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Jacob Blake, Crump is practicing what Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper calls “a new strategy” for pushing what Crump and his allies consider civil rights progress.

In a Newsmax commentary, Horace laments that this new strategy relies upon “using individuals whose lives and behavior are a wholesale rejection of American culture” and employs “a new and ever-expanding definition of equality and civil rights grievance” that “denies the significant racial progress America has made.”

Why has this happened? Horace suggests race relations in America have gotten to a point where things have become so serene that hyperbole is the only way that those who trade in race can maintain their bases of power:

Perhaps because racism and bigotry have receded so far from the center of the public square that efforts to rally our nation into a race or equality discussion isn’t as easy to initiate and for those who “profit” from this discussion, it certainly wasn’t as lucrative.

And there is a definitive downside, since by-products of this new strategy including worsening race relations and the accusations and flared tempers we now see on a regular basis:

As night follows day, once [Crump] shows up so do the protestors and soon thereafter the looters.

Coincidentally, the protests and looting end once a settlement agreement is reached. Lucrative for his law firm, and painful for the rest of America.

While this has benefited Crump and those who subscribe to this new strategy, it’s led to billions of dollars of damage to our cities, devastated businesses (many of them black-owned) and more unjustified deaths than were originally being protested. It’s also being used by the radical left to try to tear down our nation’s cherished institutions that have created a society that was quickly fixing and atoning for the racial disparities of its past.

All of this also does a great disservice to the legacy of civil rights icons such as Rosa Parks, whom Horace notes epitomized the way the civil rights movement successfully sought justice:

[That] model – supporting upstanding members of the community when their rights are violated – proved highly successful and ultimately led to a broad consensus in America for the full implementation of our Founders’ vision of citizen equality before the law.

One major additional achievement was that it was an occasion for blacks and whites to work together albeit at great sacrifice – personal and financial.

But those days are over, thanks to people like Crump:

Redefining civil rights to include a license for criminality has taken the noble cause of racial equality down an unfortunate path that must be reversed.

Black America must reject the temptation to support this initiative.

Horace advises: “Elites in the media and within the civil rights community would be well served to remember Rosa Parks’s legacy. She was decent and morally upright.”

To read all of Horace’s Newsmax commentary – “Blacks Must Reject Redefining Civil Rights to License Crime” – click here.

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