Last night,
the Washington Post revealed the full unedited racist emails sent by various Ferguson police officers and city officials during a period between 2008 and 2011. Several of the emails sent contained disparaging anti-Obama and anti-minority (esp. anti-Black and anti-Islam) vitriol.
Brendan James at TPM:
Emails published by the Washington Post on Friday show the racist jokes and email chains that Ferguson, Missouri police and city officers exchanged over several years, including comparing President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee.
The emails were described by the Justice Department in its report detailing the widespread racism in the Ferguson police department. But the actual contents of the emails were not public until the Washington Post got them through a public records request.
The three officials connected to the emails were Ferguson police Capt. Rick Henke, Sgt. William Mudd, and court clerk Mary Ann Twitty. They sent racist material back and forth between 2008 and 2011.
Wesley Lowery and Kimberly Kindy at the WaPo:
City officials in Ferguson, Mo., on Thursday evening released the full, unredacted content of racially charged and religiously insensitive e-mails sent by the city’s former court clerk as well as two former supervisors in the police department.
[...]
Several of the e-mails focus on President Obama, and the majority of them speak disparagingly of him or minorities more broadly.
In a message dated Tuesday, April 19, 2011, Twitty forwarded a message titled “Very Rare Photo” that included an image of former president Ronald Reagan feeding a baby monkey. Beneath the photo is the caption: “Rare photo of Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962.”
Another e-mail Twitty sent both men on March 1, 2010, included a short story titled “Leroy’s last child support payment.”
In an e-mail that Mudd forwarded to Twitty — which she then forwarded to others — in May 2011, the body of the message declares:
“A black woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital [for] pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received a check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.’”
Another, sent by Mudd on June 7, 2011, included a photo of two dogs and compared them to welfare recipients.
In an e-mail written Nov. 14, 2008, Henke wrote to a recipient whose identity was redacted in the records, that “we shouldn’t worry about him being president for very long because what black man holds a steady job for four years.”
Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland at The Guardian:
Senior police officers and a city official in Ferguson, Missouri, exchanged emails that likened ethnic minority welfare recipients to dogs and joked about stoning Muslim women, it emerged on Friday.
The previously undisclosed messages were released along with full copies of emails referenced in a report by the US Department of Justice that led to the dismissal of a series of senior city officials last month.
One of those emails depicted Barack Obama as a chimpanzee, another doubted his ability as a black man to hold a job for four years, while a third labelled a photograph of a black tribal gathering “Michelle Obama’s high school reunion”.
[...]
Included among a series of “one-liners” forwarded by Twitty to Mudd and Henke was a joke about a man who discovered his wife had an affair. “But, by turning to religion, I was soon able to come to terms with the whole thing,” it said. “I converted to Islam, and we’re stoning her in the morning!”