By The Editors

Is anyone surprised anymore at the depths Glenn Beck will sink to?

Almost immediately the vicious, mocking tirade he unleashed last week against Malia Obama provoked such a fierce reaction that Beck, no doubt carefully gauging how far beyond the bounds of decency he could venture for long, issued a carefully worded statement that the more credulous have taken for an apology.

But peering into the moral vacuum Beck inhabits does have its uses. For example, this latest episode shows that there’s no sophistication at all to his hypocrisy. Days earlier, as he commiserated with Sarah Palin about the plans of her new neighbor, the author Joe McGinnis, to write a book about her and her family, he declared that the families of public figures should be off-limits for criticism. “Leave my family, leave people’s families alone,” he said, “When it was Bill Clinton, you don’t go after Chelsea Clinton. You don’t talk about the Bush kids. Now, the minute they get into politics, that’s a different story. You leave the families alone.”

It soon became clear he feels that principle excludes the nation’s first African-American First Family—indicating that we’ve yet to see the full dimensions of Beck’s pathological

True, Barack and Michelle Obama have now long been the targets of those whites who feel they are too accomplished and don’t pay proper deference to “old” notions of what used to be called “racial .” But there’s a larger resonance to Beck’s deliberate targeting of a black it has deep roots in the dynamics of American anti-black attitudes.

Glenn Beck

Of course, black children were as much victimized by slavery and the bias against so-called free blacks during the antebellum era and by the pervasive restrictions of the Jim Crow century that followed. It was no accident that segregated and unequal schooling – the denial of opportunity to black children – was the bulwark of racial apartheid in the South and the North. Nor was it an accident that black children and young people played such a prominent role in the mass-action phase of the Civil Rights as a result, were so often the targets of the violent white racist reaction.

The most infamous example of that during the 1960s was the bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963. The blast occurred just as children gathered for Sunday School, killing four girls ages 11 to 14 and injuring twenty others. It happened just two weeks after the landmark March on Washington; but I’ve always believed the murderers were driven by a purely localized hatred. The civil rights demonstrations Martin Luther King, Jr. had led in Birmingham that previous spring revealed to white America and the world the profound brutality of Jim Crow, effectively undermining the last major bulwarks of legalized racism in the South.

It was the participation of the hundreds of Birmingham children in those demonstrations – the so-called Children’s Crusade – that brought the movement there its victory.

That’s why the bombers struck at the children of one of the black community’s most prominent churches and one which had been a staging ground for the demonstrations. They struck at the children because they could see the future in them. They could see their promise, and the probability of their achieving success was growing greater with each civil rights action.

Of course, that was becoming the reality not just in Birmingham. Because of the Civil Rights Movement, for the first time in American history black children and youth all over America – the black Baby Boomers – could sense a world full of opportunities were becoming available to them.

Some whites embraced that vision of America’s future. Others, like the bombers of Birmingham, couldn’t stand to contemplate a future in which they’d have to share America with these children and clutched their ridiculous notions of white superiority and black inferiority even tighter. It is that fear – fear of the success of children of color (and their parents) – that once can see in the words of Glenn Beck ’s tirade, that one can hear in the voice of this adult venting his spleen on a child.

Some of us know this from personal experience. Such despicable tactics didn’t work then, and they aren’t going to work now.