Memphis organization says James Woods doesn’t care about Black people

Actor James Woods has been continuously making inflammatory tweets directed at US Attorney General Eric Holder calling for a hate crime investigation concerning attacks on one white teen in Memphis, Tennessee. The tweets caught the eye of the Memphis chapter of Black Autonomy Federation.

A fight between two groups of Black teen females at a Cici’s Pizza turned into a flash mob that attacked and beat up three people in the parking lot of a Memphis strip mall. One of the attacks was filmed by a shopper at the supermarket who captured a white employee of a Kroger supermarket being beaten and kicked until he was knocked unconscious before a security guard stepped in to stop it. The video was uploaded to social media and went viral in a matter of hours. Because the employee is white, the actor James Woods took to twitter to issue what he called the “Holder Challenge” and asked his twitter followers to implore Holder to investigate the attack as a hate crime and sarcastically called on Holder to help “heal the racial divide” in America and by going to Memphis.

Mr. Holder, this is your opportunity to step across the ugly racial divide in America. Go to Memphis, Sir, for ALL of us. #holderchallenge

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) September 9, 2014

There is problem with James Woods “hate crime” narrative, two of the other victims of the flash mob were Black and one Black woman had her car vandalized. The Memphis police did not classify it as a hate crime and neither did father of the white young man who was attacked. Mark Sauser whose son was the “white dude” seen in the video being pummeled said that race had nothing to do with the assault on his son and that the teens were just attacking random people in the parking lot.

Mr. Sauser said he saw rage when he watched the video of his son being attacked by the Black teens but he did not call it a racist attack as right wing instigators as if James Woods are calling the unfortunate incident.

“They were taking out anybody they could get their hands on,” Sauser said. “My first gut reaction – they need to be tried as an adult, that was serious, they could have murdered my son and I have no doubt that some were trying to, at the same time, you can’t throw people away”.

The Memphis chapter of the Black Autonomy Federation agreed with James Woods on that Eric Holder should come to Memphis to investigate but for different reasons. They also called James Woods a “racist”.

A statement issued by chapter cadre Lorenzo Ervin and JoNina Abron-Ervin reads,

“The white actor James Woods has started a racist Twitter storm over the incident in Memphis, Tenn., on Saturday that began as a fight among black teens, spilling over into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, where some employees and customers were beaten. Cell phone video shows one white Kroger worker being beaten. Woods is demanding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder come to Memphis to investigate just the beating of white people in this case as a hate crime. What about the black people who were beaten? Woods is a racist, who is really saying, “what about that white man?”

If Holder does investigate it as a so-called hate crime, he should be investigating the cover-up of the deaths of the 23 people killed by Memphis police in 2012 and 2013, especially the death of 15-year-old Justin Thompson, who was killed by an off-duty cop in September, 2012. No police department in America killed more people in this time period than Memphis cops did. Memphis leads the nation in the use of deadly police force, yet there is a media and police cover-up of these killings. Twenty of the 23 people killed by the Memphis police were black. Why haven’t their deaths been investigated, as opposed to the beating of one white person?”

The group also accused James Woods of spreading disinformation about the teen attacks in Memphis and said he has a history of making such inflammatory and misleading statements to the public.