Reverend Jesse Jackson had harsh words for "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson on Wednesday, calling Robertson's remarks in a recent GQ interview "more offensive" than the bus driver who told Rosa Parks she had to move to the back.
In an interview with GQ magazine this month in which he compared homosexuality to bestiality, Robertson also claimed that the Jim Crow-era South wasn't so bad for African Americans.
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person," Robertson told GQ. "Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
“These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago,” Jackson said in a statement obtained by ABC News.
“At least the bus driver, who ordered Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white person, was following state law. Robertson’s statements were uttered freely and openly without cover of the law, within a context of what he seemed to believe was ‘white privilege.’”
Jackson's statement comes a week after GOP congressional candidate Ian Bayne called Robertson "the Rosa Parks of our generation."
Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition and GLAAD have been calling for a meeting with A&E, the channel that hosts "Duck Dynasty." A&E suspended Robertson earlier this month.
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