Updated below with Team Perry’s response to Cain.
Rick Perry’s campaign is pushing back hard on a tough Washington Post story published Sunday that described the history of Perry family hunting plot in Texas once decorated with a rock bearing its name: “Niggerhead.”
But as the campaign worked to shoot the story down — telling Politico it “contains ‘incorrect, inconsistent’ claims” — one of Perry’s rivals for the GOP nomination, businessman Herman Cain, pounced.
The gist of the Post story about Perry, which includes the tale of a painted rock bearing the word “Niggerhead” that once greeted entrants to the property (and conflicting stories about when in the past it was finally obscured):
Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it [Niggerhead] well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s. There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property. In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country. Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.
But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor. Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.
When asked last week, Perry said the word on the rock is an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”
Herman Cain leaped on the story in a pair of Sunday morning TV appearances after a week that showed his campaign in a new ascendancy. (He’s also going through a campaign shakeup that includes the resignation of his well-known communications director.)
“There are some words that do not, basically, inspire the same kind of negativity as that word…the name of the place was called ‘Niggerhead.’ That is very insensitive,” Cain said. “Since Gov. Perry has been going there for years to hunt, I think it shows a lack of sensitivity for a long time of not taking that word off of that rock and renaming the place.”
“It’s just basically a case of insensitivity,” he added.
“That’s just very insensitive,” Cain told Fox News Sunday. “There isn’t a more vile, negative word than the N-word and and for him to leave it there as long as he did before I hear that they finally painted over it, it’s just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country.”
Cain is in his own pot of hot water with some African Americans this week. On CNN the other day, Cain said “African-Americans have been brainwashed” into voting for Democrats. That drew criticism from Jesse Jackson, former RNC chair Michael Steele and others.
Update:
The Perry campaign said Cain didn’t have his facts straight on the “Niggerhead” rock.
“Mr. Cain is wrong about the Perry family’s quick action to eliminate the word on the rock, but is right the word written by others long ago is insensitive and offensive,” Perry adviser Ray Sullivan said in a statement. “That is why the Perrys took quick action to cover and obscure it.”
Sullivan referred back to complaints about the Post story Perry’s campaign detailed in a statement sent to reporters.
