Mr. Reed feels his friend Yvonne Kennedy has been badly wronged by Bradley Byrne. In fact, he goes so far as to say that Mr. Byrne is acting as a self-appointed “Fuhrer,” although he skirts Godwin’s Law by not actually mentioning Hitler’s name.
For those not keeping up with Mobile’s contribution to the community college scandal, Yvonne Kennedy has just retired, with a really nice pension, from her job as president of Bishop State Community College. There have been umpteen people arrested for all kinds of fiscal chicanery in the student aid system that occurred under her watch (some details here). It’s the old story; either she knew and is crooked, or didn’t know and is incompetent.
For her retirement she requested, and Byrne gave her, not only the honorary “President Emeritus” title, but also an office on campus and secretarial help in order to write a history of the school.
He also told her to fire David Thomas, who was still on the Bishop State payroll after his felony conviction. (Granted, the big “felony” was running over a kid’s foot at Mardi Gras, and the kid wasn’t hurt in the least. Still, he was convicted. Then they threw him off the school board for buying thousands of dollars worth of Mardi Gras throws with county money. Mardi Gras is a dangerous time for David Thomas.)
But Kennedy didn’t fire Thomas. So Byrne took away the office and the secretary (she’s still President Emeritus) and fired Thomas himself. Since Byrne is white, and Thomas and Kennedy are both black, in Joe Reed’s eyes this is clearly a racist act. The over-the-top letter he was moved to write is worth a read.
Joe Reed also thinks that academics at Bishop State are “second to none” and that the nursing program is the “envy of the state.” Yeah, that must be why its director just resigned.
According to Reed, Byrne doesn’t legally have the power to make college presidents do anything; according to the SACS president (and Byrne himself of course) he does. Apparently Reed feels Kennedy is “far too gracious a lady” to put up a fight; but I think that if she has a legal grievance, we’ll be hearing more about it.
Joe Reed, Roy Moore, Fob James….the list of complete fools who have power in this State is really a wonder of nature.
This sounds like another of Reed’s last ditch efforts to hang onto the power that is slipping through his fingers. He makes himself look like an idiot, and a bit of a hysteric, defending Kennedy with that over-the-top missive. And claiming racism in this case just makes it harder for people who really are targeted because of their race.
But what else could I expect from the man who tried to overturn Patricia Todd’s election because he thought a black (and straight, of course) person should hold her seat — and be damned to what the voters of her district decided.
[...] publicly stopped short of heaping condemnation on Kennedy, but admit that Reed’s letter makes him look like an idiot. David Prather of the Huntsville Times has a little more insight into the Democrats’ [...]
Unless my memory is failing me (which it frequently does now) it was the new interim president at Bishop State (who I think is a black man) that fired Thomas. Maybe we have a black racist at the helm of the college now, huh?
Kennedy had like 5 weeks to take care of it before her official retirement date, but she failed to take action. So the new guy did it on his first day of work. I think I read somewhere that Byrne had set the process in motion along with writing that “hurtful” letter to Kennedy, so I suppose the Reed party line is that the new guy was jes’ following orders, Uncle Tom that he is.
I hope to God Bradley Byrne can clean up this Augean stable and all the other ones too, and let the two-year system start serving the people it’s supposed to serve, many of whom are, news flash, African-American. One explanation I’ve heard is that the powers that be were content to let the patronage program bob gently along, up until there was a genuine need for a well-trained work force, and all of a sudden now it’s reform time. I think that’s pretty shameful.