COREY WILLIAMS
DETROIT
Hundreds of onlookers cheered yesterday as a leading US civil rights group put to rest a racist expression by symbolically burying the slur referred to as the "N-word".
Delegates who gathered in Detroit for the convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People marched for a ceremony after two horses pulled a pine box adorned with a bouquet of fake black roses.
The coffin is to be placed at Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery and will have a headstone.
The group has been campaigning against the casual use of the word "nigger", which has a painful history as a racist epithet intertwined with slavery. Mainstream African-Americans are particularly offended that many rap musicians use it in lyrics, which has revived it in American slang.
"Today we're not just burying the N-word, we're taking it out of our spirit," said Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. "We gather burying all the things that go with the N-word."
Discussion of the word's usage increased last year after Seinfeld actor Michael Richards used it repeatedly during a Los Angeles comedy routine and later apologised.
The issue about racially insensitive remarks heated up last April after radio talk show host Don Imus described black members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos". Nappy is a derogatory reference to the hair of some black people and "ho" is slang for "whore".
NAACP chairman Julian Bond repeated the call when opening the convention.
"While we are happy to have sent a certain radio cowboy back to his ranch, we ought to hold ourselves to the same standard," Bond said. "If he can't refer to our women as hos', then we shouldn't either."
The NAACP held a symbolic funeral in Detroit in 1944 for Jim Crow, the systematic, mostly Southern practice of discrimination against and segregation of blacks from the end of post-Civil War reconstruction into the mid-20th century.-AP
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