Talbert Swan calls black supporters of Kirk ‘coons’
A pastor who serves on the Massachusetts Task Force on Hate Crimes and leads a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter said Charlie Kirk’s assassination was “chickens coming home to roost,” and used a racial pejorative to describe black supporters of the slain conservative activist.
Talbert Swan, who in addition to his role on the task force is also the president of the Springfield NAACP, lashed out Friday at the outpouring of condolences for Kirk, who was assassinated at Utah Valley University on Wednesday while speaking on a nationwide campus tour for his organization, Turning Point USA. Authorities arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and said bullet casings from the rifle he used in the attack contained messages associated with the far left.
“Charlie Kirk’s entire brand was built on racism, division, and lies about black people. He denied that systemic racism existed. He attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Swan said on his YouTube show, The Black Love Experience. “He was on a journey to spread hate from the time he was a teenager,” said Swan.
Swan, pastor of Spring of Hope Church Of God In Christ, was especially hostile toward black supporters of Kirk.
“I’m troubled by the number of black people who are all over the internet who are mourning a white supremacist who thought you were less than human,” said Swan. “I didn’t realize we had as many coons as we have.”
Swan insisted he was “not going to celebrate” Kirk’s death, but then said “you’re not going to gaslight us into mourning him either.”
“All these black preachers who are saying, ‘This isn’t about chickens coming home to roost’—yes it is,” he said. “It absolutely is.”
Those are striking remarks for a member of the Massachusetts Task Force on Hate Crimes, which advises the state’s governor on “issues relating to the prevalence, deterrence, and prevention of hate crimes.” Former Gov. Charlie Baker (R.) appointed Swan to the task force in 2022. Gov. Maura Healey (D.) appointed Swan to a similar state commission in 2018, when she served as attorney general.
Healey condemned Kirk’s murder “in the strongest possible terms.”
“The growth of political violence in our country must be stopped,” wrote Healey.
Reached for comment, Swan said his words were “taken out of context to fit the agenda of your right leaning publication,” but acknowledged he made the remarks about “coons” and “chickens coming home to roost.” He noted he said later in his program that “murder is evil, no matter who the victim may be.”
Healey’s office and the Task Force on Hate Crimes did not respond to requests for comment about Swan’s remarks. The Springfield NAACP, which Swan has led since 2011, did not respond to a request for comment.
Numerous other left-wing activists have defended Kirk’s killing, or justified it because of what they claim are Kirk’s inflammatory statements.
University of Michigan professor Charles H.F. Davis, whose “Anti-racism” research has been funded by the Gates Foundation, said the shooting was a “solution” to what he said was Kirk’s “violent rhetoric,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Davis said Kirk “should not be mourned or celebrated.” The University of Michigan defended Davis’s remarks under its institutional neutrality policy.
Swan has spouted inflammatory and racist rhetoric before during his tenure on the Massachusetts Task Force on Hate Crimes. He has made numerous derogatory remarks about white people, writing “Whiteness is an unrelenting, demonic, force of evil.” He pushed anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control of the entertainment industry while defending Kanye West after the rapper made anti-Semitic remarks, the Free Beacon reported.
“Nothing debunks the stereotype of having an inordinate level of influence in American sports and entertainment like stripping $1 billion from a Black entertainer and getting a Black athlete suspended while forcing him to apologize and pay half $1 million for offending you,” Swan wrote.
Swan has described Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who praised former German führer Adolf Hitler and referred to Jews as “termites,” as “one of the most revered and respected … figures in American social and cultural politics.”
He’s justified violence before. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Swan said in a sermon, “Violence is the language of the unheard.” He has since accused Israel of conducting a “Holocaust” in Gaza in its war to eradicate Hamas.
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