The University of Southern California will no longer honor John Wayne, who attended pre-law classes and played football there before embarking on his storied film career.
The memory of the Oscar-winning star must be erased, the school says, because Wayne uttered now-unacceptable sentiments in an interview with Playboy magazine 49 years ago.
And so the Wayne exhibit at the university’s cinema school will be removed.
The Hate-Wayne movement began last year when the interview popped on Twitter, and has gained steam since the death of George Floyd on May 25, which in turn prompted leftists in Orange County to launch a drive to remove his name and statue from the county’s airport.
The Announcement
The announcement came from Evan Hughes, Interim Assistant Dean of Diversity and Inclusion for the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
“Conversations about systemic racism in our cultural institutions along with the recent global, civil uprising by the Black Lives Matter Movement require that we consider the role our School can play as a change maker in promoting antiracist cultural values and experiences,” Hughes wrote. “Therefore, it has been decided that the Wayne Exhibit will be removed.”
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Thankfully, the school hasn’t decided to burn the materials, and will instead move them to the Cinematic Arts Library. “Placing them in the proper archival and research context will allow scholarship to continue on the role that John Wayne’s films played in the history of cinema,” wrote Hughes, who teaches students “to produce documentaries around issues such as racism and social justice, environmental activism, LGBTQ+ rights and HIV/AIDS stigma.”
One doesn’t need a Ph.D. from USC’s cinema school to know what the “scholarship” will say about Wayne’s many films.
“His words [were] twisted by the interviewer,” tweeted Wayne’s 64-year-old daughter Aissa. “He loved people of color. He founded orphanages for Mexican children [and] didn’t scream it out like celebrities do. Was given a bracelet from [a] Vietnamese Indian tribe [and] wore it with honor, never taking it off and wore it till the day he died.”
The bracelet to which she refers came from Montagnard tribesman fighting with U.S. Green Berets in Vietnam.
The Interview
The trouble for The Searchers and Quiet Man star began after excerpts from his interview showed up on Twitter in February 2019.
Wayne’s “racist” remarks included these:
• We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
• I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
Wayne said other things, but those are the comments, assuming the writer accurately recorded and transcribed them, that sent the Left into a foaming rage last year, and then again after the Floyd riots began.
And so Wayne must be canceled, like Gone with Wind, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Mount Rushmore, and everything else with which the radical Left and its minority proxy warriors take issue.
After Democrats in Orange County passed an “emergency resolution” to remove his name and likeness from the county’s airport, Ethan Wayne, the head of John Wayne Enterprises, wrote that his father treated everyone fairly and would have intervened to save Floyd.
And a petition began on Change.org to urge the county not rename the airport.
“John Wayne is so revered and appreciated he has an airport named after him, the Pioneer Trail in Washington named after him, John Wayne Parkway in Maricopa, Arizona and part of highway 347 in Arizona honors his name,” the petition says. “Please join me in stopping this ridiculous, cancel culture move on behalf of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. Block them from removing John Wayne’s name and removing his statue from the John Wayne airport.”
“Let me make one thing clear,” Ethan Wayne said in noting that his father did not intend to convey the literal meaning of his remarks: “John Wayne was not a racist.”
Image: needpix.com
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
