NYC NAACP President Accuses Pro-Charter School Parent of 'Doing the Business of Slave Masters'

Anyone who's been around New York a long time knows all about the odious Hazel Dukes, a hack's hack who help run OTB into the ground during the abysmal Dinkins administration. A vile, unrepentant racist, Dukes these days is the New York NAACP President, a reward for her years for outrageous behavior, apparently. She's now taken it upon herself to stridently deny parents and children the right to attend charter schools, preferring they remain in the failed public school system.

Naturally, she's stuck her foot in her mouth yet again.

Naacp leader Hazel Dukes blasted a pro-charter-school parent from The Bronx as "doing the business of slave masters" in a shocking e-mail defending the civil-rights organization's lawsuit against city plans to expand charters.

Dukes made the stunning attack in response to a Hispanic woman who wrote a heartfelt letter urging the civil-rights leader to pull the NAACP out of a lawsuit aimed at blocking the expansion or co-location of 19 charters in city school buildings.

"If you and the NAACP continue on this horrible lawsuit against my daughter's school and the fellow 18 charter schools," Janette Ramos said, "it will not be the best legacy to leave behind."

But hey, why listen to the urgent pleas of parents when you can sink into the gutter so casually?

Dukes issued a terse response.

"You are not a member of the NAACP and don't understand that you are doing the business of slave masters," Dukes said in a June 1 response.

The fact Dukes is still president of the local NAACP says more than enough.

Why this war on charter schools? Power, of course. And jobs for the failed public school teachers. Can it get any more pathetic?

But that's what will happen if the NAACP and the UFT have their way in court. The civil rights organization's participation is inexplicable. But the UFT's aim is obvious: to protect adults' jobs, regardless of the impact on kids.

This does not happen with charter schools, because failure is not tolerated. Take, for example, Kingsbridge Innovative Design Charter School in the Bronx. Opened eight months ago, the administration failed to manage effectively. So the state shut it down.

Meanwhile, the UFT is wielding the impenetrable provisions of the mayoral-control law - as written at the union's behest - to keep open the worst educational dead zones and to bar charters from sharing space in underutilized school buildings.

Union President Michael Mulgrew's stance traces to the fact that most charters are not unionized. And his court papers reveal the motivations behind the legal action.

He complains the Education Department did not add staff to the failing schools by transferring in UFT members who were excessed from their classrooms and are unwanted by any principal.