The president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP is calling for a boycott of the Giants after one of the team's owners contributed to the re-election campaign of Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), who joked about a public hanging.
Charles Johnson and his wife, Ann, have each donated $2,700 to Hyde-Smith's (R-Mississippi) campaign, according to a federal election filing recently made public.
Hyde-Smith, who is facing a Nov. 27 runoff against former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, a Democrat, has been on the defensive after she was caught on camera joking about attending a “public hanging.”
The comments ignited a firestorm of criticism but did not garner much attention in the Bay Area until Johnson's contribution was brought to light.
"For him to have given this donation to Ms. Hyde-Smith is a cooperation with evil," said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the local NAACP chapter and a native of Mississippi, a state with a troubling history of slavery and lynchings of African-Americans.