In response to a Twitter user who charged that he made the slur intentionally, he railed, “You are out of your mind to think I would jeopardize future of my family and career to insert a racial slur against the GREATEST civil rights leader of all time?!?! #Ridiculous #Hateful #Judgemental and #youdontknowthefirsthingaboutme!” a thousand times or more in my career,” he told The New York Times in a phone interview. “To my knowledge, this is the first time that it came off wrong.” “I’ve probably said Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of the greatest civic leaders of all time.” “I would never want to tarnish the reputation of such a great man as Dr. I promise you that.” He meant he did not intentionally say the word “coon,” but jumbled together the k-sound from King with the “oo” sound from “junior.” He said he often speaks quickly in his weather reports. “There was no malice,” he said in a Facebook video on Monday, “Some people did interpret that the wrong way. “woSay ‘King’ and ‘Junior’ 5 times fast and tell me what happens,” responded another Twitter user with the handle insisted he simply “jumbled” his words. One side saying Kappell either intentionally used the phrase, or that he slipped only in the time and place that he said it, but it must have been a part of his regular vocabulary. Would-be linguists have weighed in on both sides. In the firestorm that engulfed social media, people have rushed both to condemn Kappell and to defend him and criticize his station for firing him. Thirty-five years after Ronald Reagan signed the bill making King’s birthday a federal holiday, there are those who still resist it. In fact, despite what many Americans assume, King is not universally respected or admired.
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Martin Luther King Jr.īut many African-Americans are familiar with exactly that swap: Martin Luther Coon Boulevard, Martin Luther Coon Park, Martin Luther Coon Day, Martin Luther… What is surprising to many is that the antique Southern anti-black slur, coon, is often substituted for King in the name of the civil rights icon Dr. It is not surprising to some people that the incident led to the weatherman, Jeremy Kappell of WHEC in Rochester, New York, being fired. It’s not surprising that a New York weatherman saying a racial slur on television ignited a controversy that ripped through social media. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.