He didn’t name it, but Sen. Tim Scott called out The Washington Post on Wednesday for a fact-check that suggested his Black family was actually well-off.
In giving the Republican response to President Biden’s address to Congress, the South Carolina Republican repeated his stump-speech accounts about his grandfather being illiterate and having to drop out of school to pick cotton.
“In his 94 years saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” he said Wednesday.
But Glenn Kessler of The Post threw doubt on that last week, claiming that probate and census records from the early 20th century show his family’s “early and improbable success” and that his great-grandfather “amassed relatively large areas of farmland.”
Mr. Scott called that fact-check an example of “a different kind of intolerance.”
After noting that “I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the N-word by progressives, by liberals,” he mentioned the Kessler column without naming it.
“Just last week a national newspaper suggested my family’s poverty was actual privilege because a relative owned land generations before my time,” he said with a disbelieving look in his eyes.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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