Black community leaders are calling for the resignation of WEEI radio hosts John Dennis and Jerry Callahan for comments they made comparing the escaped gorilla from the Franklin Park Zoo to a Metco student.
‘Fire them outright,’ said Sadiki Kambon, director of the Black Community Information Center during a news conference Thursday outside Fenway Park. ‘We won’t allow anybody to attack our innocent children.’
Metco is the voluntary desegregation program that buses Boston students to suburban schools.
Although the pair of radio hosts was suspended for two weeks by WEEI, Kambon and the BCIC joined the chorus of voices calling for the station to outright fire Dennis and Callahan.
Mayor Thomas Menino, along with Executive Vice-President of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts Peter Meade, Metco Executive Director Jean McGuire and 10 of Boston’s 13 city councilors have said the two-week, unpaid suspension is not enough. A representative from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said today the NAACP is also calling for the hosts to resign.
‘We are demanding that WEEI management look beyond the issue of profit margin and do the right thing, which is fire both John Dennis and Jerry Callahan,’ the group said in a press release. ‘If not, then we call on WEEI’s advertising base, such as Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots and Mr. Werner and Mr. Lucino [sic] of the Boston Red Sox to follow the lead of Blue Cross and Blue Shield, get on the moral bandwagon and pull back their advertising revenue’ until the hosts are fired, the statement said.
The group held their news conference outside Fenway Park in an effort to pressure the Red Sox organization to withdraw their WEEI ads, the group said.
Dennis apologized after the incident, calling it the ‘single most stupid and poorly thought-out comment I’ve made in the 26 years I’ve been in Boston,’ according to the Boston Herald.
As word spread of the racial joke, public fervor increased and WEEI suspended Dennis for two days. Initially, Callahan was not punished at all.
The two-week suspension of the radio duo came only after Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts announced it would pull $27,000 in advertising from the station and donate the money to Metco.
Kambon, of the BCIC, also praised Dunkin’ Donuts for following the example set by Blue Cross and Blue Shield and pulling its advertising from the station. He said he believes this was ‘an act of racial hatred, not a slip of the tongue. Dennis and Callahan were expressing their true feelings.’
‘Calling a black person a gorilla is just like calling them nigger,’ Kambon said after the conference.