The NAACP passed a resolution recently asking the tea party movement to purge itself of racist elements. As the anti-tax, anti-big government movement grew in the past year, so too have the racist images and rhetoric along its fringes.

Though many in that movement would argue that depictions of President Barack Obama as a witch doctor shouldn't qualify as "racist" per se, no reasonable person would believe that the image of a black president with a bone through his nose is strictly about differences on health care policy.

Even with such provocations, the NAACP issued a mild resolution that did not suggest the tea party movement as a whole was racist -- only a bit too accommodating to a minority with racial hang-ups. For daring to suggest that, the NAACP has been roundly denounced by the conservative media and pilloried as "racist" itself.

Then an interesting thing happened. Mark Williams, head of the Tea Party Express, penned a "satirical" open letter to Abraham Lincoln, ostensibly from the NAACP, that was so self-evidently racist that no one could deny its toxicity. Written in the stereotypic dialect of a 19th-century black person, the letter asks Lincoln to repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments:

"We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves and take consequences along with rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop."

Outrage from the tea party movement was swift, culminating in the expulsion of Mr. Williams and his group. This is an example of what the NAACP wanted all along -- a quick and resolute response to some racist elements in a movement that professes to be focused on the cost and growth of government and that represents the views of many decent Americans.

On July 31, various tea party groups will meet in Philadelphia for a "Uni-Tea" conference. African-American members of the movement will be front and center to demonstrate that racist speech is an aberration, not a rule. By expelling Mr. Williams, the tea party movement can begin to claim an intolerance for intolerance.

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