Romney fields questions on King – Campaign says claim not literal
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he watched his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, in a 1960s civil rights march in Michigan with Martin Luther King Jr.
On Wednesday, Romney’s campaign said his recollections of watching his father, an ardent civil rights supporter, march with King were meant to be figurative.
“He was speaking figuratively, not literally,” Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesman for the Romney campaign, said of the candidate.
The campaign was responding to questions raised by the Free Press and other media after a Boston publication challenged the accuracy of Mitt Romney’s account.
In a major speech on faith and politics earlier this month in Texas, Mitt Romney said: “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.”
He made a similar statement Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said, “You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights.”
Romney’s campaign cited various historical articles, as well as a 1967 book written by Stephen Hess and Washington Post political columnist David Broder, as confirmation that George Romney marched with King in Grosse Pointe in 1963.
“He has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb,” Hess and Broder wrote in “The Republican Establishment: The Present and Future of the GOP.”
Free Press archives, however, showed no record of King marching in Grosse Pointe in 1963 or of then-Gov. Romney taking part in King’s historic march down Woodward Avenue in June of that year.
George Romney told the Free Press at the time that he didn’t take part because it was on a Sunday and he avoided public appearances on the Sabbath because of his religion.
Romney did participate in a civil rights march protesting housing bias in Grosse Pointe just six days after the King march. According to the Free Press account, however, King was not there.
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Astronaut’s mom dies while he’s in space
Man, I wonder how NASA broke the news.
LOMBARD, Ill. – The 90-year-old mother of a NASA astronaut aboard the international space station died Wednesday when a train struck her vehicle, police said.
A preliminary investigation showed that Rose Tani, the mother of astronaut Daniel M. Tani, stopped behind a school bus pausing at a train crossing, Raymond Byrne, police chief in this Chicago suburb, said in a statement. She drove around the bus, bypassing the lowered crossing gate, he said.
The train struck Tani’s vehicle on the passenger side and pushed it down the tracks before stopping. Paramedics took Tani to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
“All indications are that the crossing gates and warning signals were functioning properly at the time of the accident,” Byrne said.
Daniel Tani, 46, has made several journeys into space. He was a flight engineer on the Space Shuttle Discovery when it took off on Oct. 23 and was scheduled to remain on the space station until Jan. 8.
Tani and another astronaut ventured out of the space station Tuesday to inspect two defective mechanisms hobbling power generation.
NASA officials did not immediately return a telephone message left after business hours Wednesday.