Jon Timmons is wrong — SD Rostra not afraid to discuss Bill Horn’s Real 1960s civil rights record

In a post at San Diego Politico today (a liberal site whose recent return Rostra welcomed) a Mr. Jon Timmons states of a Bill Horn controversy,  “SD ROSTRA won’t write about it either, because he is a conserve now and their site is about looking at the injustices and falsehoods of only the liberals.”  Clearly Mr. Timmons has never read SD Rostra!   Clearly also Mr. Timmons has never spoken with retired San Diego State Professor (and civil rights icon) Hal Brown about Bill Horn’s real civil rights record at SDSU in the early 1960s.  I have interviewed Prof. Brown in the past and heard from his own lips that he remembered college student Bill Horn supporting the Civil Rights cause when it was not an easy thing to do!

Professor Brown, an African-American, remembered Horn clearly, expressing his admiration for the students who, like Horn,  were witnesses for racial equality and the CORE movement in an era when being in a protest demonstration was Way Over the Top behavior.  (Professor Brown also shared with me his own Major League tryout with the St. Louis Browns baseball team!  They later became the Baltimore Orioles).

Bill Horn is getting some grief now for mixing up his real, and admirable Civil Rights record, with related associations and activities he cannot now document.  U.S. Marine that he is, Horn is taking his medicine and apologizing for those honest errors.

To this author, however,  what really matters is that in a time when 90% of college students were non-political, a White, blond-haired  Native San Diegan named Bill Horn (Mission Bay High school grad)  showed moral courage by speaking up for equality and fair treatment in a very public way. None of that is in dispute.  Horn showed the same courage a few years later, this time as a Marine Combat commander, resisting another form of slavery (Communism) in Vietnam.

I hope the people taking cheap shots at Bill Horn today will ask themselves if they could have lived up to Bill Horn’s standards, had they  been around in the 1960s and had to face the same challenges and controversies.