Harris-Perry slams Breitbart.com for ‘lies’ on Derrick Bell

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New MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry criticized conservative website Breitbart.com for creating controversy over an old video from President Barack Obama’s days as a student at Harvard University Law School.

This past week, Breitbart.com indicated that Obama’s introduction and hugging of the late African-American Harvard professor Derrick Bell at a protest rally in 1990 was the future executive-in-chief supporting a “radical.”

Without specifically mentioning their name, Harris-Perry called the right wing website’s hysteria over Bell as a “manufacture policy” filled with “lies.” She then proceeded to explain Bell’s unselfish legacy and accomplishments, which included protesting Harvard University by taking an unpaid leave of absence after the school denied to offer a women of color a tenured position.

“President Obama, tried and convicted in the court of conservative public opinion for the unforgivable offense of hugging a black man,” Harris-Perry said.

The Tulane professor went on to compare Breitbart.com’s outrage of Obama hugging Bell to how former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was roundly criticized for actively talking with African-Americans.

Harris-Perry added that even seven decades after Roosevelt’s public photos, “social equality” is still viewed by some as “radical” and “anti-American.”

WATCH: Video from MSNBC, from March 10, 2012.

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