Critics are calling for the John Wayne Airport in Southern California to be renamed after a 1971 “Playboy” interview resurfaced this week.
A Los Angeles Times opinion piece from earlier this week highlighted opinions the former movie star voiced in the interview on black people, gay people and Native Americans.
{mosads}Wayne, who was 63 at the time of the interview, said he believed in “white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”
He also mentioned “tests” which proved black people did not have “requisite background” to attend college.
When asked which films he called “perverted,” Wayne listed 1969’s “Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy,” before using anti-gay slurs to discuss the films.
Wayne said that Native Americans were “were selfishly trying to keep” the U.S. “for themselves.”
“Orange County today is such an economically and ethnically diverse community that it’s hard to justify asking any member of that community to board planes at an airport named after an outspoken racist and homophobe, with his strutting statue occupying a central niche in front of the concourse,” columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote for the LA Times.
Some have come to Wayne’s defense, saying that it is unfair to call out an interview from 50 years ago.
“Removing his name from Orange County’s airport now only validates what many Americans are coming to believe: You can’t say anything anymore, darn it, without being discovered and punished by the mob,” Madeline Fry wrote in the Washington Examiner.