Black Conservatives Take Lead in Tea Party Movement

Though the tea party movement has attracted criticism for its supposed lack of diversity, minority activists who are involved say the movement has little to do with race, and that it is attracting a more diverse crowd every day.

(By Judson Berger, FOXNews.com) - Lloyd Marcus' conservatism started when he was 9.

His family had just moved out of the "ghetto" to a brand-new high rise in Baltimore -- within months, he said, the "dream come true" turned into a nightmare, as the building of welfare-collecting black residents became a den of crime.

His father moved the family out as soon as he got a job with the city fire department, but "my cousins never escaped," Marcus said. He cried as he told the story.

Marcus, a black conservative who is now involved in the growing tea party movement, attributes the problems of his childhood neighborhood, his extended family and the black community in general to a "cradle-to-grave government dependency" that in the case of his cousins enabled an idle life of crime and drug abuse.

To Marcus, President Obama's policies perpetuate that dependency. That's why, he says, it baffles him and other black conservatives when the tea party movement is dismissed as somehow anti-black, as a rowdy bunch of ignorant, white protesters who have it in for the nation's first black president.