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The names in the American pantheon of black civil rights leaders is long.

It stretches from Crispus Attucks, a slave of black and American Indian parents who was killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre by British soldiers, to Andrew Young Jr., a 1960s civil rights leader and later Atlanta mayor.

Now there's an effort to add a new name to the list: Minutemen.

The lawn-chair brigade, which appointed itself border guardians last year, has now taken it upon itself to become guardians of black America.

The Minutemen, lead by cofounder and failed congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist of California, launched a crusade Wednesday citing undocumented immigrants as the cause of black unemployment.

Immigration politics is making for stranger-than-usual bedfellows.

The Minutemen are the successors of the Know-Nothings, a mid-19th century anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant movement, and White Citizens Councils, the anti-integrationist and anti-semitic Southern groups of the 1950s and 1960s.

Now the largely white Minutemen members say they stand arm in arm with their black brothers and sisters.

But don't tell that to longtime Tucson civil rights leader, Clarence Boykins, who is the executive director of the Tucson-Southern Arizona Black Chamber of Commerce and president of the NAACP's Tucson chapter.

"The Minutemen don't speak for me or blacks in Arizona or America," said Boykins, who spoke at the April 10 rally at Armory Park.

He said the answer to illegal immigration is a comprehensive plan. He supports a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants and improved border security without fences.

It's true that within the black community, there are concerns over the impact of illegal immigration on black employment and the political future. While some blacks jeered Gilchrist and a few Minutemen in Los Angeles this week when the group launched its caravan to the nation's capital, there were other blacks who supported the border watchers.

"Illegal immigration has had and is having a devastating effect on the black community," the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a Los Angeles Minuteman supporter and critic of the NAACP, told the Los Angeles Times. "Black Americans are being put out of jobs, they're put out of their own homes."

Black unemployment has persistently lagged behind white. The joblessness rate for whites 16 years and over was 3.9 percent. For blacks it was 8.8 percent, the Department of Labor's reported for April.

In 2004, 72 percent of black men in their 20s who did not complete high school did not have a job. That compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.

In some cities with large black populations, legal and undocumented immigrants have entered the work force, competing for low-wage jobs.

The Minutemen want black Americans — and everyone else for that matter — to make a connection between black unemployment and illegal immigration.

But it's an overly simplistic and incorrect connection, Boykins said.

Black unemployment is due to the lack of quality education and job opportunities, he said. State and national governments are not providing sufficient money to improve education and job training, he said.

Illegal immigration is a factor in the unemployment rate but it's not the culprit. The national rate is a relatively healthy 4.7 percent.

The Minutemen are trying to divide blacks and Latinos over jobs, Boykins said. "Nothing of what they profess is closely related to our issues."

As the small caravan of Minutemen drives to Washington, D.C., what they really want is to drive is a political wedge between blacks and Latinos.