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Post by pim on Jun 26, 2015 20:53:50 GMT 10
Bloody Nazis trashed a perfectly good peace sign. Ask the Hindus and Buddhists
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Post by KTJ on Jun 26, 2015 21:43:12 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Is it time for the Confederate flag to be as taboo as the Nazi swastika?By ISHAAN THAROOR | Wednesday, June 24, 2015In this undated file photo from the 1930s a member of the Hitlerjugend — HJ (Hitler Youth) wearing his uniform holds a big drum as he stands in front of a tent in a camp looking at a flag of the National Socialists with a swastika on it. — Photo: Associated Press.A DARKER EMBLEM looms over the heated conversation about a controversial American symbol. To hammer home how problematic the continued state-sanctioned tolerance of the Confederate battle flag is in parts of the United States, some have drawn comparisons to the infamous banner of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
“It would be like having the swastika flag flying on your next-door neighbour,” said Whoopi Goldberg, on ABC's The View on Monday. “If [the Confederate flag] continues to fly, the statement that’s being made … is that ‘We miss this really crappy part of history’.”
To be sure, Nazi Germany was a vastly different political entity than the Confederacy, and existed in a vastly different historical context.
But the growing backlash against the Confederate flag does suggest that, a century and a half later, Americans are finally accepting what Goldberg and many others believe it has represented all along: not heritage, nor pride, nor a badge of Southern identity, but a regime of white supremacists who went to war against the Union in order to preserve the inhuman institution of slavery.
That's a legacy and ideology that does not deserve to be honored by government institutions in the 21st century. And it's in that sense where the comparison to the Nazi swastika is most apt.
After World War II and the defeat of the Third Reich, which survived nearly three times longer than the Confederate States of America, the insignia and flags of Nazism were banned. They were stripped from uniforms, detonated off the facades of buildings, and eventually deemed a violation of Germany's criminal code as symbols of an unconstitutional organization.According to a 1946 article in Time magazine, the occupying Allies embarked on a ruthless quest to expunge any trace of Nazi iconography, reducing “to pulp literature, museum and library material, newspapers, films and war memorials” connected to Hitler's regime. Only tombstones were spared. To this day, it is illegal to display a Nazi swastika or any other associated logo or perform the “Heil Hitler” salute — even sometimes as an act of satirical, anti-fascist protest.
Never will you find a serious German politician, let alone one contending for the leadership of the country, insisting in 2015 that the Nazi swastika is “part of who we are.” Nor would you be able to stock up on kitsch, “nostalgic” Nazi memorabilia. There are no vainglorious monuments to Nazi leaders lining German city squares; instead, in the heart of the capital, sits a painful testament to collective guilt and the horrors of the past.
The contrast between this and the way some American states still commemorate Confederate leaders, name roads after Confederate generals and fly Confederate flags could not be more stark.
The Civil War may have put slavery to an end, but as the shooting in Charleston made clear, cultures of hatred remain. The Confederate battle flag, now at the heart of so much controversy, was revived almost a century after the war by Southern groups opposed to efforts toward desegregation. It became an enduring emblem of the country's deeply entrenched systems of inequity.
This is not to say that a toxic ideology simply dies out with the retirement of its symbol.
Nazism and its political allure hardly faded overnight with the scrapping of the Nazi swastika. The “denazification” efforts launched by the occupying Allies had limited effect. As the late historian Tony Judt chronicles in his book “Postwar”, considerable sympathy for the old regime remained in the years that followed the end of World War II.
A 1946 poll of West Germans found that one in three agreed with the proposition that “Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race.” Another poll in 1952 found that some 25 percent of West Germans still held a “good opinion” of Hitler.Clarence Brandenburg, 48, who says hes an officer in the Ku Klux Klan, left, and Richard Hanna, 21, admitted member of the American Nazi Party, pose for picture following their arrests, August 8th, 1964, Cincinnati, Ohio. — Photo: Associated Press.After 1949, there was a climate of amnesia in West Germany about the misdeeds and horrors of Hitler's genocidal rule, as well as a degree of resentment of the Allies' treatment of their defeated foe. “The overwhelming majority of West Germans were clearly in favor of... forgetting everything having to do with Nazism,” wrote the German historian Norbert Frei. The new government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer eventually set up sweeping amnesty for former Nazi officials and party members.
Judt lays out the extent of the Nazi rehabilitation:
In Bavaria [once the heartland of Nazi party] about half the secondary schoolteachers had been fired by 1946, only to be back in their jobs two years later. In 1949 the newly-established Federal Republic ended all investigations of the past behaviour of civil servants and army officers.
In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party.
Historians argue that this was largely tolerated by the United States and other countries in the West because of the looming shadow of the Cold War and the need to keep West Germany on side. It set up a more painful reckoning in West Germany in the decades ahead.
“The emergence in West German society of a serious and open confrontation with the Nazi past,” wrote Frei, “was made possible only by a very different preceding period — a period of utmost individual leniency, reflecting a policy for the past whose failing would stamp the new state's spirit over many decades.”
In the United States, some would say a long deferred reckoning is perhaps now taking place.
In Germany, the censorship of Nazi symbols is still a matter of debate — with many wrestling over the dual necessity of preserving liberal freedoms while also recognizing the evils of the Third Reich. Far-right and even neo-Nazi groups exist and organize in the country, but raising the Nazi swastika is a red line that no one can cross.
Instead, at times, some European fringe groups have come up with another symbol to represent their hateful creed: the Confederate flag.• Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.__________________________________________________________________________ Related stories:
• Why European neo-fascists wave the Confederate flag
• The Charleston terrorist wore badges of racist African regimeswww.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/24/how-germanys-ban-of-the-nazi-swastika-echoes-in-the-battle-over-the-confederate-flag
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Post by KTJ on Nov 23, 2015 12:27:11 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....My white neighbor thought I was breaking into my own apartment. Nineteen cops showed up.The place I call home no longer feels safe.By FAY WELLS | Wednesday, November 18, 2015FAY WELLS. — Photograph: Kyle Monk/The Washington Post.ON September 6th, I locked myself out of my apartment in Santa Monica, California. I was in a rush to get to my weekly soccer game, so I decided to go enjoy the game and deal with the lock afterward.
A few hours and a visit from a locksmith later, I was inside my apartment and slipping off my shoes when I heard a man's voice and what sounded like a small dog whimpering outside, near my front window. I imagined a loiterer and opened the door to move him along. I was surprised to see a large dog halfway up the staircase to my door. I stepped back inside, closed the door and locked it.
I heard barking. I approached my front window and loudly asked what was going on. Peering through my blinds, I saw a gun. A man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointing it at me. I stepped back and heard: “Come outside with your hands up.” I thought: This man has a gun and will kill me if I don't come outside. At the same time, I thought: I've heard this line from policemen in movies. Although he didn't identify himself, perhaps he's an officer.
I left my apartment in my socks, shorts and a light jacket, my hands in the air. “What's going on?” I asked again. Two police officers had guns trained on me. They shouted: “Who's in there with you? How many of you are there?”
I said it was only me and, hands still raised, slowly descended the stairs, focused on one officer's eyes and on his pistol. I had never looked down the barrel of a gun or at the face of a man with a loaded weapon pointed at me. In his eyes, I saw fear and anger. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw how it would end: I would be dead in the stairwell outside my apartment, because something about me — a 5-foot-7, 125-pound black woman — frightened this man with a gun. I sat down, trying to look even less threatening, trying to de-escalate. I again asked what was going on. I confirmed there were no pets or people inside.
I told the officers I didn't want them in my apartment. I said they had no right to be there. They entered anyway. One pulled me, hands behind my back, out to the street. The neighbors were watching. Only then did I notice the ocean of officers. I counted 16. They still hadn't told me why they'd come.
Later, I learned that the Santa Monica Police Department had dispatched 19 officers after one of my neighbors reported a burglary at my apartment. It didn't matter that I told the cops I'd lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID. It didn't matter that I went to Duke, that I have an MBA from Dartmouth, that I'm a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation. It didn't matter that I've never had so much as a speeding ticket. It didn't matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. It also didn't matter that I didn't match the description of the person they were looking for — my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911. What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city — and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he'd never seen me before.FAY WELLS. — Photograph: Kyle Monk/The Washington Post.After the officers and dog exited my “cleared” apartment, I was allowed back inside to speak with some of them. They asked me why I hadn't come outside shouting, “I live here.” I told them it didn't make sense to walk out of my own apartment proclaiming my residence when I didn't even know what was going on. I also reminded them that they had guns pointed at me. Shouting at anyone with a gun doesn't seem like a wise decision.
I had so many questions. Why hadn't they announced themselves? Why had they pointed guns at me? Why had they refused to answer when I asked repeatedly what was going on? Was it protocol to send more than a dozen cops to a suspected burglary? Why hadn't anyone asked for my ID or accepted it, especially after I'd offered it? If I hadn't heard the dog, would I have opened the door to a gun in my face? “Maybe,” they answered.
I demanded all of their names and was given few. Some officers simply ignored me when I asked, boldly turning and walking away. Afterward, I saw them talking to neighbors, but they ignored me when I approached them again. A sergeant assured me that he'd personally provide me with all names and badge numbers.
I introduced myself to the reporting neighbor and asked if he was aware of the gravity of his actions — the ocean of armed officers, my life in danger. He stuttered about never having seen me, before snippily asking if I knew my next-door neighbor. After confirming that I did and questioning him further, he angrily responded, “I'm an attorney, so you can go f— yourself,” and walked away.
I spoke with two of the officers a little while longer, trying to wrap my mind around the magnitude and nature of their response. They wondered: Wouldn't I want the same response if I'd been the one who called the cops? “Absolutely not,” I told them. I recounted my terror and told them how I imagined it all ending, particularly in light of the recent interactions between police and people of color. One officer admitted that it was complicated but added that people sometimes kill cops for no reason. I was momentarily speechless at this strange justification.
I got no clear answers from the police that night and am still struggling to get them, despite multiple visits, calls and e-mails to the Santa Monica Police Department requesting the names of the officers, their badge numbers, the audio from my neighbor’s call to 911 and the police report. The sergeant didn't e-mail me the officers' names as he promised. I was told that the audio of the call requires a subpoena and that the small army of responders, guns drawn, hadn't merited an official report. I eventually received a list from the SMPD of 17 officers who came to my apartment that night, but the list does not include the names of two officers who handed me their business cards on the scene. I've filed an official complaint with internal affairs.
(The department released some of this information to The Washington Post after an editor's inquiry.)
To many, the militarization of the police is primarily abstract or painted as occasional. That thinking allows each high-profile incident of aggressive police interaction with people of color — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray — to be written off as an outlier.
What happened to them did not happen to me, but it easily could have. The SMPD sent 19 armed police officers who refused to answer my questions while violating my rights, privacy and sense of well-being. A wrong move, and I could have been shot. My complaint is not the first against the department this year. This spring, the local branch of the NAACP and other concerned residents met with SMPD to discuss several incidents of aggressive policing against people of color. The NAACP asked SMPD for demographic information on all traffic, public transportation and pedestrian stops; so far, the department has promised to release a report of detailed arrest data next year.
The trauma of that night lingers. I can't un-see the guns, the dog, the officers forcing their way into my apartment, the small army waiting for me outside. Almost daily, I deal with sleeplessness, confusion, anger and fear. I'm frightened when I see large dogs now. I have nightmares of being beaten by white men as they call me the n-word. Every week, I see the man who called 911. He averts his eyes and ignores me.
I'm heartbroken that his careless assessment of me, based on skin color, could endanger my life. I'm heartbroken by the sense of terror I got from people whose job is supposedly to protect me. I'm heartbroken by a system that evades accountability and justifies dangerous behavior. I'm heartbroken that the place I called home no longer feels safe. I'm heartbroken that no matter how many times a story like this is told, it will happen again.
Not long ago, I was walking with a friend to a crowded restaurant when I spotted two cops in line and froze. I tried to figure out how to get around them without having to walk past them. I no longer wanted to eat there, but I didn't want to ruin my friend's evening. As we stood in line, 10 or so people back, my eyes stayed on them. I've always gone out of my way to avoid generalizations. I imagined that perhaps these two cops were good people, but I couldn't stop thinking about what the Santa Monica police had done to me. I found a lump in my throat as I tried to separate them from the system that had terrified me. I realized that if I needed help, I didn't think I could ask them for it.• Fay Wells is vice president of strategy at a company in California.EDITOR'S NOTE: The Santa Monica Police Department told The Washington Post that 16 officers were on the scene but later provided a list of 17 names. That list does not match the list of 17 names that was eventually provided to the writer; the total number of names provided by the SMPD is 19. The department also said that it was protocol for this type of call to warrant “a very substantial police response,” and that any failure of officers to provide their names and badge numbers “would be inconsistent with the Department's protocols and expectations.” There is an open internal affairs inquiry into the writer's allegations of racially motivated misconduct. After this essay ran online, Police Chief Jacqueline A. Seabrooks released an additional statement. “The 9-1-1 caller was not wrong for reporting what he believed was an in-progress residential burglary,” she wrote. “Ms. Wells is not wrong to feel as she does.”.__________________________________________________________________________ Read more on this topic:
• I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong.
• I'm a cop. If you don't want to get hurt, don't challenge me.
• Instead of cash reparations, give every black person 5/3 a vote
• There's a reason Mizzou protesters didn't want the media around
• Don't criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did too.
• Community policing might make police brutality worsewww.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/18/my-white-neighbor-thought-i-was-breaking-into-my-own-apartment-nineteen-cops-showed-up/
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Post by KTJ on Oct 3, 2017 14:53:26 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....The legacy of slavery is not gone with the windBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Monday, October 02, 2017I WAS shuffling along a path beside the James River in the hot Southern sun, tied loosely by a rope to 17 other people while an actor dressed as an 18th century slave overseer paced beside us screaming demeaning, racist epithets. The thought crossed my mind that this was the height of white privilege: paying for the chance to experience a few minutes of slight discomfort (knowing the tour bus and lunch were just around the corner) so that I could get a hint of what slavery felt like.
Still, the experience was illuminating. I knew it was all theater, yet I kept my head down and my eyes averted to avoid the faux slave driver's wrath. To maintain balance and keep an awkward, slow pace, my left hand gripped the shoulder of the young black man ahead of me. He was a senior from the University of Washington named Jarrod Stout, and his feelings about this experience were certainly more intense than mine. Jarrod was consumed by the horrific realization that people who looked like him had been pulled from slave ships at this very spot.
After being stolen away from their homes and families, the enslaved Africans had endured weeks of shipboard confinement in cramped, stifling gloom, chained up with other luckless strangers, hungry, naked, awash in their own bodily waste. When they arrived in Richmond — the city second only to New Orleans as a prime American portal for the trans-Atlantic slave trade — they were shackled into lines and marched down the path to the pens in which they would be kept until being sold off to the highest bidder on the slaver's auction block.
All Americans know at least a little about our country's shameful history of slavery, and many think the problem was resolved when the Civil War ended 152 years ago with the defeat of the rebellious Southern states. In reality, though, slavery morphed into 100 years of segregation, economic disadvantage, rights denied and racist terrorism for African Americans. And now, even after the advances of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s, systemic issues remain: mass incarceration, unequal educational opportunities, economic disparities, political disenfranchisement, police violence.
Judging by the fearful ignorance displayed by too many white Americans, not only are these systemic issues not recognized as valid, but even bringing them up in polite conversation or a political campaign is an offense against their conception of what America is and should be. As we have seen in recent days, NFL players raising such concerns during a pre-game singing of the national anthem will even cause the president of the United States to respond with an angry tweet storm.
I am one white American who believes this country I love cannot be as good and great as it should be until these issues are confronted. So, for five days in mid-September, I joined with an interracial, intergenerational collection of men and women under the auspices of Project Pilgrimage, a new organization based in Seattle that promotes engagement with the civil rights issues of our day. One method of engagement is taking diverse groups on immersive pilgrimages to places where both contemporary and historical struggles can be directly experienced.
Two years ago, I traveled with a similar group through the South — to Birmingham, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; Montgomery, Alabama; the Mississippi Delta and finally to Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary commemoration of the pivotal Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that helped drive passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
This time around, the group included a college professor, a county official, a former legislator and other older adults paired with university students and recent college graduates. The itinerary would take us to Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in August, neo-Nazis paraded with torches and a young female counter-protester was killed. We would go to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where the abolitionist John Brown tried to incite a slave rebellion in 1859 and where, at a black college on a hill, the civil rights movement was born. We would trek across the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where vast armies of white Americans fought and killed each other to settle the question of whether blacks in this country would be slave or free.
First, though, we would spend a day in the capital of the old Confederacy, to witness firsthand the debate about monuments dedicated to the Southern heroes of the bloodiest war in the nation's history — a debate that suggests that, in significant ways, the Civil War did not end conclusively in 1865. Rather, it continues to flare up with each new generation.• This is part one of a five-part series.www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-legacy-slavery-20170930-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 4, 2017 9:33:13 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....Confederate monuments are tributes to a whitewashed historyBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Tuesday, October 03, 2017RICHMOND, VIRGINIA — Monument Avenue is a broad boulevard that stretches through some of the finer real estate in this city. At several intersections, the streets carve central squares and circles and at the center of those stand monuments to the venerated heroes of the Confederacy, monuments that some people would like to sweep into the trash heap of history.
Like many American cities and towns, Richmond is confounded by what to do with these relics of another age and a commission has been set up to sort it out. This having been the capital of the Confederate States of America, what they do here may have more significance than in any other locale. Several days ago, I was on a bus with 17 other Project Pilgrimage participants from the West Coast, rolling along Monument Avenue for a rendezvous with some participants in the debate. We met up with a city councilman, Chuck Richardson, and a professor of history from the University of Richmond, Dr. Julian Hayter, who is a member of the monuments commission. Both are African Americans.
The first monument we encountered was dedicated to Arthur Ashe, the black tennis champion and civil rights activist — obviously not one of the Confederate heroes. After a lot of effort and antagonism, Richardson succeeded in getting this statue put up as something of a rebuttal to the bronze images further along the avenue. And rebuttal would be the right term because the other statues were very much intended as an unambiguous statement in the segregationist era in which they were erected: The Southern cause was just and righteous, and this city will not apologize or relent.
A few blocks after Ashe stands a big equestrian statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson defiantly facing north. Beyond Jackson is an elaborate memorial to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. On the memorial's stone steps sat five protesters who do not at all like the idea of removing the monuments. Flanked on his right by two wary white men and on his left by two equally suspicious white women, a lone black man greeted our group with a smile. He stood up, introduced himself as retired Army Sergeant Major James S. Haynes, Jr., and gave us a lengthy explanation of why he believes money spent on removing the monuments would be a waste since the city has “many fish to fry besides dead men on dead horses.”
The councilman, Richardson, sat nearby, fuming as Haynes spoke. Finally, he could not take any more and went on a tirade about the Confederate president's white supremacist beliefs. One of the women shot back at him, telling Richardson to “get off the Democrats' plantation!” She declared that it was the Democrats who were for slavery, which, while partially accurate in a historical context, ignores the reality that segregationist Democrats jumped to the Republican side in the 1960s and '70s.
One of the black students in the pilgrimage group got into a discussion with one of the white men. The man argued that, in assessing old Jeff Davis, “you've got to look at it from a 19th-century perspective.” The student stayed polite, but, walking beside me afterward, he wished he had reminded the man how that “perspective” would not have been healthy for a black man alive back in Davis' day. Coming up behind, Richardson shook off his anger and said with a grin, “But you gotta love the artwork, I tell you.”
That artistry is undeniable and reaches epic proportions in the towering figure of General Robert E. Lee astride his horse, Traveler, standing proudly atop a massive pedestal. Hayter noted that the huge traffic circle on which Lee stands is state property and that, in 1977 after a black majority took over the Richmond City Council, the Virginia Assembly quickly passed a law prohibiting the statue's removal.
That same year, the Assembly approved a law that blocked the black-run city from expanding into the white-controlled outlying areas. Now, Richmond is ringed by white suburbs with good schools, while only 17 of the city's 44 predominantly black public schools have accreditation. That sort of politically engineered disparity is just one of the myriad examples of how the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow still haunts the South. Those who want the monuments taken down say the statues are symbols and celebrations of that dark legacy, not mere tributes to ancestors.
Hayter is in complete agreement with that view of what the monuments represent, but he notes that, when Baltimore and New Orleans took down their Confederate statues, it did not really change anything for the black residents of those cities. Hayter is open to the idea of doing something different in Richmond. Perhaps, signs and structures can be placed around or beneath the statues of Lee, Davis, Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, the final rebel hero represented on the avenue, that will alter the message and teach a very different story.
Remarkably, by state mandate, Virginia's schoolchildren are still being told that the Civil War was not a result of slavery, but was a dispute over state's rights and preservation of Southern heritage — a noble Lost Cause that their white ancestors defended with blood and courage. Could the monuments be transformed into places that counter those erroneous lessons? There is a very different and far more accurate narrative to be told. As the founding documents of the Confederacy state very clearly, the Civil War was all about slavery and the Southerners who fought and died so bravely sacrificed for an unworthy cause.
There are 75 million descendants of Confederate veterans alive today, Hayter said, and a great many of them are not eager to admit their ancestors were on the wrong side. Nevertheless, the professor told me, “We are going to have to be honest with our history, or we will live and die by it.”
• This is part two of a five-part series.
www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-confederate-monuments-20171002-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 5, 2017 5:23:31 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....Shrouding the Confederate past in CharlottesvilleBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Wednesday, October 04, 2017ON THE dark night of August 11th, hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched across the University of Virginia campus chanting “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us!” Carrying tiki torches, they streamed across the great, grassy lawn behind the Rotunda, the oldest building on campus, made their way up the steps and down the stairs on the other side of the building to mass around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the university's founder.
The marchers were met by a small group of anti-racist protesters who circled the base of the statue, as if to protect Jefferson from the mob. Oddly enough, a few weeks later, a different group of student activists decrying Jefferson's ownership of slaves shrouded the statue with a black plastic sheet.
Such are the complications on America's college campuses where issues of identity drive passionate debates.
Last week, I visited the UV campus with a group of participants in a Project Pilgrimage fact-finding tour and walked over to the Rotunda. Following the lines of the Pantheon in Rome, Jefferson designed the building as a structure evoking “the authority of nature and the power of reason.” It took the place of the church that, in his time, was generally set at the center of a university.
Affixed on the Rotunda's brick wall above the Jefferson statue I found plaques memorializing UV students killed in several of America's wars. On the lawn side of the building, there were two more plaques, one in remembrance of the university's World War I dead and one in tribute to President Woodrow Wilson, who attended the UV law school. Between those were two places where the bricks were cracked, evidence of the recent removal of a pair of plaques. Black students had demanded that the plaques come down because they listed the names of UV alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy.
On this college campus, even common soldiers swept up in a war not of their making have become casualties in a battle to revisit American history and represent all those — black Americans, in particular — who have been marginalized in our nation’s story.
Down in the town, I strolled through two parks and found more contentious targets of protest — equestrian statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They have been covered with black tarps until city officials can figure out what to do with them. Liberal activists want the things removed because they were placed in those public squares in the days when white intimidation of black citizens was common practice backed by cruel law. To many, the statues are seen as just another tool of that intimidation.
When I was going through school as a kid fascinated by Civil War history, Lee was widely considered to be an American hero, not just a man venerated by the South. The simple biography of Lee said duty and honor compelled him to resign from his commission in the U.S. Army to fight for his beloved home state of Virginia, even though he disdained the institution of slavery.
Recent scholarship suggests that story is too kind. Lee's own letters indicate he saw slavery as a burden for white people who, of necessity, had to keep blacks under their control until they could raise them to a proper level of Christian enlightenment. When he led the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania, Lee allowed his troops to sweep up free blacks and take them south as slaves. When the North's commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, bargained with Lee for a swap of prisoners, Lee refused to return any black Union soldiers, insisting they were the property of Southerners. When Union troops took over one of the Lee family plantations, the resident slaves showed no regret at being liberated from Lee's stern, paternalistic authority.
The students on the bus tour with me have no trouble perceiving Lee as a traitor to his country whose defense of the slave system cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Unburdened by other narratives and steeped in the dialectics of social justice, the matter seems rather clear to them: Lee and all the other Confederates were fighting for racism and, therefore, should no longer be memorialized in any public space other than a museum or battlefield.
That is a hard verdict for many Americans to accept.
In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” In the decades after Lincoln's death, that healing was done by treating the defeated Confederates as straying brothers who were welcomed back into the American family. Southern historians were able to concoct a noble “Lost Cause” narrative that came to dominate perceptions, even in other parts of the country, and which was popularized in Hollywood epics like “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind”.
Today's challenge to that version of history is opening those old wounds. Southerners who grew up believing their ancestors were American heroes are now being asked to accept that they were traitors in a wicked cause led by leaders who, as far as the people they enslaved were concerned, were not much better than Nazis. That harsh narrative is not likely to be met with anything but resistance.
This leaves questions for all of us to face. How much understanding of complex human motivations are we willing to fold into our judgments about the past? How much ground will any of us be willing to give up for the sake of future reconciliation? How much truth can we handle? What does justice require?• This is part three of a five-part series.www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-shrouding-charlottesville-20171003-story.html
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Post by Deleted on Oct 5, 2017 6:00:33 GMT 10
Yet white, black or brindle yankies will still think America is the greatest...
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Post by KTJ on Oct 5, 2017 23:13:17 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....Uncovering the untold history of civil rights at a martyred zealot's farmBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Thursday, October 05, 2017HARPER'S FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA — At this small town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, there is a history that is well-known and a history that has been hidden.
The familiar history is the story of militant abolitionist John Brown, who on the night of October 16th, 1859, came with a party of 22 raiders to seize the United States arsenal. His objective was to provoke a slave revolt that would spread throughout the South. Instead, Brown and his compatriots were trapped inside an engine house just inside the gate of the arsenal grounds. U.S. Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate commander, killed 10 of the raiders and took Brown prisoner. Brown was tried for treason against the state of Virginia — a dubious offense — and was hanged.
I heard this tale retold by a National Park Service guide, Jim Silvia, while sitting in the restored engine house with my fellow Project Pilgrimage sojourners. All visitors to Harper's Ferry will hear this story, but Silvia added more to his narrative by taking us up the hill to the site of Storer College. Opened at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the publicly supported school was open to anyone. Because it served black students, though, no whites ever enrolled. Ironically, when desegregation became the law of the land, federal and state funding was withdrawn on the pretext that African Americans could now attend any college they chose, and Storer was shut down in 1955.
The college is, arguably, the birthplace of the civil rights movement because it was there that the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Niagara Movement led by W.E.B. DuBois, held a national conference in 1906. DuBois returned to the Storer campus in 1932 with the intention of installing a plaque to memorialize John Brown, who by then had achieved saintly status among black Americans. White Southerners emphatically did not share that view, and DuBois was dissuaded from erecting the memorial. One like it was not installed on the grounds until 2004.
Brown remains a controversial figure. When the National Park Service held an event marking the 150th anniversary of the abolitionist's raid, Silvia said, a troop of Ku Klux Klan members paraded around a book tent on the Storer grounds to express their displeasure.
Brown was a true radical. He makes today's anti-fascist protesters and window-smashing anarchists look like children scuffling on a playground. Prior to the raid, he holed up with several of his men in a remote farmhouse four miles outside Harper's Ferry, where they plotted and trained for revolution. Lee called Brown “a fanatic or a madman”. DuBois hailed him as a hero who “aimed at human slavery a blow that woke a guilty nation”. When we visited the restored farmhouse, we were greeted by a rather convincing wax figure of Brown seated at a table with guns ready. I contemplated the possibility that both Lee and DuBois were right.
Just a few paces up the hill from Brown's hideout, we discovered another bit of black history that few white folks know about. In 1950, after buying the farm property to preserve as a shrine to John Brown, the African American fraternal organization known as the Black Elks built a nearby auditorium. It is now a vacated wreck, but between 1950 and 1965, it became a remote but successful stop on the Chitlin Circuit, the string of dance halls and bars stretching from Boston to Austin where black musicians performed for black audiences shut out of other venues by segregation.
African Americans would drive in from as far away as Baltimore and Washington to dance and groove with nearly every top black performer of the era — Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, B.B. King, Etta James, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino and many more. Ed Maliskas, a musician who wrote a book about the remarkable place, titled “John Brown to James Brown: The Little Farm Where Liberty Budded, Blossomed and Boogied” guided us through the empty hall. An older black man, Al Baylor, a local who had come along with Maliskas, reminisced about the dance hall in its heyday, when he was a teenager. He remembered the necessity of buying a new suit, shirt, tie and shoes so that he would look as sharp as everyone else, and how the new clothes would be wet and limp after hours of dancing. Smiling wide, Baylor recalled standing in front of the stage mesmerized by the shimmy and shake of a young Tina Turner.
Maliskas made a good argument that music has had as much influence on changing white American attitudes toward race as any other force. The music streamed out of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago and Harlem. It caught fire in clubs and saloons in the black communities. It got put on vinyl at Motown in Detroit and at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee. It spread into the receptive minds and tapping toes of white teenagers everywhere. It formed common bonds of culture, smashed stereotypes and subverted prejudices.
The music played and sung at John Brown's farm created a revolution, one as big as fanatical old John Brown ever imagined in his wild, wild dreams.• This is part four of a five-part series.www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-zealots-farm-20171004-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 7, 2017 20:21:00 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....Confederates, Columbus and everyone else: Let's just tear down all the public memorials to ‘great’ men“When the people of the future look back on us, it is best that they have no statues to remember us. They would tear down every one.”By STEPHEN MARCHE | 4:00AM PDT - Friday, October 06, 2017Crews slowly remove the statue of former Justice Roger Taney from the front lawn of the Maryland State House in Baltimore on August 17th. — Photograph: Matthew Cole/Tribune News Service.COLUMBUS DAY will be more than just a holiday this year. It will be a confrontation with history. In August, the Los Angeles City Council voted to erase the event from its calendar, replacing it with Indigenous Peoples Day. In September, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Manhattan's Central Park had its hands painted blood red by vandals. Earlier this year, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio announced plans to consider removing all statues of Columbus from city property, classifying them as “monuments to hate”.
This isn't just about Columbus — or Confederate generals or any other villain, perceived or real. By now, it has become clear: Public memorials to great men have outlived their purpose. It's time for them all to come down.
Iconoclasm is not just an American phenomenon. It's global. In Canada, a statue of John A MacDonald, the “father of Confederation,” struggled to find a home at his bicentenary in 2015, and this year, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario called for removing his name from public schools, given his role in the cultural genocide against indigenous groups. In Accra, in 2016, the University of Ghana removed a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from campus, remembering his statement, made during his residency in South Africa, that Indians were “infinitely superior” to native Africans. Removing Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Capetown in 2015 was less controversial.
What distinguishes American iconoclasm is its chaos: statues pulled down by angry mobs or removed by officials in the middle of the night. And the chaos leads to incoherence — unobtrusive Confederates decapitated here and there, while massive tributes such as Stone Mountain remain. When President Trump and his lawyer asked whether monuments to George Washington would be targeted following those to Robert E. Lee, liberals were outraged. Lee was in no way like Washington, they claimed, and the American Revolution was in no way like the Civil War. Except that the Revolutionary War was waged by white supremacists and the Constitution entrenched their power. It was Americans, not their British overlords, who hammered out the three-fifths compromise, and black slaves were not their only victims. Washington earned the name Hanodagonyes or “Town Destroyer” among the Iroquois in New York.
Thomas Carlyle in “Heroes and Hero Worship” articulated the spirit that built the statues that fill our parks and our cities: “The history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here,” he wrote in 1841. “All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history.”
Carlyle's vision has expired. The notion that an individual, any individual, can embody human ideals is null and void.
Who deserves a statue or national holiday in 2017? President Obama? A man whom Human Rights Watch described as a leader who “never really warmed to human rights as a genuine priority and so leaves office with many opportunities wasted”? Saint Hugh's College in Oxford had to remove a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi because the Nobel Peace Prize winner, like so many other winners, has turned out to be comfortable with mass death. Perhaps only Malala Yousafzai fits the level of innocence we now require from our political icons; she was a child when she won the Peace Prize.
When the people of the future look back on us, it is best that they have no statues to remember us. They would tear down every one. We imagine that history has progressed to the point at which we may sit in judgment over the past, but the number of slaves in the global supply chain is growing, not shrinking. Anyone who has eaten shrimp in the last five years has participated in a slave economy. Anyone who has purchased a smartphone has contributed to enslavement.
Statues to the Confederacy were consciously created to impose white supremacy as a dominant ideology. But the intention behind statues is often more muddying than clarifying of their function. Statues to Columbus were often raised to celebrate the contributions of Catholic and Italian American immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan explicitly resisted monuments to Columbus, seeing them as “part of a conspiracy to establish Roman Catholicism,” as one Klan lecturer put it.
Statues never represent the people on the monuments: They represent the interests of those who build them.
It is in our interest to take the worst thing a historical figure has ever said or done, establish it as their whole being and then make the destruction of their memory a collective benefit. This process will leave no statue standing. As Hamlet said, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?” If Gandhi can't survive, Columbus certainly won't.
The reality of people in history — the mixture of good and evil, making individual choices within imposed systems, taking their meaning in context — has no interest either for those who raise statues or for those who tear them down. A blank at the heart of Columbus Circle where a person once stood would suit our moment perfectly.• Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Unmade Bed: The Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century”.www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-marche-statues-iconoclasm-20171006-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 7, 2017 20:21:12 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....Gettysburg: Where white armies battled over the fate of black livesBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Friday, October 06, 2017IN THE middle of a pool game in the back room of the Flying Bull tavern, my new friend, Jarrod Stout, pulled me aside. He wanted to make sure I had his back if things got rough. As soon as he'd come into the bar he had gotten glaring looks from some of the white patrons, and now a grim-faced guy with a custom-made pool cue was acting a bit strange.
Jarrod is a young black college student with dreadlocks, a quick wit and a magnetic gregariousness. He grew up in a comparatively open, accepting Seattle suburb where black families are scarce but not scorned. The vibe he was getting in the Gettysburg bar was something he was not used to; a small-town narrowness that felt personal.
The night passed without incident, but the next day inside the elaborate visitors' center at the Gettysburg battlefield, Jarrod felt it again. The little white kid who gave him a smile was followed by a parent with eyes that displayed anything but welcome. A string of other tourists would not return his hello or his grin. And then there was the young black man in a red T-shirt sporting the words “Make America great again”. These encounters rattled him.
Jarrod found himself doing that thing that black Americans must do so many days of their lives: questioning himself and asking, “Am I imagining this or do these people detest the color of my skin?”
As a white male, there are a lot of questions I do not have to answer. If I am pulled over by a cop, I do not wonder if I might get shot for doing or saying the wrong thing. I have never worried that I would not be hired for a job or not allowed to rent an apartment because of the way I looked. My racial identity is not something I think about each morning when I look in the mirror.
In these days of identity politics when Americans seem to be retreating into separate tribes, I find it impossible to tie my own sense of self to any narrow group. That attitude is more than a perk of white privilege; it is based on a conviction that extreme tribalism — a militant and exclusive loyalty to a certain religion or race or ethnic group or nation — is the scourge of humanity. We need to find common ground wherever we can, even as we celebrate and respect the richness of cultural differences.
Riding on the bus with my Project Pilgrimage companions, I got into a discussion with Esmy Jimenez, an aspiring young journalist who recently graduated from the University of Southern California. I told her I felt no compelling link to the lands of my ancestors, England and Norway. The United States is my home and I am nothing if not an American. I think she found this a bit mystifying, but said maybe she could feel more that way if the country she grew up in would open its arms and embrace her.
Esmy, you see, is a “Dreamer”. Her family crossed the border from Mexico without documents when she was a child, and now, after receiving a promise that young immigrants like her could stay and be a vital part of American society, the promise has been revoked by presidential order. That may change or it may not. All her ambitions are in jeopardy. No wonder she finds her identity through other connections.
As our group walked the ground over which the Confederate and Union armies fought, I wondered if Esmy and Jarrod and the other twenty-somethings among us could relate to what they were seeing. Why should they care that tens of thousands of white men spent three deadly July days slaughtering each other in this place more than 150 years ago? They have their own battles to fight in today's America. I thought of my own ancestor who wore Union blue and managed to survive the war. I know little of the man, but I think it likely he shared the prejudiced ideas that were common in his day, and joined the Army not to free slaves but to have an adventure. Still, if men like him had refused to fight, the slave masters would have prevailed.
As we stood at the line where a small contingent of Union cavalry awaited reinforcements and held fast against Robert E. Lee's oncoming rebel army, I pointed out to my young companions that if those few men had failed, the war might have been lost right there, the country would have permanently split and slavery would have gone on for many more grim decades. I don't know whether that impressed them or not. It seemed important to me.
The next morning we gathered at the cemetery where the Union dead are buried, the spot where Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address. Our group leader, David Domke, chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, drew us to the shade of the trees down below a memorial to Lincoln. Domke asked us to form a circle, then he passed out copies of the Gettysburg Address. Working clockwise around the circle, each person recited a line from the speech. I had read and heard Lincoln's phrases many times in my life, but they had never sounded more immediate.
Lincoln spoke of the men who died on the battlefield to save a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He said, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
In that moving moment, we all stood together — young millennials and aging baby boomers, black, white and brown — and resolved, each in our own way, to carry on with the unfinished work of freedom.• This is the last installment of a five-part series.www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-gettysburg-20171004-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 23, 2017 16:13:15 GMT 10
from the Los Angeles Times....As monuments to the Confederacy are removed from public squares, new ones are quietly being erectedBy JENNY JARVIE | 5:00AM PDT - Sunday, October 22, 2017Allie Chastka, a re-enactor, kneels at the new Unknown Alabama Confederate Soldiers monument in the Confederate Veterans Memorial Park in Brantley, Alabama. — Photograph: Brynn Anderson/Associated Press.ANNETTE PERNELL, a council member in this Texas town, was aghast when she heard about plans to construct a Confederate memorial that would be visible from the interstate and loom over Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
But there was nothing she or anybody else could do about it. The land was private.
And so the Confederate Memorial of the Wind slowly went up on a grassy half-acre. A total of 13 concrete columns — one for each Confederate state — rise from a circular concrete pedestal. Eventually it will be surrounded by as many as 40 poles topped with Civil War battle flags.
“It's as if we've gone backwards,” said Pernell, who is 54 and black. “I didn't think, at this age, I would see what I'm seeing now. A Confederate memorial is a slap in the face of all Americans, not just African Americans.”
More than 150 years after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, local officials across the Deep South are removing contentious Confederate monuments from prominent perches in busy town squares and government buildings. In August, violence at a rally of white nationalists seeking to preserve a statue of Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia — and comments by President Trump opposing its removal — brought renewed national attention to the issue.
Less publicized has been the quiet rise of a new generation of Confederate markers — on private land, in cemeteries, on historic battlefields.
In South Carolina last month, a granite monument dedicated to the “immortal spirit of the Confederate cause” was unveiled on a spot where Civil War enthusiasts gather each year to reenact the Battle of Aiken. In Alabama in August, a gray stone memorial was dedicated in a private Crenshaw County park to unknown Confederate soldiers. In Georgia last year, a black marble obelisk was erected on public land in the mountain town of Dahlonega in memory of the county's nearly 1,200 Confederate veterans.
In all, more than 30 monuments and symbols to the Confederacy have been dedicated or rededicated since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. A historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, conducted an inventory of his own state and found that 20 monuments had gone up there over that time — the most since the early 20th century.
The people funding the monuments — often the great-great grandchildren of Confederate soldiers — say they simply want to remember their loved ones and ensure their legacies live on. More controversially, many also promote a revisionist history in which slavery was not a major cause of the war.
“We just want to honor our ancestors,” said Hank Van Slyke, a 62-year-old engineering specialist and commander of a local Sons of Confederate Veterans brigade that put up the monument in Orange. The group is an association of male descendants of Confederate soldiers, and was formed in 1896 to hail the “hallowed memories of brave men” and “record of the services of every Southern Soldier”.
“Throughout history, whoever wins the war and conquers the nation, they get to write the history books,” he said. "We've always studied that we had a good cause and our ancestors fought for what they thought was right.”
While most historians agree that the root cause of the Civil War was slavery, a significant number of Americans, particularly in the South, have been taught the war was about states' rights in general. Six years ago, a Pew Research Center survey found that 48% of Americans said states' rights were the reason for the war, while 38% cited slavery.
The debate is particularly charged in Texas, where the State Board of Education in 2010 adopted new academic standards listing slavery as third among the causes of the war, after sectionalism and states' rights.
“There's a kind of historical symmetry, in that many of these men now fighting the battle to defend the Lost Cause are predisposed to see themselves as under threat,” Brundage said.
The new monuments tend to be more modest than older ones. At the turn of the 20th century, when Confederate organizations enjoyed enormous cultural prestige in the South, large bronze and marble monuments were erected in conspicuous public spaces and etched with politically charged plaques. Now, Brundage said, they often focus less on defending the Confederacy and more on memorializing unknown soldiers or listing those who died.
Even in its unfinished state, the new Confederate memorial in Orange has stirred more public controversy than most new ones.
“We know this makes our town look bad,” said John “Jack” Smith, the city attorney for Orange, a town of 19,000 near the Louisiana state line whose motto is “Small town charm, world class culture”.
Smith said the monument didn't reflect the values of Orange residents, and he slammed the Sons of Confederate Veterans as a “racist hate group”.
“We're very concerned that this could send the wrong signal about Orange as people drive down the highway,” he said. “But what can we do about it? It's a matter of free speech. We cannot stop them from building the thing on private land.”Georgia's Stone Mountain relief of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, from left, wasn't complete until 1972. — Photograph: Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency.Just over a third of Orange residents are black — a greater share than in any other town in the predominantly white county, which has long grappled with racism. In the 1990s, members of the Ku Klux Klan protesting federal attempts to integrate public housing held marches in the nearby city of Vidor, which was notorious as a “sundown town” because African Americans were not safe after dark.
In 2013, word spread that Granvel Block, then Texas division commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, had quietly bought a small plot of land near Interstate 10 for less than $10,000 and acquired a city building permit to construct a Civil War monument. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and several residents attended a City Council meeting to oppose the project.
The monument also sparked an online petition and an editorial from a local newspaper, the Beaumont Enterprise: “The last thing Southeast Texas needs is a large memorial to the Confederacy,” it said. “Simply put, it would be divisive and offensive.”
Still, when the newspaper conducted an online poll asking “Do you want a Confederate monument here?” more than 70% of respondents clicked “Yes. The Confederate Army and Civil War are part of our history.”
Block responded by publishing a lengthy “Call to Arms” on his group's Facebook page.
“If we do not stand up when our ancestors are being attacked and break the stigma that our opponents attempt to attach to anything Confederate, we run the risk of everything Confederate as we know it, being condemned and exterminated,” he wrote. “These new Confederate memorials will be the turning point, and will open the doors and dialog for an accurate account of history to be taught.”
Rather than just follow the “easy path” of honoring ancestors “in the ways which are acceptable,” he argued, the group should focus on challenging the idea that the war was fought over slavery.
Yet in a sign of how controversial the monument has become, Block now declines to meet with reporters or speak on the record for fear of upsetting his wife.
In a telephone interview, Van Slyke, the local brigade commander, said that although slavery “may” have been a “small part” of the war, it was pretty far down the list.
Karen L. Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said that those putting up new monuments to the Confederacy represented a minority point of view.
“They continue to believe in the sort of version of history that mythologizes the Confederacy and its heroes, but it's so obvious it's disingenuous,” she said. “They're not honoring history; they're commemorating the principles and objectives of the war.”
While Orange city officials decided they could not legally stop the monument there, they sought to limit its impact by regulating the size of the Confederate flags and placing restrictions on parking. In 2013, the council passed an ordinance to limit flagpoles to 35 feet tall and ban any flags larger than 4 feet by 6 feet.
While many people prefer not to talk about the monument, defenders aren't hard to come by.
John Broussard, 54, an industrial electrician, and John Shaver, 33, a millwright machinist — both white — said those who criticized the monument, and its position near a street named after a slain civil rights leader, didn't understand it.
“I don't think it’s intended to be malicious to any race,” Shaver said. “A Confederate memorial on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive could bring the community and two racial groups together. Being a Confederate monument, the first thing that pops up in your mind is segregation and slavery, but it isn't about that.”
Nathaniel Colbert, 68, an African American and retired plant operator who lives on the other side of the interstate less than a mile away, believes the monument was a deliberate insult.
At first, Colbert said, it really bothered him to drive by the memorial. Now he just whizzes on by in his pickup truck, barely noticing it.
“It's an affront, but I've dealt with ignorance most of my life,” he said. “Right now, it's just the beat of the drum.”• Jenny Jarvie reported from Orange, Texas.• Jenny Jarvie is a freelance writer living in Atlanta, Georgia. She has worked as a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the Sunday Telegraph in London. She was born in London in 1975, has a masters in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Glasgow and is a past winner of the Catherine Pakenham Award for the most promising young female writer in Britain. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • White nationalist Richard Spencer to noisy Florida protesters: You didn't shut me down • Confederates, Columbus and everyone else: Let's just tear down all the public memorials to ‘great’ men • If slavery and racism disqualify Confederates and Father Serra, we'll be removing statues for a whilewww.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-confederate-memorials-20171020-story.html
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Post by KTJ on Jan 30, 2018 9:30:57 GMT 10
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Post by geopol on Jan 30, 2018 11:36:12 GMT 10
Should we cast the "Southern Cross" adrift as well, especially the flag we have inherited, as it were, from Eureka?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 30, 2018 12:04:27 GMT 10
Burn all flags except white ones.
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Post by KTJ on Jan 30, 2018 13:59:29 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Jan 30, 2018 14:00:50 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Nov 25, 2018 11:54:32 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Apr 22, 2019 19:00:26 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…America, take note: Georgetown students are acting on the courage of their convictionsStudents have voted to pay a reconciliation fee to aid the descendants of men and women enslaved by Jesuit priests.By COURTLAND MILLOY | 9:00AM EDT — Sunday, April 21, 2019[/size] The Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition and Hope on April 18, 2017, drew over 100 descendants of people enslaved by Georgetown University. — Photograph: Allison Shelley/for The Washington Post.WHILE MANY are confounded by the subject of reparations for slavery, students at Georgetown University have acted on the courage of their convictions.
America, take note.
These students have seen how the legacy of slavery manifests itself in racial disparities — in health, wealth, housing and employment. And they know that the outcomes are no accident. They are the intended results of an economic system rooted in racism and designed to maintain itself in perpetuity.
Maurice Jackson, who teaches courses about slavery, racism, reparations and the Reconstruction era at Georgetown, says many of his students are no longer willing to ignore the problems. They are closing the gaps between the sugar-coated historical myths of their childhoods and the brutal reality of a nation birthed in genocide and bondage.
“They are seeing how ignorance about the past threatens their future. And they are in a hurry to do something about it,” Jackson said.
What they did was modest, yet unprecedented.
A referendum proposing that undergraduates pay a “reconciliation fee,” in effect reparations, was put to a vote on April 11 — and passed. The beneficiaries would be the descendants of a particular group of 272 enslaved people. They were working around Prince George's County when, in 1838, the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus decided to sell them to raise money for a financially strapped Georgetown University.
Students learned of the school's ties to slavery after a human thigh bone was unearthed during construction of a residence hall in 2014. It was a cemetery site, where the remains of slaves and free blacks had been buried. Subsequent discoveries led the university to make a formal apology in 2017 “for our participation in the evil of slavery,” Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia wrote in an open letter to the campus a day after the student vote.
He said the university would take other steps toward fostering dialogue. “We are pursuing work that is uncharted,” he wrote.
With this month's vote for paying restitution, the students had charted a path of their own.
The amount of the reconciliation fee, to be paid each semester, was a symbolic $27.20. The fees were expected to generate an estimated $400,000 a year. More than 8,000 descendants of the 272 have been identified so far.
Some students complained that the amount was too low, “just an Uber ride,” as one wrote in a post on social media.
Others said the fee increase was unfair, especially to poor students.
Some black students questioned why they should pay reparations when, if anything, they should be receiving them. For others, the answer was clear.
“No problem helping my less fortunate brothers and sisters,” a black student posted on social media. “I'm here because somebody helped me.”
In an op-ed for the Hoya in February, two students, Samuel Dubke and Hayley Grande, made their case for opposing the fee.
“Supporters of the referendum will claim that we, by attending classes, living in dorms and accepting our degrees, owe an intrinsic debt to the descendants of those enslaved people who paid for Georgetown's existence with their lives,” they wrote. “While we agree that the Georgetown of today would not exist if not for the sale of 272 slaves in 1838, current students are not to blame for the past sins of the institution, and a financial contribution cannot reconcile this past debt on behalf of the university…. Georgetown University alone, not the student body, has the obligation to pay for its past transgressions.”
And yet, the measure was approved, overwhelmingly, garnering 66 percent of the 3,845 votes cast. The spring elections, which included candidates for the school senate, drew the largest voter turnout in Georgetown's electoral history, according to the Hoya.
“The measures advanced in this referendum would put Georgetown on the right side of history and constitute the first reparations policy in the nation,” Georgetown University Student Association President Norman Francis Jr. and Vice President Aleida Olvera wrote in an op-ed for the newspaper.
In an open letter to the university following the vote, DeGioia praised students for “bringing attention to deeply held convictions that we take very seriously.” But he also noted that requiring students to pay such a fee “raises complex issues” that won't be resolved “immediately or easily.”
The referendum was nonbinding; school officials would still have the last word.
And on April 15, two students filed a lawsuit with the Georgetown University Student Association's Constitutional Council, seeking to nullify the vote. They contended that the GUSA can hold referendums only on constitutional issues and that the GUSA had violated its own bylaws by holding a vote on raising fees.
The election did not mark the end of the student campaign for reparations. More like a new start.
A remarkable one at that, with most students pushing aside arguments that have doomed reparations proposals in the past.
William Darity Jr., a professor of public policy at Duke University and a scholar on the economics of reparations, told Politico that he was “admiring” what the students at Georgetown were doing. But he also urged them to work on a nationwide effort instead of going only for “piecemeal” solutions.
“We do need to move away from viewing this as a matter of individual guilt or individual responsibility that can be offset by individual payments, towards the recognition that this is a national responsibility,” Darity said.
And yet, a large majority of students had voted to, in essence, begin atoning for the sins of their school.
At Georgetown, where symbols of hate and violence have appeared in recent years — swastikas carved into elevator walls, racist graffiti scrawled in hallways, menorahs defaced — students had created one that could be trumped by none.
It was a vote — the voice of a free people — symbolizing compassion, reconciliation, justice, mercy and collective responsibility.
Lee Baker, a descendant of the 272, was impressed.
“Regardless of what happens,” he told the Hoya, “we will know that Georgetown University students practiced solidarity and decided to ensure that such an historic injustice has a permanent lens for awareness, analysis and action.”
Take note, America. This is what the future looks like.__________________________________________________________________________ • Courtland Milloy is a local columnist for The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1975. He has covered crime and politics in the District and demographic changes in Prince George's County, Maryland. He has also written for The Post's Style and Foreign sections. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • Georgetown's missing slaves were closer to home than anyone knew • Georgetown gathers descendants for a day of repentancewww.washingtonpost.com/local/america-take-note-georgetown-students-are-acting-on-the-courage-of-their-convictions/2019/04/19/144b4efc-615e-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html
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Post by KTJ on Oct 24, 2019 16:38:16 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…So you want to talk about lynching? Understand this first.By MICHELE NORRIS | 3:49PM EDT — Wednesday, October 23, 2019The rope believed to have bound the wrists of Raymond Byrd, who was lynched in Wythe County, Virginia, in 1926. — Photograph: Matt McClain/The Washington Post.SO you want to talk about lynching?
Okay. Let's talk.
A lynching involved a man, but sometimes a woman or a child, who was dragged from home, heels in the dirt, body contorting, convulsing with fear.
A lynching involved another man — this time, almost always a man — finding a rope and making a noose, or perhaps finding a rope that had already been made into a noose, for this was not exactly rare in an earlier time. It took a special kind of rope to hold the knot, to hold the weight. A heavy rope. Corded and coarse.
The knot took skill; the act was impulsive, but the details relied on practiced technique. The genus, health and shape of the tree were important. Were the branches high enough? Thick enough? Healthy enough to accommodate the sudden plummet of death?
A lynching was bulging eyes and slobber and spittle.
It took a mob, a rabble, a group of several people to carry out the deed. To hold the victim. To toss the rope. To necklace the rope. To hoist the rope. To keep it taut while the body fought and then stiffened and then went limp and sodden. Heavy like coal. Dangling like earrings.
A lynching was loud, for a mob is never silent. The act itself was audible: The rope chafed against the bark. It tore open the skin. It suffocated and gagged, crushed the esophagus and snapped the neck. It made water, involuntary and foul, tricking past the knee, past the calf and the foot. A lynching was a fight against gravity. Desperate. Futile. Listless. And gravity always won.
A lynching was an act of community will. A community that showed up dressed for the outing, smiling, cheering, hoisting their children for a better view, preening for the cameras, for there were so often cameras to commemorate the occasion with postcards later sold as keepsakes. Postcards with swaying, charred bodies. Shoulders limp. Legs loose. Heads lolled backward in an odd contortion that made it seem that their souls were communing with God.
Lynching was the work of “good people”. People who held positions of stature and authority. Who went to church. Who taught their children the golden rule about Jesus loving all the little children. A rule with exceptions and bylaws and fine print. A rule that applied only to people with white skin.
A lynching was meant to send a message. Stay in line. This could be you or your son or your wife or your father. Your heart. Your pride. Your breadwinner. Your changemaker. Your dignity. Yes, there was a message. We are powerful. You are not.
A lynching was often accompanied by long-term amnesia. The people behind those acts would eventually forget this history, forget that this is what transpired in the town square or tobacco field, forget that they were engaged in what would now pass as evil because, jeez, who would want to claim that?
According to the NAACP, 4,743 people were lynched in the United States from 1882 to 1968. (Yes, 1968.) Of that number, 3,446 were black.
Lynching was a fact of life for much of this country's existence. It was the green light for decapitating the victim and the impulse to place a head on a stick and then place that stick into the ground on a well-traveled road and leave it there until the sun or the birds or the vermin had their way.
Lynching was sometimes not enough. Bodies were burned and blow-torched and branded. They were gutted and skinned like animals. They were castrated, scalped, dismembered. It was the justification for human bonfires and dismembering bodies and turning toes into key fobs and skin into lampshades.
In one particularly gruesome case — Mary Turner was lynched in 1918 after threatening to swear out warrants for the men who lynched her husband, Hayes Turner, who was wrongly accused of a crime. She was eight months pregnant, but that didn't matter. She was tracked down, captured, dragged to a bridge between two counties in Valdosta, Georgia, and hung upside down from a tree, ankles tied together. She was doused in gasoline, and her clothes were burned off.
Had enough? The mob wasn't done. One man used a hunting knife to cut open her pregnant belly. Her unborn child tumbled to the ground where it was reportedly crushed under the heel of a boot.
Even that was not enough. They pummeled her body with gunfire before cutting her down. She was one of at least 13 people killed in that rampage, and her name — we must say her name — Mary Turner — now graces a project dedicated to remembering that there was no justice served for these atrocities. And that we must understand how the long arm of this history and the attitudes that fueled it still touch us today.
This is hard reading, I know. Many will not have gotten this far. I am not sharing these facts for mere sensation. This is our history. Our history. We will never fully understand how far we’ve come as a nation until we accept and acknowledge the spectacular abominations that passed as normal.
Do not trifle with this history. Not unless you are willing to understand the meaning, the weight, the horror, the ardor, the hatred, the stain, the special brand of evil associated with it and the deed it represents. Anything less is an attempt at distraction. That is desperate and diabolically wrong.
So if you want to talk about lynching, let's do it. Let's acknowledge it. Let's face it, even if it turns our stomach. Let's face it as the terror and the terrorism it was. Because to face it — and face it down — is a first payment on an insurance policy that perhaps ensures we will never see this again on our soil.
If you are unwilling to do this work — and it is work — then leave that word alone.__________________________________________________________________________ • Michele Norris is a former host of NPR's “All Things Considered” and the founding director of the Race Card Project.__________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • VIDEO: How Republicans responded to Trump's ‘lynching’ tweet • VIDEO: McCarthy on Trump ‘lynching’ tweet: ‘It's not the language I would use’ • Trump compares impeachment probe to ‘lynching’, again prompting political firestorm around racewww.washingtonpost.com/opinions/so-you-want-to-talk-about-lynching-understand-this-first/2019/10/23/c5a5fd2a-f5ae-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html
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Post by pim on Oct 24, 2019 17:05:37 GMT 10
Prickles you post this as porn. Your aim is to tittilate. You're not an anti-racist's bootlace because you have racist agendas of your own. Ask the Jews.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2019 21:31:02 GMT 10
None the less its a horrific story....lesson from that is fear God fearing peopleoids.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 27, 2020 19:45:09 GMT 10
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Post by Deleted on Jun 27, 2020 23:57:06 GMT 10
A nation that makes heroes out of violent thugs in movies they make in Hollywood is socially violent fucked...
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Post by KTJ on Jun 29, 2020 10:02:57 GMT 10
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Post by pim on Jun 29, 2020 12:04:08 GMT 10
Meanwhile, in a white supremacist enclave at the bottom of the world ...
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