Black artist will burn, bury the Confederate flag across the South on Memorial Day

(theGrio)  Can you think of a better way for a black man to spend Memorial Day than to burn a Confederate flag?

As was reported in the Orlando Sentinel, an artist will do exactly that, with plans to make it happen in all the states throughout the former Confederacy.

John Sims, an artist from Sarasota, Florida, is honoring the constitutional right of self-expression by staging burnings and burials of the Rebel flag, that troublesome symbol of the Old South that many, particularly African-Americans, associate with slavery, white supremacy and state-sponsored terrorism and lynchings.

“We are in America, and people have the right to fly whatever flag [they want],” Sims said. “And I have the right to bury whatever flag, and to burn whatever flag.”

The Republican Party Takes a Stand For Jim Crow

In the South, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu angered Republicans when she pointed out the obvious, which is that President Obama’s unpopularity in the South is tied to the problem of race.

“I'll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans,” Landrieu said. “It's been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader."

In response, Governor Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana) called Landrieu’s statement “remarkably divisive.” Meanwhile, state Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere said her remarks were “insulting to me and to every other Louisianian,” adding “Louisiana deserves better than a senator who denigrates her own people by questioning and projecting insidious motives on the very people she claims to represent.”

GOP Strives To Make Hate Groups Look Respectable

For good or for bad, you're judged by the company you keep, and that goes for the Republican Party and anyone else. But when the GOP is accused of cozying up to hate groups, they don't seem to distance themselves from the alleged affiliations, they embrace them. Sometimes Republicans go out of their way to demonstrate their approval of racist and homophobic organizations that we should all find objectionable.

Case in point: Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi. Of the civil rights era, he said "I just don't remember it as being that bad," he told the Weekly Standard. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white." In Barbour's world, the races lived side by side during Jim Crow segregation, and the White Citizens' Council--known to many as the white collar Klan-- was a force for good in his hometown of Yazoo City:

You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.

The reality of these councils was far different, as neo-confederate expert Edward Sebesta documents in his Citizens' Council newspaper historical website. The councils were established as a direct response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, to resist desegregation and maintain white supremacy in the South. An article in the October 1955 edition of The Citizens' Council entitled, "Mississippi Citizens' Councils Are Protecting Both Races" had this to say:

Citizens' Councils, 60,000 strong and growing fast, are mobilizing Mississippi to guard both whites and Negroes.


Their aim is to preserve separation of the races against assaults form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in alliance with the federal government. At the same time, they are dedicated to protect the rank and file of Negroes from the wrath of ruffian white people who may resort to violence.

And in an article called "Texans Will Fight To Preserve Segregation":

There's a rainbow of hope in the dark "integration" sky in Texas.


The courageous spirit of manhood which had been somewhat dulled by more than twenty years of imported propaganda, brought into this country by way of Washington, is re-asserting itself and definite steps are being taken to counter the worst blow directed against the South since the Civil War.

Following the Supreme Court's ruling, which applied only to certain Negro children in Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, Kansas and the District of Columbia, the NAACP, composed partly of Negroes but mostly of rich white trash, saw a chance to put a fast one over. They gave the South the rush act, with their attorneys and representatives spilling out into each State and insisting that de-segregation was now the law of the land. They were about to get by with it when the people of Texas, as well as its officials waked up and went into action. ...

The people of Texas, like those of the Deep South, have always been extremely fond of good Negroes....But in the final analysis and when the chips are down, they just don't go much for arrogant Mullatoes who come barging into the State from out of the East making threats...before rolling away in long black Cadillacs....

While the matter is far from settled, it is now clear that Texas, along with other States in the South, will exhaust every legal resource available in resisting the attempt of a Marxist-conscious Supreme Court to bring about mongrelization of the white race by judicial ruling.

And a pamphlet from the Association of Citizens' Councils titled "Why Does Your Community Need a Citizens' Council?" referred to the NAACP as the "National Association for the Agitation of Colored People." "We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries," said the pamphlet. "We are certainly not ashamed of our traditions, our conservative beliefs, nor our segregated way of life."

Barbour seemed to backtrack from his comments praising the racist group, which is akin to getting a bucket of water after you just committed arson. After praising the Councils, he said the groups were "indefensible" and called segregation "a difficult and painful era for Mississippi."

Meanwhile, the GOP standard-bearers are taking sides in the latest battle between the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Family Research Council. The SPLC, a civil rights group based in Montgomery, Alabama, released a report called 18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda. One of the groups named in the report is the Family Research Council, which is described by SPLC as a font of anti-gay propaganda that calls for the criminalization of homosexuality, and pushes false accusations linking gays to pedophilia. Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state representative and the head of FRC, once paid $82,500 to use the mailing list of former Klan chieftain David Duke. Moreover, in 2001 Perkins gave a speech to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that is the ideological heir to the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s.

FRC is fighting back with a "Start Debating, Stop Hating" campaign. Not surprisingly, the Republican Party leaders are siding with the hate group. In a full-page ad in Politico and the Washington Examiner, FRC calls SPLC a "liberal fundraising machine." The ad also accuses the civil rights group of character assassination, and attacking groups that "uphold Judeo-Christian moral views, including marriage as the union of a man and a woman." Among the 150 conservative leaders--including 22 members of Congress-- who signed the letter are Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), Sen, Jim DeMint (R-SC), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. "It was a remarkable performance, given that it was precisely the maligning of entire groups of people -- gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people -- that caused the SPLC to list groups like the FRC," SPLC responded on its blog.

This comes as civil rights groups push for a federal review of curriculum changes made by the Republican-owned Texas Board of Education, including the removal of people of color in the textbooks, the watering down of the civil rights movement, and teaching slavery, Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy in a positive light. The groups claim the board is discriminating against black and Latino students, and failing to provide equal educational opportunities to these students.

Here's the deal: The GOP cannot have it both ways. They cannot take a stand in favor of hate groups--white supremacists, neo-confederates, and homophobes-- and take offense when their critics call them out for it. Moreover, they cannot rewrite history and attack civil rights. Since the Goldwater presidential campaign and Nixon's Southern Strategy, the Republicans made a deal with the Devil. And the Devil's in the details. Appealing to disaffected Southern whites on states' rights and skin-color solidarity, the GOP became the Dixiecrats. Tax cuts became code word for the N-word, because it was understood that blacks would get hurt worse than whites, as Southern Strategy architect Lee Atwater bluntly noted.

On one level, the Republican Party would whitewash the image of their base, not to mention America's racially-charged past and their role in it. And yet, on another level, they are so extreme that they embrace their intolerance with no shame. The GOP embraces the white-Christian-nationalist spirit of the White Citizens' Councils. They present themselves as the protectors of society from the enemy, the "other" who threatens to destroy white Christian values--whether Latino immigrants, Muslims, or gay marriage. We saw this in George H.W. Bush's Willie Horton ad, and we saw this in Sharron Angle's anti-immigration ads.

For now, in this bad economy, the GOP is living on borrowed time and scapegoats. But the clock is ticking and the nation is browning, and hate will not grow their base.

Repeal of 14th Amendment is un-American

From The Progressive:

The call by some conservative lawmakers to repeal the 14th Amendment represents the worst of America.At a time of economic hardship when we should be uniting people and making them whole, such an idea will only serve to sow the seeds of hate and division.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., — who does not think that the children of undocumented immigrants should automatically become citizens — has proposed a piece of legislation to begin repealing the amendment. And Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has called for hearings into the matter.

Adopted on July 9, 1868, and championed by the so-called “Radical Republicans” in Congress, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship as a birthright. The citizenship clause states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

This clause was important because it thwarted attempts by Southern states to deny citizenships to former slaves.

But little of these details on the history or the importance of the 14th Amendment mean much to those who would repeal it. Rather, they only seem to care about scoring political points.

And while they could develop positive solutions in the area of immigration reform, they choose to divide people along lines of color, race, ethnicity, class, language and national origin.

In the current economic recession, people are in despair and are looking for scapegoats. People blame immigrants — particularly Latinos and undocumented workers — for losing their jobs and livelihoods. Patriot and militia groups patrol the border and harass and threaten Latinos. And while hate groups and the tea party movement exploit these insecurities, some unscrupulous lawmakers are trying to codify this hatred.

This is such a bad idea that even Lou Dobbs disagrees with it.

“I part ways with the senators on that because I believe the 14th Amendment, particularly in its due process and equal protection clauses, is so important,” Dobbs said. “It lays the foundation for the entire Bill of Rights being applied to the states.”

Giving away the 14th Amendment is giving up on America. Citizenship should remain a birthright in this nation of immigrants. But that right was a secured only by fighting a bloody Civil War and overcoming a brutal legacy of slavery.

Sadly, some people want us to turn the clock back to the antebellum days.

Jim Crow In A Teabag

What can I say about Rand Paul that has not been said? Paul, of course, is the GOP nominee for Senate in Kentucky, and Great White Hope for the Tea Party faithful around the country. And he is the son of Congressman Ron Paul of Texas.

Rand Paul recently made statements in opposition to portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, on the grounds that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate against African-Americans and others and deny service to them. He is entitled to his opinions, however racist they may be. But he cannot expect to run as a serious candidate from a major party and not have such controversial points of view scrutinized. At the very least, watching this not-ready-for-primetime-politician try and wiggle his way out of his past statements will make for great entertainment at the very least. Paul is dead wrong, but he unwittingly provided a valuable service to the public.

Tea parties and racism. Many of us suspected that the Tea Party movement is a fundamentally racist one. Although it would be unfair to say that all Teabaggers are racist, certainly it would be disingenuous for anyone to argue that the movement does not appeal to the angry mob, particularly those white folks who hate blacks and Latinos, immigrants, and most of all the President because he is black fascist-socialist-Muslim-communist from Kenya who refuses to produce his real birth certificate. And it would be intellectually dishonest to say that the Teabaggers are not a part of the recent surge in right-wing hate group activity of late, including militias, anti-immigrant Patriot groups and others.

From their early days at the McCain-Palin rallies during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Tea Party crowd has had an energy about them that smells of a Jim Crow type of racial intolerance, just like the 1950s and 1960s. Rand Paul's prominence only confirms what many already knew, which is that racism under girds the Teabag movement.

Flawed ideologies. All ideologies need to undergo a stress test to see if they can survive everyday use. It is one thing to express an ideology, and sell wolf tickets if you will. But it is an entirely different thing to put those ideas into practice. In that regard, Communism as practiced has been a huge failure. The notion of equalizing a society that has known harsh inequities and economic exploitation sounds like a good idea. But when the new system of government is as brutal, corrupt and incompetent as, or more brutal, corrupt and incompetent than the one it replaced, well, that is a bankrupt ideology--at least as it is being applied.

Similarly, capitalism in the American context is a failed system. The concept of trickle-down, free-market economics has led to an unprecedented looting of the American people and a concentration of economic power, with an upward redistribution of wealth from the have-nots to the have-mores. Moreover, the financial institutions that espouse laissez-faire capitalism for the rest of us prefer socialism for themselves in the form of government-sponsored bank bailouts and corporate welfare payments.

Aspects of libertarianism have their merits, and there is something to be said about less government intrusion in certain aspects of one's life. But his civil rights views demonstrate that Dr. Paul and his libertarian ideologies are impractical and simply not ready. If you hate government so much, why run for political office in the first place? And how can you claim to oppose government intrusion, yet oppose physician cuts to Medicare when it serves your own narrow interests?

Finally, for Paul to call the President un-American for criticizing BP--the corporation responsible for the world's worst ecological disaster--is confounding at best. Obviously, Rand Paul is cheerleader for a system that allows people and businesses to do as they please without limits, without social responsibility built into the system. Remember, unfettered capitalism gave us slavery, worker exploitation, and all sorts of human rights abuses. That was the free market in action.

Dr. Paul wants to appear principled by opposing civil rights and endorsing the oppression of black people over forty years after the fact, all in the name of his narrow ideology. In the end, he appears boxed in by that ideology, as are his prospects in the Senate.

But then again, in this country, you never know.

Poor Whites Get Confederate History Month & Coal Mine Disasters

I have a question and I need a quick answer: Exactly what benefit is derived from the commemoration of Confederate History Month? Does it increase the standard of living for its celebrants, presumably poor and working-class whites? Does it provide them better wages, benefits and working conditions? I need to know…

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is teaching us the realities of the present-day Republican Party. When you want to appeal to the ultra-Right base, you’ll have to dabble in white supremacy, plain and simple. The Governor issued a proclamation in honor of Confederate History Month, “to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.” The original proclamation failed to mention slavery even once. In response, McDonnell said that “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

Then, he issued a clarification, with a revised proclamation stating that “the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders.” Mississippi Governor and former RNC chair Haley Barbour – who recently characterized himself as a “fat redneck” – has drawn praise from the national chaplain of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans (SCV) for failing to mention slavery in his state’s Confederate Heritage Month proclamation. By the way, the SCV is a neo-Confederate group which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is dominated by radical racists, and whose leaders are tied to segregation and white supremacy.

According to Barbour, this whole slavery flap isn’t worth “diddly”. And as if to ignore the legacy of Jim Crow, McDonnell has brought back the literacy test for nonviolent felons who want to restore their voting rights.

So, once again I ask, why celebrate the Confederacy? McDonnell said it would increase tourism for Virginia, which I suppose is a valid reason if you plan to host a Klan convention. Don’t get me wrong, I think we should learn as much as we can about that important time in history. But these proclamations are not the stuff of history buffs, antique collectors and Civil War re-enactors. Rather, this is the glorification of slavery, domestic terrorism, secession and treason.

To invoke the Confederacy in 2010 is to throw a bone to disaffected white voters. They are bitter and angry because they can’t make ends meet, and rightly so. But their anger is misdirected. They want their country back, and hope to return to the “good ol’ days”, which was pretty horrible for minorities, women, the poor, and everyone except for rich white WASPy dudes with connections. They’re angry over all of these changes in society, with brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants coming into the country and taking all of the good jobs picking fruit, washing dishes and busing tables. And of course there’s that black Muslim-socialist-fascist president who can’t find his birth certificate, and who made good on his promise to slip black folks some reparations and civil rights in the form of health care reform. Lord, have mercy.

So, the powerful always threw the bone to white folk of meager means, and many of them took it and ran, even though it was against their interests to do so. The Confederate soldiers who supposedly fought and died so bravely did it to maintain a system of slavery that kept themselves poor and dumb, and rendered their labor unnecessary. But at least they were white, so they thought. They remained poor during Jim Crow, but at least they could rally around the Confederate flag, and against black people. And that flag was a tool used to fight integration, civil rights, and the hopes and dreams of African-Americans. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Georgia added the stars and bars to their flag in 1956, after the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision. From the 1960s on, Dixiecrats went Republican for the most part, and the GOP became the standard bearer for race card politics with a winning Southern Strategy. Meanwhile, the party of Lincoln – which once claimed over 1,500 black elected officials throughout the nation – has been rendered a Southern-based white nationalist party in the twenty-first century. Now that’s progress.

This is where the tragic West Virginia coal mine disaster comes in. “Low information” voters, as they are called, get very little from the GOP aside from empty-calorie values issues such as race, abort ion bans, gun rights and legalized homophobia. Republican policies, with help from corporate Democrats, have actually widened the gap between rich and poor since Reagan. Inequality is now worse than it was right before the Great Depression. Trickle-down economics has created a massive redistribution of wealth, making America far less socially mobile than those so-called socialist European nations the teabag crowd so enthusiastically derides. A big part of this bonanza for the rich has been deregulation. A Republican utopia would be completely free from regulations because they stand in the way of total profits, and the workers be damned. Massey Energy – the company whose millions of dollars in safety violations led to the recent West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 workers, the worst such disaster in 40 years – gives 91 percent of its money to Republican candidates. Massey CEO Don Blankenship said safety regulators are “as silly as global warming,” and argued that the Mine Safety and Health Administration “seeks power over coal miners.”

Perhaps Republicans should spend more time caring about workplace safety and the well being of people, rather than pander to their voters with empty calories, nonsense values and racial hatred. These white voters, to their detriment, have fallen for the okeedoke every time. The challenge for progressives is to sustain a movement that welcomes these poor and working-class whites, and shows them how to act in their own economic self interests for a change.

A Klan By Any Other Name Would Smell as Racist

Can't we just call them what they really are? I speak of the Tea Party crowd who hates Obama and thinks he's a socialist, fascist, communist Muslim who was born in Kenya and pals around with terrorists. They have allies in the Republican Party, and enablers on Fox News and rightwing talk radio. And I also refer to those white domestic terror groups -- anti-government, anti-tax, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, racist, homophobic, gun worshipers, whatever -- who would take matters into their own hands.

I call them all Klan. And why not? They also happen to be the radicalized base of the GOP, those barrel scrapings that call themselves the ultra-right these days. Back to the barrel scraping in a moment.

Some of you may conclude I'm painting in awfully broad brushstrokes here. You're entitled to your opinion, but I have my reasons, if you just listen.

First of all, the recent images of the unwashed Tea Party faithful threatening members of Congress -- of spitting at African-American lawmakers and calling them n*gger, calling a gay lawmaker a f*ggot, and so on -- are shocking, although not entirely surprising. Since the 2008 election, empowered by the McCain-Palin rallies, these folks have been on a rampage. They came with their racist placards and Obama monkey dolls complete with nooses. Some arrived with their loaded weapons. Under the banner of "taking our country back," these people were and still are angry, to be sure.

Those of you who remember the televised images of angry white protestors in the 1950s and 1960s know that this is nothing new. Whenever a black child tried to integrate a school in the Jim Crow South, the teabaggers of their day were out there to show their outrage. Whenever African Americans tried to register to vote or sit at a segregated lunch counter, the same crowd was out there. They came with their fists, their vulgarity, threats of violence and spitting. They, too, wanted to take their country back, and for the same reasons as their twenty-first century heirs. While some of these hotheads limited their protest to the usual rabble rousing, others went the extra mile and engaged in lynching, bombing and other acts of terror.

Meanwhile, the Dixiecrat lawmakers of the day, hoping to curry favor with their Southern Democratic base, gave a wink and a nod to the racial violence. And so, Southern politicians signed the Southern Manifesto and filibustered civil rights legislation. They vowed to fight to preserve segregation, and stood on the schoolhouse steps to defy the federal authorities, in an expression of white Christian nationalism and skin-tone solidarity. The white-collar Klan was on the same page with the down-and-dirty Klan, not to mention the everyday racist on the streets. They all read from the same game plan, and they all knew what to do, a distinct role cut out for each. Some did the dirty work, while others appeared stately, as if to remain above the fray. But the overall goal was to stop black people from becoming full citizens.

Although times are rather different now, the comparisons between the days of the civil rights movement and today are compelling. Amidst the increasing acts of violence, threats of violence and polluted discourse that we are witnessing, Republican leaders are for the most part silent about the hate emanating from their base. Sometimes they are too busy justifying the violence their base represents, if not actively fomenting it. Cynical politicians that they are, they want to harness the Teabagger, Birther and militia hate. This is their ticket to electoral victory, they believe.

And RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Rep. Eric Cantor (R, VA), a black and a Jew, should be ashamed for their participation in this blatant exercise in extremist intolerance called the Republican Party. These two men appear to be among the last vestiges of diversity in the once Grand Old Party, the party that once boasted 1,500 black political officeholders during Reconstruction. Michael Steele claims he is facing scrutiny from the party because of his race, and perhaps he is correct. But as a person of color, Steele cannot cry racism. He cannot claim victimization when he has willingly cast his lot with those who revel in their white skin privilege, and depend on the race card for their bread and butter. In other words, he knowingly assumed the risk.

And exactly why is the Republican base so angry these days? What do they want? Is this really all about taxes and the size of government? And why were they so eager to protect the interests of health insurance companies, who on a daily basis commit grand larceny against the struggling schlubs of America? Corporate lobbyists bankrolled the Teabaggers because low information voters (a.k.a. the ignorant and uneducated) have a propensity to act against their economic self interests. For years, poor whites sided with the wealthy to maintain an economic system that rendered their labor superfluous. And they refused to join forces with workers of color in a collective effort to unionize and raise everyone's standard of living. They were poor and dumb, but at least they weren't black, so they thought.

In 2010, the Tea Party anger is depicted in the media as a legitimate beef with the government. But when you look below the surface, they're really just racist. They want their country returned to them, from the hands of a black boogeyman President Obama. They want the immigrants expelled. Surely they are concerned that over half of the babies born in the U.S. are of color. When the right fringe gains control of school boards, as is the case with Texas, they literally erase all the color from the history books and "can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist." And they oppose taxes and government programs such as health care because they think that blacks and Latinos are the beneficiaries. Rush Limbaugh said himself that health care reform is a civil rights bill, reparations for slavery. This attitude reflects a natural progression of the GOP since the 1960s, when aggrieved racists formed white Christian "segregation academies," and fled the Democratic Party to make a home in the GOP.

The GOP benefited from a "Southern Strategy" that exploited white opposition to the civil rights movement, and antipathy towards black folks. One of the chief practitioners of that strategy was the late Lee Atwater. He described the Southern Strategy this way:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,' " said Atwater. "By 1968, you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites."

This strategy served the GOP very well in past elections, but now demographics are catching up with the party. In a browning America, their base is shrinking. With every race-baiting campaign, more reasonable moderate and liberal whites fled the Republican Party until there were virtually none left. What remains now, for the most part, is a regionalized, ultra-right core, many of whom are racist. And apparently some are violent as well.

Embracing the fringe, the GOP is scraping the bottom of the barrel and courting the troubling and troubled byproducts they find. They do so at their own peril, as now some violent anti-government "Guardians" have sent death threats to Republican and Democratic governors. The recent incarnations of the angry mob have many brand new names, but they're still the old Klan to me.

140 years after the 15th Amendment, more progress must be made on voting rights

From the Progressive:

It has been 140 years since the 15th Amendment was ratified, but we still have a ways to go to ensure the right to vote.

The 15th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on March 30, 1870. It states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it adds: “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

With voting rights granted to former slaves, the change to the American political landscape was dramatic. There were more than 1,500 black political officeholders during Reconstruction, all of them Republicans. They included a governor and a lieutenant governor, state legislators and members of Congress and the Senate.


Despite the new voting rights protections guaranteed under the 15th Amendment, there was considerable Southern white resistance to black participation in American civic and political life. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed to intimidate blacks. And as federal troops left the South and Reconstruction came to a close, the South descended into an era of Jim Crow segregation. States engaged in the wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks, wiping them off the political map.

It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that full citizenship rights would be restored to black people. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of people died securing that right.

And sadly, now, in 2010, remnants of Jim Crow remain.

An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions, including 4 million who are out of prison. A third of them are black. That means one in eight black men can’t vote.

“As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified,” says Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Some politicians want to return us to the days of Jim Crow laws. At a Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February, former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo told an audience he lamented that “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” He added, “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”

Tancredo’s objectionable statement was a not-so-subtle reference to literacy tests, a weapon of choice used by Jim Crow states to disenfranchise black voters.

On the 140th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, Tancredo and others would have us turn back the clock, and return to a time when people of color were denied the right to vote.

Let’s expand democracy rather than shrink it.

Prop 8, Jim Crow, Nuremberg and Other Unjust Laws

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
December 18, 2008

Forty years ago, in many states, my marriage to my wife would have been illegal. In fact, we would have been regarded as criminals and locked up for miscegenation, or “race-mixing” as they called it.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, which found that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, a law banning interracial marriage was unconstitutional in violation of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time of the Loving decision, 16 states still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books.

Racist origins of laws restricting marriage

Today’s laws banning same-sex marriage - including California’s Proposition 8, a ballot measure which passed in the November 2008 election - are the descendants of these pernicious Jim Crow laws and the Nuremberg laws enacted in Nazi Germany. All of these forms of codified intolerance are promulgated for the same reasons: to justify and perpetuate a regime of supremacy, hatred and violence against a group of people, end of story. And the stated rationale for these restrictions, these human rights violations, is always couched in terms of the need to protect tradition, custom, the family or social integrity. Such laws are cloaked in self-righteous, sanctimonious religious ideology, completely reflecting the obsessions and hang-ups of those who write and support them. So, in the case of invalidating same-sex marriages, those who subscribe to that proposition say that they seek to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage, whatever that means.

Similarly, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia had concluded in a 1955 decision that the state’s anti-miscegenation laws had legitimate purposes, which were “to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” as well as to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride,” a not-so-subtle endorsement of White Supremacy.

In 1958, Mildred Jeter (Black) and Richard Loving (White), residents of Virginia, were married in the District of Columbia. When they returned to Virginia, they were sentenced to a year in jail for violating Virginia’s ban on leaving the state to evade the law (Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code), and the ban on interracial marriages (Section 20-59):

• “Leaving State to evade law. If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.” (Section 20-58)

• “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”(Section 20-59)

The Lovings pleaded guilty, and the judge suspended the sentence if the couple agreed not to return to the state for 25 years. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” the judge wrote in an opinion. “And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

How sweetly ironic that the first African-American president, himself a self-described “mutt,” won three Southern states in the Electoral College, including Virginia, the cradle of the Confederacy, which would have criminalized the union of Obama’s parents at the time of his birth.

Southern obsession with race-mixing becomes law

The anti-miscegenation laws represented a convergence of issues of sex, race and power. The Southern preoccupation with race-mixing can be explained to some extent by the need to protect the purity of the White woman. Although White men often fathered children of color, the thought of a White woman mating with a Black man was worse than murder. Blacks were regarded as dirty and subhuman, and the psychological basis of the notion of White female purity has been deep-seated. The regulations served to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established in the antebellum years, and uphold the White family as an impregnable institution. This became particularly important in a new context where Black men were now free, with the potential to express themselves in society as actual men and not slaves. The institution of racial slavery had helped to define a caste system where social equality was implausible. But in the absence of slavery, there was a risk that White Supremacy would be exposed for the farce it is.

The lynching of black men was part and parcel of the anti-miscegenation regime. Relationships between black men and white women, which became the very definition of rape in the Jim Crow context, would result in dead Black men. Thus, White men could maintain their sexual dominance over Black women and not run afoul of the law, yet control Black men and prohibit their contact with White women through anti-miscegenation and lynch laws.

The U.S. Information Agency noted that “As to mixed marriages, the most delicate question of all, it is to be noted that 29 states - all those of the South and many in the Southwest - forbid it. In the North, such marriages are frowned upon, and represent an almost insignificant percentage.” Alabama law, for example, declared that “the state legislature shall never pass any law to legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or a descendant of a negro,” with a penalty of two to seven years’ imprisonment for anyone choosing to intermarry or “live in adultery and fornication with each other.” Arizona prohibited marriage between whites and anyone with Negro blood, or between whites and Hindus. Arkansas prohibited the concubinage of a Negro with a white, yet allowed marriage provided the Negro blood was not “visible and distinct,” under penalty of one month to one year of hard labor. North Dakota prohibited sexual relations, cohabitation and marriage between whites and anyone having 1/8th or more Negro or “Mongolian” blood.

Oregon forbade unions between whites and anyone with one-quarter or more Negro, Chinese or Malay blood, or one-half or more American Indian blood. The state provided penalties for the marriage partners as well as the persons issuing the license and performing the ceremony. In an interesting twist, South Carolina expressly forbade the adoption of a white child by a Negro. The South Carolina state constitution stated that

• “It shall be unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any woman of wither Indian or negro races, or any mulatto, mestizo, or half-breed, or for any white woman to intermarry with any person, other than a white man, or for any mulatto, half-breed, Indian, negro or mestizo to intermarry with a white woman.”

The Texas anti-miscegenation statutes are a conspicuous example of the arbitrary, irrational, and cruelly intrusive nature of the Jim Crow laws:

• “If any white person and negro shall knowingly intermarry with each other on this state, or having so intermarried in or out of the state shall continue to live together as man and wife within this state, they shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than two nor more than five years.”

All interracial marriages in Texas were void, but punishment was not imposed unless the amount of Negro blood was one-eighth or more. Further, a municipal ordinance prohibited sexual relations between whites and blacks in the city of Fort Worth.

Jim Crow gives birth to Nuremberg Laws

The Jim Crow legal regime - which embraced not only anti-miscegenation laws but also labor exploitation, political disenfranchisement, segregation in public accommodations, housing and education, not to mention rigid definitions of who was “colored,” hence the “one-drop” rule - informed and inspired Hitler’s promulgation of the Nuremberg laws in 1935.

The Nuremberg laws, like the Jim Crow laws, were designed to strip a targeted minority group (in this case the Jewish people) of all of their rights. The preamble of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stated that “purity of the German Blood is the essential condition for the continued existence of the German people.” Not surprisingly, and eerily similar to the Virginia law at issue in Loving, section 1 forbade marriage between Jews and Germans, with a penalty of hard labor:

• “Marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden. Marriages nevertheless concluded are invalid, even if concluded abroad to circumvent this law.” (§ 1(1))

Meanwhile, section 2 stated that “Extramarital intercourse between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood is forbidden.” (§ 2) Under the Reich Citizenship Law, Jews lost their German citizenship. This was part of a legal regime that had begun to dismiss Jews from government jobs, prohibit them from taking state professional exams or joining professional organizations, severely restrict their numbers in public schools and universities, and criminalize their religious and dietary practices. In the coming years, the laws became harsher, with Jewish exclusion from the social welfare system, expulsion from public schools and complete segregation in education and housing. Jews could not hold driver’s licenses, were banned from resorts, beaches and swimming pools, barred from sleeping and dining cars on trains, and made to register for forced labor. Jews were forbidden to walk in certain places at certain times of the day. Non-Jewish women married to Jewish man were urged to divorce or suffer the disadvantages suffered by Jews. Nazi law defined children as “persons who are not Jews.” Being Jewish, in essence, became illegal. (Source: Midwest Center for Holocaust Education)

Dr. King on unjust laws

One should be suspicious of laws which, whether through edict, legislation or ballot measure, allows the majority to strip the minority of its rights in a wholesale manner. Such laws are immoral and invalid. And as Dr. Martin Luther King noted in his April 16, 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, unjust laws are made to be broken:

• “You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust…. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all'…. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.”

So, fast forward to today, and California’s Proposition 8, which restricts the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and prohibits same-sex couples from marrying. It is necessary to ask whose interests are served from the law, who is behind the law, and who paid for the law. Right-wing Christianity tends to be the usual suspect in such matters. For example, Focus on the Family, a group which opposes abortion and gay rights, and advocates for abstinence-only education, spent $539,000 in cash and $83,000 in nonmonetary support to pass Prop 8. As a result, the evangelical Christian group had to cut its workforce by 20 percent, which is a good thing.

Mormon Church

But the bulk of the money for Prop 8 came from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), the Mormon Church. LDS church leadership supported the ballot initiative, and urged their members to contribute to the effort, to the tune of $20 million, or as much as 70 percent of total funds raised by Protectmarriage.com. This has caused protests by some Mormons, resignations from the church, and has led to an effort to strip the religious organization of its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. The LDS church, it should be noted, once embraced polygamy, and excluded Blacks until 1978 on the grounds that dark skinned people bore the Curse of Cain and were inferior. And now, apparently, they have given themselves authority as moral arbiters to decide what consenting adults should or should not do in the privacy of their own household, who they should or should not love, and who they can or cannot marry.

Nothing good can come from unjust laws that treat one group as less than human and deny them their full civil and human rights. Jim Crow laws, Nuremberg laws, Prop 8 - different names, but they’re all one in the same. Like Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, today’s anti-gay marriage laws must be abolished.

Supreme Court's voter ID decision is a blow to democracy

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service
May 7, 2008

By upholding Indiana's voter ID law, the Supreme Court struck another blow to civil rights and equality in the United States.

In its 6-3 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the court ruled that the law, which requires Indiana voters to show photo identification at the polls, is constitutional.

But the law was devised with partisan motives in mind. The Republican-dominated legislature enacted it in 2005 against the wishes of Democrats and civil rights advocates who were concerned that it would deny equal access to the voting booth.

Why? Because the law places an unfair burden on the poor, minority groups, students, the disabled and the elderly, groups that are least likely to have proper ID.

Voter ID laws like Indiana's harken to the days of Jim Crow, when states required blacks to pay poll taxes and pass literacy tests, or answer questions as inane as "how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" in order to vote.

In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, said the burden the law imposes is minimal and even-handed, and that the law is justifiable since it aims to "protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself." Also siding with the majority, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Indiana law is "eminently reasonable.

The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not `even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"

The dissenting justices, Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, concluded that the law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State's citizens." They added that a "significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting."

The dissenting opinion also took issue with Indiana's provisional ballot system. Voters who do not have an ID can cast a provisional ballot. The ballot becomes validated only if the person appears in court or before the county election board within 10 days of the election and can establish his or her identity. Someone without an ID would be required to repeat this process in every subsequent election. This is a burden for indigent voters in a state that lacks public transportation in many areas.

Ironically, the issue of voter fraud - the reason that some Republican lawmakers use to justify voter ID laws - is a red herring. There is very little evidence of voter fraud in the United States. Yet the Supreme Court cited voter fraud as the primary reason for upholding the Indiana law.

It is unfortunate that the highest court in the land has turned its back on voting rights for all Americans. Voting should be made easier, not harder. By giving the green light for states to enact such repressive laws, they are enabling those who would turn the clock back on civil rights in this country.

In an election year where millions of new voters are being brought into the democratic process, this should concern us all.

Hanging Hate: Backlash against the Jena Six case sparks an epidemic of public nooses

By David A. Love
Published by In These Times
January 2008

The noose, that symbol of American racism associated with the Jim Crow South, is making a comeback.

Following the notorious Jena, La., incident, a rash of noose-related hate crimes has surfaced around the country, at times in the unlikeliest of places. These cases are not aberrations, but part of an endemic problem.

On Oct. 9, 2007, in New York City, a noose was found hanging from the office door of a black professor at Columbia University Teachers College. On Oct. 10, an NYPD officer found a noose hanging over his locker. On Oct. 11, a noose was found hanging from a light pole in front of a post office near Ground Zero. On Oct. 22, a noose was sent to a high school principal, a black woman, in Brooklyn.

For African Americans, the noose symbolizes racial intimidation, violence and death—and with good reason. “The noose is among the most repugnant of all racist symbols because it is itself an instrument of violence,” noted Judge Robert L. Carter, a black federal district judge, in Williams v. New York City Housing Authority. In this 2001 employment discrimination case, African-American public employees were subjected to a hostile work environment, including the hanging of a noose.

Lynching has been America’s own form of domestic terrorism, columnist George Curry wrote recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Far from being merely a prank, the hanging of nooses harks back to a shameful period in American history. It was not until 1952 that the United States went a whole year without a single lynching.”

Mark Potok, a staff director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and hate groups, thinks the current noose hangings are a reaction to Jena. “What the nooses represent is a wider and deeper backlash by whites than people recognize,” he says. “White people think the events in Jena were whitewashed by an evil and politically correct press.”

To track these hate crimes, DiversityInc magazine has initiated “Noose Watch,” which catalogues incidents of what it calls a “dangerous racist trend.” As of Dec. 5, it had collected information on 61 incidents that have occurred since the beginning of 2006. (The New York Times reports that 50 to 60 noose incidents have occurred since the large Sept. 20, 2007 rally in Jena) Most recently:

• On Nov. 20, a city employee in Slidell, La., was fired for allegedly hanging a noose at a job site a few days prior.
• On Nov. 13, a college student in Orangeburg, S.C., was arrested for hanging a noose in a classroom.
• On Nov. 8, in Beekman, La., high school students discovered a raccoon hanging from a noose on their school’s flagpole.
• On Oct. 30, a black mannequin with a noose tied around its neck was found in a county landfill building in Sacramento, Calif.
• On Oct. 24, a noose was placed around the neck of a bronze statue of Tupac Shakur in Atlanta.
• On Oct. 15, a housekeeper at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pa., found a noose hanging in a 10th floor hospital room.
• On Oct. 4, a black Verizon employee in Cranberry, Pa., found a doll with a noose tied around its neck, along with a note saying that she did not deserve her promotion.
• On Oct. 1, at a construction site in Philadelphia, Pa., a white construction worker held a noose in front of a black co-worker and allegedly said he “wanted to hang someone.”
• In October 2007, a noose was found hanging from the exit of a Home Depot store under construction in South Elgin, Ill., along with racist graffiti.
• On Sept. 28, a noose was found in the men’s bathroom of the Hempstead, Long Island, police department.
• On Sept. 20, two men were arrested in Alexandria, La., for having nooses in the back of their pickup truck, only hours after an anti-racism march in nearby Jena.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the United States shot up from 602 to 844 between 2000 and 2006—an increase of 40 percent. The group also found that, based on 2005 Department of Justice data, about 191,000 hate-crime incidents are reported each year. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is handling an increasing number of noose cases alone: 24 since 2001. The number of reported workplace racial harassment cases increased from 3,075 in 1991 to 6,000 in 2006.

“The display of nooses does occur anywhere,” says Lewis Steel, a civil rights attorney at Outten & Golden in New York City. “African Americans who are exposed to this are infuriated by it. It rubs a nerve, whereas with white people it is just not in their experience.”

Steel is representing black and Latino employees in a lawsuit against the New York City Parks Department for racial discrimination and practices—including multiple displays of nooses on city property. He says that combating these incidents in the employment context depends to a large extent on the leadership of the employer.

“Certainly when we originally started the Parks Department case, [former New York City Parks Commissioner Henry] Stern viewed the display of nooses as silly,” Steel says. “He did not send a memo around, and no action was really taken against those who displayed them.”

Similarly, Reed Walters, the district attorney of LaSalle Parish, La., who prosecuted the Jena Six black teens for a schoolyard brawl with a white classmate, reacted to the hanging of the nooses at Jena High School by telling black students they were making too much of the “prank.”

Many black Americans think government officials are treating these noose incidents too lightly.

On Nov. 3, hundreds of people marched in Charleston, W.V., in support of Megan Williams, a 20-year-old black woman whom authorities say was kidnapped, tortured, beaten and raped by six white men and women in a trailer over the course of a week. Williams’ captors also allegedly forced her to eat rat, dog and human feces, and placed a noose around her neck. The six suspects, who were arrested and charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, malicious wounding and battery, have not been charged with hate crimes.

“They just kept saying, ‘This is what we do to niggers down here,’” Williams told the Associated Press.

On Nov. 16, thousands of community activists, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, marched at the U.S. Department of Justice demanding that the federal government more vigorously prosecute crimes of racial violence.

“When you hang up a noose, it’s no joke to us,” said Sharpton at the march. “Every noose that’s hung should be prosecuted by the law. And we’re going to demand that today.” According to Sharpton, the federal government has relinquished its responsibility to protect civil rights by relying on states to address hate crimes, something he characterized as a “revival of states’ rights.”

In response to the march, Attorney General Michael Mukasey issued this statement: “In recent months, there have been reports of nooses and other symbols of racial and religious hate appearing in schools, workplaces and neighborhoods across the country. These symbols of hate have no place in our great country. … Although there are limitations and challenges in bringing successful hate crimes prosecutions, the department takes each case seriously and is prepared to vindicate the rights of the victims when prosecution is warranted by the facts and by federal law.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has said that “for too long, the Department of Justice failed to confront the serious questions of injustice, inequality and intolerance raised by the troubling events in Jena.” She advocates restoring professionalism to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and calls for strengthening the hate crimes laws and voting laws.

In a letter to Mukasey, presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) wrote, “Unfortunately, this administration—and your predecessors as attorney general—have a poor track record in the area of investigating discrimination against racial minorities, while inexplicably focusing resources on a few, exceptional cases involving white victims.”

Meanwhile, Steel, who has used the legal system to wage the fight against noose-related hate crimes, thinks that community organizing is needed to get the attention of people in power and bring about change.

“There is a real connection between community organizing and leadership. This kind of conduct … is really despicable, so you hope the community should protest against this type of thing. It is hateful and it is stomach turning. You want to see communities organizing so this type of thing doesn’t happen again.”

But why are these racially motivated crimes on the rise at this point in time? Potok suggests that the recent noose incidents reflect not a fringe phenomenon, but a major social problem. “We’re looking at an upsurge in racial nationalism,” says Potok. “What’s going on is a serious backlash against globalization. You have a certain level of economic rage that provides fertile ground for these groups.” He says that with more people of color immigrating to the country, “whites are angry and uneasy.”

According to Potok, these whites who are scapegoating think, “Our country is being stolen from us. The country my white Christian forefathers built is being taken away.” But on Democracy Now!, Malik Shabazz, a member of Black Lawyers for Justice, said: “The hanging of nooses is a sign that there [could] be real bodies under those nooses very soon.”

Keeping An Eye on the Promise Keepers

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Published by Emerge Magazine
by David A. Love
April, 1997

(Author's note: In light of this election season, I thought it was useful to resurrect the following commentary from ten years ago.)

Last September, I attended the Promise Keepers conference at Shea Stadium. One of the few African-Americans in the crowd of nearly 50,000 men, I was out of my element. A progressive person--I belong to a group that fights the burning of Black churches, police brutality and the regressive policies of an extremist U.S. Congress-- I did not attend the event expecting a message that would appeal to my interests. Rather, I went to study the Promise Keepers' concept of "racial reconciliation."

The Promise Keepers hold their all-male conferences in stadiums across the country, drawing crowds of up to 725,000. Most of the mainstream media have painted the group as an innocuous, apolitical organization that seeks to embrace the spiritual lives of Christian men. Televised images of Promise Keepers events-- men singing together, crying and embracing each other-- reinforce that image.

However, an Oct. 7th article in The Nation magazine provides a different perspective. It says the Promise Keepers are an attempt to give the radical Right a friendly face, and further its fundamentalist and bigoted political agenda in the process. With a reported annual budget in excess of $115 million, the support of rich conservative businessmen and the blessing of individuals such as Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network and Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, the Promise Keepers hope to build on the political success of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.

One of the primary themes of this movement is a call for racial reconciliation. Surely, the word "reconciliation" was chosen very carefully. As a concept, reconciliation is quite different from equality or justice. If two individuals reconcile, that does not mean they both get what they want. A slave and a slave master may reconcile, but that will not necessarily alter their fundamental relationship.

The "Christian" Right does not seek racial justice in the United States. Throughout history, it has stood in the way of freedom for all Americans. Conservative White Christians justified the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans, participated in Jim Crow segregation, burned crosses and blocked schoolhouse doors. Today, they endorse policies that threaten the already tenuous position of the poor and reward those who possess more than enough wealth. Their stance against women's rights and reproductive rights is repressive, and their attitude toward immigrants is racist and xenophobic.

Moreover, in the spirit of their segregationist predecessors, today's Christian conservatives are uncompromising in their opposition to affirmative action and other programs that seek redress for racial discrimination. In a cynical attempt to detract attention from their own complicity in this racially charged climate, elements of the radical Right (including the Christian Coalition and the Promise Keepers) have pledged funds to rebuild Black churches. Forgive me if I am suspicious of those who have show nothing but intolerance and hatred toward me, yet suddenly claim to seek my friendship.

Not unlike last year's Republican convention, the Promise Keepers' event at Shea Stadium was abundant in racial symbolism but short in substance. Many of the female volunteers were Black or Latino. Furthermore, although th crowd was overwhelmingly White, many of the featured speakers were men of color. For example, Rev. Joseph Garlington, pastor of a nondenominational church in Pittsburgh, ws a member of the reelection committee for conservative Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). E.V. Hill, and African-American pastor from Los Angeles who is featured at many Promise Keepers conferences, gave President Nixon's inaugural prayer in 1973 and was the chairman of Clergy for Reagan. By putting Black faces in high places, the Promise Keepers create the illusion of an organization that is sympathetic to people of a darker hue.

So, what do the Promise Keepers really want? If they can attract significant numbers from Black, Latino and mainstream White congregations and instructs them to vote for Right-wing political candidates with so-called "Christian" values, they will have succeeded in destroying the traditional New Deal coalition.

Got Questions? Ask a Smart Black Guy

MLK/Malcolm X photo © Associated Press

By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator

September 27, 2007

With fascination, I've noted the recent popularity of these television commercials featuring the smart Black guy. You know what I mean, the intelligent, "articulate" and "clean" man of color, someone you wouldn't mind inviting to your home for dinner. In the commercial, he is invariably called upon to provide technical expertise on some complex matter, whether it involves the specifications of the latest model computer, information on selecting an insurance policy, or giving crucial investment advice.

I suppose I should be satisfied that we have improved in the media depictions of people of color, somewhat, that Black men are finally portrayed as something other than criminals, buffoons, the hired help, etc. To be sure, these ads, creations of Madison Avenue, rightly suggest that there are many Black men out there from which society could learn a great deal. However, in the real world in which most of us live, Black men are rarely heard. Most of society has very little to say to Black men, and believes there is very little, if nothing, that they can learn from them.

To be sure, there have been many who were willing and eager to give advice, but society has refused to heed their message. For example, in the 1960s, Dr. King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers and others had much to say to America, and much advice to give. But their message was unwelcome, and the messengers were assassinated. And a number of whites at that time who openly asserted that society must listen to what Black people have to say, were murdered, maimed or otherwise discredited.

African American men are the nation's universal scapegoat. They are the most likely to die, the most likely to be undereducated and the most likely to be unemployed. Many whites fled the cities to get away from them, so that their children would not go to school with them, or even worse, date them.

Through unjust laws, Black men, along with their Latino counterparts, are the majority of the nation's prisoners. And they comprise the most incarcerated demographic in the world, America's attempt to lock up its race problem — out of sight and out of mind — and throw away the key. In a country where each of the 50 states bans dog fighting, and rightly so, men of color are chained up and put down like dogs, and men and women of color often are not even respected as much as dogs.

Black men in particular are stressed over the badge of criminality they must bear. The nation's tough-on-crime, law and order apparatus is mobilized primarily against them. When they are born, there is a presumption of their guilt. Society places an insurmountable burden on Black men to prove that they are not a criminal element, which is why they are likely to receive longer sentences for the same crime than white men.

Even the clothes associated with young Black men of the hip hop generation - saggy jeans - have been prohibited by law in some parts of the U.S .

A white man with a criminal record has an easier time finding a job than a Black man who has had no brushes with the law. And as anti-racism activist and writer, Tim Wise notes, a Black man with a college degree makes nearly $20,000 less, or nearly half his white counterpart, while a white with a masters degree earns 10 percent more, and a white with a professional degree earns $30,000 more.

Based on the longstanding assumption that two or more Black males gathering together in public constitutes a criminal conspiracy, the Black Codes were enacted during Jim Crow in order to control Black men's daily affairs. Studies have been funded to prove that Black men possess an innate wolfpack mentality and penchant for violence. America is the department store within which African American men must navigate, constantly monitored, followed and scrutinized, and always presumed to be up to no good.

And today, we can see the intergenerational nature of this criminalization process. As six Black teens were arrested and indicted in Jena, Louisiana, facing hard time for fighting against raw racism under the "white" tree, eight former Black Panthers were arrested and indicted, based on illegal evidence, old, unsettled scores and trumped up charges, four decades in the making.

In this election season, it is plausible that almost none of the interchangeable empty suits that are the Republican presidential candidates will have any contact with Black men, much less acknowledge their existence. That is why many of them have run away from the presidential debates on Black and Latino issues. It is doubtful that a number of Democratic candidates have a clue as well.

Certainly, an individual such as Mitt Romney, marketed as the whitest man with the whitest family in the land, has no need to concern himself with what Black men are thinking. And surely Rudy "9-11" Giuliani had no concern for the many Black and Latino men who were killed by the police under his watch as mayor of New York. For this crowd — which, curiously, seems to believe it can win by playing to the base and ignoring this nation's ascending majority — policy towards people of color is of a punitive nature, whether it is war against Arabs and Muslims at home and abroad (and apparent Arabs and Muslims), deportation for Latinos, elimination of civil rights, voting rights and affirmative action for people of color in general, and more imprisonment for all of the above.

(Of course, our white brothers and sisters of meager means do not fare any better under a hypothetical G.O.P. administration. However, the regressive conservatives throw a bone to that segment of the electorate in the form of the race card, naked homophobia and criminalization of women's rights, the war on terror, the war on crime, creationism, guns, and other divisive distractions.)

The Black guy in the commercial seems to serve a role for a society that is in denial. He soothes the collective guilty conscience by reminding America of the progress we've made, and providing proof that racism and racial inequity are a thing of the past. "This smart Black guy is managing my stock portfolio and building me a computer, he's doing well, so why does he need affirmative action?" the argument goes. "The civil rights movement was a long time ago, and we live in a colorblind society, so why should this guy get any breaks over my kid?"

There is a racial disconnect in America, and it is enormous. A recent study by Ohio State University of white people's understanding of the black experience suggests that many whites are clueless. When given a hypothetical involving an oppressed minority group in a fictional country that mirrors the Black experience, whites estimated that the group deserved, on average, $1 million in compensation. But when posed the same question with regard to African Americans, the estimate dropped to $10,000.

And according to a survey by the Associated Press and MTV, 72 percent of whites between ages 13-24 say they are generally happy with life, as opposed to 56 percent of Blacks and 51 percent of Latinos. Among participants of color in the survey, the most important key to happiness was lack of money woes, while whites said that a good family was the most important factor. Further, 28 percent of people of color believe race will hurt them in their search for a better life, while 20 percent of whites feel their race will help them get ahead.

So, the next time you see a smart Black guy in a TV commercial, ask yourself a question: how much better would this country be if we actually listened to what the real-life Black people have to say?

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love

Jim Crow lives on in Jena, and in America

Bettmann/Corbis

By David A. Love
Published by Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service
August 2007

Racism and Jim Crow are alive and well in America. The recent conviction of a black teenager, and the indictment of five others in Jena proves that.

It all started when a black student sought permission from school administrators to sit under the "white tree," a tree at the high school where white students normally gathered. School officials told him to sit where he liked. So, on Aug. 31, 2006, some black students decided to sit under it.

The next day, three white students hung three nooses from the tree, prompting a protest under the tree by the school's black students. Later that day, LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, accompanied by police, told the black students they were making too much of the "prank."

"I can be your best friend or your worst enemy," Walters reportedly told the students. "I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen."

The school principal had recommended expulsion for the white students who hung the nooses, but the superintendent of schools overruled his decision and gave the white students only three-day suspensions.

Racial tensions heated up, and one of the black students, Robert Bailey Jr., was beaten by a white teen for attending an all-white off-campus party that Bailey reportedly was invited to.

The next day, according to news reports, a young white man pulled a shotgun on Bailey and his two friends at a convenience store.

Two days later, a group of white students, including those who hung the nooses, taunted Bailey and others, and called them n------. Intimidation and name-calling by white students allegedly continued at the school.

Later that day, on Dec. 4, 2006, a white male reportedly brought a gun on school property, and when students wrestled it away and held him for police, the students were charged and the gunman was merely fined.

In June, after deliberating for less than three hours, an all-white, six-person jury found one of the black students, Mychal Bell, 17, guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery for the Dec. 4 incident. He faces up to 22 years in prison when he is sentenced on Sept. 20.

Five other black students still await trial with more serious charges. The six boys, who were expelled from school, originally faced attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit attempted second-degree murder. Their bail ranged from $70,000 to $138,000, sums that their families could not afford. The real crime the Jena Six committed, however, was challenging racial segregation in their town, and having the audacity to sit under a tree reserved for white students at Jena High School.

The tree was recently cut down, but the racial wounds in Jena — and the nation — still fester.

Today, we still have a separate and unequal justice system. Blacks face disproportionately high prosecution rates and prison sentences.

Sadly, white America is in denial about the persistence of racial intolerance.

The plight of the Jena Six should awaken us all to the racism that still infects this country.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love