From Pine View Farm

Milestones 0

A couple of weeks ago, I found my copy of Green and Gold. That was the directory of incoming freshmen that rising sophomores at my college prepared. We freshman received it when we arrived for orientation.

Second Son was looking at it yesterday. One thing he remarked on (in addition to the freaky haircuts and funny clothes you will see in high school senior portraits from the late 1960’s) was the very small number of black persons, maybe three or four–we called them “colored” or “Negroes” back then–in the incoming class of about 700
persons.

I pointed out to him that, just a few years before, the college had been all white.

Fortunately, he is from a new generation. He doesn’t care about color.

Will Bunch’s post on Senator Obama’s achievement is just too good–and for those or us who lived through it, black, white, yellow, red, or purple, too true–to ignore.

Addendum, a Few Minutes Later:

Dick Polman has more:


When Obama was born on August 4, 1961, southern blacks could not sit with white patrons at lunch counters, or drink from the same water fountains, or use the same public toilets, or sit where they wanted on buses. They were routinely denied the right to vote. Civil rights workers known as Freedom Riders, who rode buses across state lines to protest segregation in transportation, were often dragged from the vehicles that spring and summer, and beaten with tire irons. Even accomplished black citizens got little respect; when NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall met that spring with attorney general Robert Kennedy to discuss the possibility of being nominated for a federal appeals court seat, RFK told him, “That’s the problem with you people. You want too much too fast.”

Share

Comments are closed.

From Pine View Farm
Privacy Policy

This website does not track you.

It contains no private information. It does not drop persistent cookies, does not collect data other than incoming ip addresses and page views (the internet is a public place), and certainly does not collect and sell your information to others.

Some sites that I link to may try to track you, but that's between you and them, not you and me.

I do collect statistics, but I use a simple stand-alone Wordpress plugin, not third-party services such as Google Analitics over which I have no control.

Finally, this is website is a hobby. It's a hobby in which I am deeply invested, about which I care deeply, and which has enabled me to learn a lot about computers and computing, but it is still ultimately an avocation, not a vocation; it is certainly not a money-making enterprise (unless you click the "Donate" button--go ahead, you can be the first!).

I appreciate your visiting this site, and I desire not to violate your trust.