“That Conversation about Race” category archive

Still rising again after all these years . . . .

Jasmine Shepard should have become the first Black valedictorian in 110 years at Cleveland High School in Mississippi. An amazing achievement considering that Cleveland, MS still has not fully complied with federal desegregation orders from Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. But Jasmine was denied this honor when she was forced to share it with a white student who did not qualify for it.

Since filing a lawsuit against the school district a few weeks ago, Jasmine and her family have been the target of a torrent of racist and hateful messages. Messages that are too sickening and hateful to be shared here.

Back in the 1960s, my Southern school district finally realized after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that segregation was done and began a show process of integration. There was one black student in the white high school, a senior, the first year; eleven black students joined it the next year as juniors; and so on–full merging of the black and white schools did not occur until I was in college.

I am certain that those students were carefully picked and all of them acquitted themselves well. There were no overt tensions at the school (of course, this wasn’t in Mississippi, either). By the time my brother graduated a few years after me, the valedictorian was a black girl. The students accepted it, because she had clearly earned it.

More to the point, the parents, the administration, and the community accepted it, though a small percentage of the white student body fled to two “seg academies” and were roundly resented by the students who remained in the public high school. I have long been grateful that the administration had the wisdom to admit defeat.

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Keith Elkon has seen it before.

People of color pulled from the streets and thrown into paddy wagons. Relentless attacks on the “liberal press.” Persistent distortion of truths, nationalism and patriotism. That is the apartheid South Africa I remember and the country and system of injustice that I left in 1976. Not an act of courage, an act of defeat. The courageous stayed on and opposed the regime in whatever way they could. The courageous were persecuted, prosecuted, put under house arrest and some disappeared.

How did such a system of injustice become law of the land? The answer is that a simple and powerful tactic — fear — the “swart gevaar” won over the white electorate. Swart gevaar is an Afrikaans term literally meaning “black danger.”

Follow the link the rest.

The Guardian covers Saturday’s KKK rally in Charlottesville. Here’s a snippet:

But as he waited at the front of the packed crowd for the KKK members to arrive on Saturday, Kyle Printz, a 74-year-old with a Confederate flag on his baseball cap, called himself “kind of neutral” and said he did not support either the Klan or the counter-protesters, who he compared to “a bunch of clowns”.

While not part of the group, he said he would be open to the Klan’s perspective they if spoke mainly in support of the Confederacy and expressed views “partial to the south”.

Read the chilling rest.

As Faulkner said, “The past is always with us. In fact, it’s not even past.”

This is your country on Trump.

In Raleigh’s The News and Oberver, Paul Isom cuts through the crap about the meaning of the Stars and Bars. Here’s a nugget:

In the early 1950s, The New York Times reported unprecedented popular interest in the Confederate battle flag. It was sparked by the segregationist States Rights Party – the Dixiecrats – whose members revived the flag’s use after walking out of the Democratic National Convention promising Washington would not “force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches.”

The use of the flag as a symbol of civil rights opposition – and worse – only grew from there. “The Confederate flag … means one thing to the Klansman: Here is a friend of ‘the cause,’” reported John Herbers in a 1965 New York Times story on a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

One more time, when you hear someone wax nostalgic about “The Lost Cause,” ask him or her what exactly was the cause that was lost.