The way things used to be
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The way things used to be
Since there was a lot of interest in my piece last night on the 1965 killing of Shirley Sherrod's father, Hosie Miller, I wanted to call attention to two excellent pieces that add more layers of context to what was going on back on Baker County, Ga., in those days -- not really that long ago (within my lifetime, certainly).
The first is by Elizabeth Holtzman, the former Watergate-era New York congresswoman, who as a young lawyer worked on a race-related case there:
Screws' deputy, L. Warren Johnson, carried the tradition forward when he became sheriff. In 1961, Johnson, a huge, hulking, 300-pound man, came to the home of Charlie Ware, a small, slight black man, and arrested and handcuffed him for reasons that were unclear then, as now. Forcing Ware into his car, Johnson picked up the radio microphone and announced that Ware was coming at him with a knife and that he was going to shoot him. The sheriff thereupon shot the small, handcuffed man three times in the neck, but Ware miraculously survived. Although the sheriff should have been prosecuted, it was Ware who was charged with attempted murder, a charge that carried the death penalty.
Tonight the always-on-top-of-it Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com, has a great look at Sherrod's husband, the renowned civil rights activist Charles Sherrod:
Sherrod was SNCC's first field secretary, and he co-founded the Albany movement after a student sit-in at the local bus station (to test a recently enacted desegregation law) led to a years-long campaign that ultimately involved Martin Luther King Jr. and the intervention of President John F. Kennedy. He traveled to the historic (and almost all-white) 1964 Democratic National Convention, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party fought for more black representation. He was jailed several times and stayed with SNCC until 1966, when Stokely Carmichael became chair and whites were expelled, but he'd already become more focused on his work in southwest Georgia than SNCC politics. Sherrod got his doctor of divinity degree from New York's Union Theological Seminary, then returned to Albany to found the Southwest Georgia Independent Voters Project, then the agricultural cooperative New Communities Inc. He served 14 years on the Albany City Council, and he still lives there, known to civil rights movement veterans but obscure to the wider world, until his wife was attacked by the ignorant bullies of the right.
"We tend to think of civil rights workers as people who, it was an episode in their life before they went on and did something else," says Clayborne Carson, SNCC historian and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford. "But Sherrod is an exemplar of those people who didn't leave the movement. They stayed, and they're still fighting, to this day.
History always matters -- when it's accurate. If you care about what's happening in America in 2010, learn the truth about what happened in Georgia in the early 1960s.
MSL -- my mother remembered the 40's, my grandmother remembered the 20's... We have moved WAY forward as a country since the 60's. Our teens and 20somethings are experiencing a world that is NOTHING like what we experienced. Discrimination moved during my era from racially based towards sex-based, and now, in the 2010's, gays "enjoy" a previously unheard of level of acceptance. That doesn't mean that there still isn't bigotry, unfairness, or racism. It means that fundamentally, the world is a much different place. Trying to explain racism to my children is like trying to explain why you would choose to use a horse to plow a field rather than a tractor. They scratch their heads and say, "Why would you do that???"— IggleFan68- "Can there be a more classic example of RG's binary mindset?" Oh the irony, coming from the person who demands that we repudiate the TP extremists, and when we don't jump, then insists we're defending them. No binary thinking there (If you're not with us, your against us!). Congrats, TPS.— RG
- MSl, for someone who often cites a futurist, you spend alot of time living in the past.— RG
MSL, reread the first line. I was there to see it. Formative years. Only an idiot would see the the two eras as the same. Race is the refuge of the left. Play the race card if nothing else is working. Sometimes it is about race. Unfortunately that will never change. For the left is is ALWAYS about race.Remember, the south was firmly in control of the democrats during the '50s and 60's. Guys like Sheets Byrd and J. Wm Fulbright (Clinton's mentor). Now we have race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton instead of principled leaders like MLK. His dream died years ago. It is still about color of skin instead of content of character to them because the left finds it a useful tool. Really pathetic. And sad— georgel
"So, decades after its founding, the NAACP hasn't solved any of these issues?" . . . . . . . . Nope, blacks still live as they did in the fifties, RG. The stuff you read about - the end of segregation, the rise of a black middle class, not to mention the 1st black prez, it's all just liberal media propaganda.- "Nope, blacks still live as they did in the fifties, RG" So progress has been made, which is what georgel said, and you criticized? Do you ever have a point?— RG
- "Only an idiot would see the the two eras as the same." . . . . . Only an idiot would ignore the fact that many people remember what it was like and don't forget. When they hear slogans like "we want OUR country back", they hear the echoes of crowds jeering black schoolchildren being escorted into schools. Don't believe me? Just ask them.
- "Race is the refuge of the left." . . . . . . . . You ought to come spend some quality time with the rednecks like I do. (This is, after all, Sheets Byrd's state as batty will remind you) That kind of mindset doesn't dry up in two generations, it's merely hidden from mixed company. Any dismissal of that is either pure naivete or bull.
Comment removed.- Comment removed.
- Once again confused, eh batboy?: ===}}} Oh, so you collected the $100 grand from Breitbart by providing the 'proof', did you? {{{=== Mr. Smith said there was proof that heroes of the civil rights lied. In fact, he has no such proof. Simple concept. Think about it some more and get back to me.— Talking point sleuth
- Proof of fabrication??? Did someone actually ask for proof that something DIDN'T happen? Ya know, I've actually seen that person beat his wife...it is a fact that his wife-beating happens all the time...of course, unless he can prove that statement is a fabrication.— legatus
- In one post, MSL claism that a simple phrase "we want our country back" stirs up offensive images, yet in another he uses the derogatory term redneck to describe his neighbors. Oh sweet hypocrisy.— RG
- "In fact, he has no such proof. Simple concept." The burden of proof is on the accuser...a negative cannot be proven. Simple concept. Where is the proof that it happened? A plethora of video and audio recordings have not turned up the evidence.— legatus
- TPS, we need proof that you dont dress up in sheets and burn crosses.— RG
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