Who is this "Martin Luther King" and why does he have his day off today?

[Hauldren Collider]

Not many sourthern educated ones. If it wasn't sick, the University of Texas law school court cases would be funny. They had a colored applicant who passed all the tests and they couldn't come up with an excuse, so they told him thanks for applying, but we can't take you since we don't have a colored law school. So he went to court. And won. So they said, well, we can't afford to build a ****** law school for just one of you, so howsabout we pay to ship your ass to a yankee law school and we'll pay your tuition? So he went to court, again. And won. So then they let him in, but he had to have a separate desk in the hallway right outside the lecture room door. So he went to court again. And won. So finally they let him in the classroom, but it took three trips to federal court and several years.

Reverend King was born in 1929, when that was just starting to change reluctantly. The concept of colored doctors and lawyers were accepted because someone had to attend on the colored patients, or represent the colored boy at trial after he stole the white man's property. But they mostly got their advanced eduction up north (as did Rev. King), and they had to keep a fairly low profile, as they were already suspect as being uppity. Being a preacher was the only way a colored man could officially and openly perfect the art of running his mouth. As men of the cloth, they were given a bit more latitude.

Right. I was aware of all of these things, actually, which is why I specifically mentioned lawyers and doctors (and not other professions like engineers). I just was trying to point out that preacher was not the ONLY option available to college educated southern blacks, though in no way am I trying to minimize the amount of prejudice and injustice they faced.

[DaShi]

Actually that is the most obvious interpretation of your post. The other is that you wanted to appear smarter than you are.

[MichaeltheGreat]

My point wasn't so much the career options (agronomy was another accepted one), it's just that being a preacher was the only one where there was a certain "uppityness allowance." A preacher could travel around and say things in the pulpit that any other professional black man would find himself in a ton of trouble over. So it drew a certain hell-raiser personality and game them a chance to refine their craft, which is why so many of the black southern civil rights leaders were men of the cloth.

Another aspect of the "uppity allowance" was for the listener, not the speaker. Go listen to some doctor or lawyer talking about ******'s rights, and you obviously needed reminding of your place. Listen to it in the pulpit, and you were generally ok. Plus you had the privacy of having an accepted meeting place where a bunch of you could gather, and not having white people listen in. So it was getting right with the Lord, not getting uppity about your proper place.

[Alexander's Horse]

I would have liked to have seen Obama invite people to come forward and accept him as their personal saviour, some probably would

[DinoDoc]

I would have liked to have seen Obama invite people to come forward and accept him as their personal saviour, some probably would

This guy might have already done that.

[Dinner]

I see. Second post is the Off Topic. The question for me, is who is preferring to argue against me as a DL rather than their primary account?

I don't find it unusual that even total strangers realize you're a drooling idiot.

[Ben Kenobi]

Sorry, but you don't. I'm not talking integration. Integration was the last step, when the de jure barriers had been removed, but the public and private de facto barriers remained. Bull Connor wasn't concerned about ******s and a bunch of outside agitatin' jews from up north riding on buses. He was concerned about the notion of maintaining control.

And as Brown eloquently stated, separation is inherently unequal. The divisions were there to ensure that this was kept in place.

As for the rest of this:

You're seriously going to look me in the eye, and saying that your single act (which wasn't even your act, but your fathers!) of standing up for someone other than yourself is the equivalent of growing up deaf? Really, MtG?

I'll tell you one story. I had a teacher - an English teacher in high school. She wanted to take the class to europe, so we had to work and save up and fundraise. Which is fine. So I did, right along with all the other students for the whole year. We actually made our goal. I was quite surprised, I didn't think we would make enough, but there it was - by the end of the year, enough to go. So our teacher was very happy with all the announcements. Passed it out around to all the students, the list of stuff they needed to put together for a trip itinerary. Save one person.

Me.

I asked her - why she didn't hand out a paper to me? She said she'd speak with me after class. So I waited, she took off. The next day, I got their early and I asked her - what was going on with the trip. She told me this:

"I did some thinking, and I decided, you aren't going to go." "Why"

"Because I don't want to cart around someone deaf on a trip to a different country."

"Well, then you ought to have told me that before I helped fundraise. I worked along with everyone else. I should have the same opportunity."

"I'm sorry, I changed my mind on you going. Thanks for all your help!"

[Ben Kenobi]

It is and it isn't, at the same time. The focus was on blacks because that was where the apartheid was most visible.

Disability is quite visible as well, and generally accepted as a form of discrimination in both education and employment, well through the 80s and 90s. Only recently, and it is still controversial, is the desire to integrate those with disability into the 'regular classrooms' as opposed to having separate (and inherently unequal school systems). It's still a reasonable argument to say that students with disabilities are better off 'in their own schools'. Same as it was for black students. When you have them out in a different classroom, then you obviate the need for educational standards. Does anyone care what happens to those in special ed? Not really. They just care that they are 'going to school'. Anything else is a bonus.

At present, the average reading score for someone with my hearing is around 3rd grade. Now, you're telling me that doesn't have an impact on their educational attainment, on their job prospects, on their entire future, on their prosperity as they go through life? I was lucky. I beat the system, but the system is still in place and hasn't changed.

You should read all the procedural history of some of the deeper civil rights cases like Gong Lum v Rice, where a "Chinaman" argues against classifying his daughter as "colored" instead of "white." The Jim Crow legal system was created specifically for the systematic oppression of black people, and when a few other non-whites showed up, then the question was were they white enough to be allowed as white, or should they be lumped in with coloreds.

Why should I when I can read other decisions like Buck vs Bell, advocating involuntary sterilization of the 'mentally unfit'?

it was just as basic as being able to travel, to eat at the front of a restaurant, etc.

So you don't think travel is an issue for those with disabilities? Really, MtG? Plenty of issues there surrounding mobility. Just being able to enter buildings can be a challenge.

[Ben Kenobi]

I don't find it unusual that even total strangers realize you're a drooling idiot.

Clever enough to make a DL, which rules out you.

[MichaeltheGreat]

And as Brown eloquently stated, separation is inherently unequal. The divisions were there to ensure that this was kept in place.

As for the rest of this:

You're seriously going to look me in the eye, and saying that your single act (which wasn't even your act, but your fathers!) of standing up for someone other than yourself is the equivalent of growing up deaf? Really, MtG?

I have to wonder about rah's or somebody's reading comprehension comment about you. I was referring to your assertion that your experience is even remotely close to the institutional and systematic racism/apartheid of the deep south in the civil rights era and before. I wasn't posting about me, I was posting about what I saw for years growing up, on a near daily basis, and telling you flat out that whatever experiences you've had don't come close to what it was like for blacks in that location and era. I said that what you went through was nothing compared, and my seeing it firsthand was nothing compared.

I'll tell you one story. I had a teacher - an English teacher in high school. She wanted to take the class to europe, so we had to work and save up and fundraise. Which is fine. So I did, right along with all the other students for the whole year. We actually made our goal. I was quite surprised, I didn't think we would make enough, but there it was - by the end of the year, enough to go. So our teacher was very happy with all the announcements. Passed it out around to all the students, the list of stuff they needed to put together for a trip itinerary. Save one person.

Me.

I asked her - why she didn't hand out a paper to me? She said she'd speak with me after class. So I waited, she took off. The next day, I got their early and I asked her - what was going on with the trip. She told me this:

"I did some thinking, and I decided, you aren't going to go." "Why"

"Because I don't want to cart around someone deaf on a trip to a different country."

"Well, then you ought to have told me that before I helped fundraise. I worked along with everyone else. I should have the same opportunity."

"I'm sorry, I changed my mind on you going. Thanks for all your help!"

Which sucks, and speaks to poor ethics and a few other things.

But, you were in school with "normal" kids, right? Or did you have to go to a "special" school out in the county, or a run down part of town, with nothing near the facilities that the "normal kid" schools had? If you were walking down a road, did you think much that total strangers might throw rocks or bottles at you, or stop and beat the **** out of you. Either because you were walking down the wrong road, or because some of the older "normal kids" decided to go to your part of town (remember, your family is not allowed to live near them, you have your own neighborhood) for a little "fun?" And God forbid, if you fight back or retaliate, you or someone like you could very likely die, and the law (if it wasn't directly involved in the killing) would harass you and protect the perpetrators?

Were your parents told (or more subtly schooled) what neighborhoods they could live in? What jobs they could work? Did you have to address everyone "normal" differently or risk a beating? I'm not talking about a schoolyard fight or taunts, I'm talking a full on, pick handle or tire-iron beat down for addressing someone the wrong way? Or if someone thought you looked at a "normal girl" the wrong way, or God forbid, she looked at you the wrong way? (because it was your fault, regardless, even if it was nothing?) Or kicked out of school/lost your job over it? Were your parents denied access to vote, to the legal system (unless it was being used against them), to all the normal institutions of society that "normal" people had, and you just grew up with "that's the way it's always been?"

When you were at a park as a kid (if you were even allowed in), did you ever have to pee your pants and get laughed at because you had to bypass the bathroom near you, because "your kind" wasn't allowed there, and you had to go to the bathroom across the park? Did you ever have a really hot summer day where you wanted to swim, but you had to go to a muddy ass river running with filth because the nice clean public swimming pool in the park in town had a sign that said "normal only?" And was it not just you, but millions of people, and it had been this way for generations, with the full force of law and the endorsement of "proper society?" And if you spoke up that it was wrong, you ran the very real risk of being killed?

[Alexander's Horse]

Ben, your Captain America avatar suit you way better. The new one makes you look like a b*tch on heat.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Disability is quite visible as well, and generally accepted as a form of discrimination in both education and employment, well through the 80s and 90s. Only recently, and it is still controversial, is the desire to integrate those with disability into the 'regular classrooms' as opposed to having separate (and inherently unequal school systems). It's still a reasonable argument to say that students with disabilities are better off 'in their own schools'. Same as it was for black students. When you have them out in a different classroom, then you obviate the need for educational standards. Does anyone care what happens to those in special ed? Not really. They just care that they are 'going to school'. Anything else is a bonus.

Disability is a wide spectrum of things, and treated very differently in different schools and districts. In the early '70s, I went to school with both blind and deaf kids (not the same kids with both, but kids with one or the other) in regular classrooms. In Washington state and central California. The blind kid had his textbooks in braille, and he showed us how it worked. The deaf kids taught some of us to sign a bit, and our teachers knew how to sign. A kid with Down's is another story, but then again, so is a gifted kid. Then there's a million other specific disabilities with different issues.

At present, the average reading score for someone with my hearing is around 3rd grade. Now, you're telling me that doesn't have an impact on their educational attainment, on their job prospects, on their entire future, on their prosperity as they go through life? I was lucky. I beat the system, but the system is still in place and hasn't changed.

And you had opportunities to beat the system. And it isn't that way universally in US. Some school districts were abysmal, some good, some clueless. It's not the same as having a system that is designed to hold you down.

Why should I when I can read other decisions like Buck vs Bell, advocating involuntary sterilization of the 'mentally unfit'?

Education is a good thing. Buck v Bell applied non-uniformly to a few tens of thousands of people for a relatively short time. And fairly "random" people, as "mentally unfit" wasn't something you and your entire community were born into. Jim Crow and such applied for generations as official policy (and similar de facto practices elsewhere) to tens of millions of people.

If you were "mentally unfit" and "colored," this could happen to you:



I won't show the worse images. According to one account I read, when they first lowered him into the flames, he tried to climb up the chain hand over hand in a desperate attempt to get away. So they brought him down, cut off his fingers (he'd already been castrated, there's your forced sterilization for you), then ran him back up the tree and systematically lowered him into the fire and pulled him back up, for a couple of hours. The whole event was so shocking and socially unacceptable that thousands of people attended, including the mayor, the sheriff and sheriff's deputies, and school children.

So you don't think travel is an issue for those with disabilities? Really, MtG? Plenty of issues there surrounding mobility. Just being able to enter buildings can be a challenge.

Anyone ever arrest you for trying to enter? Lack of proper facilities is one thing. A legal authority to say "we don't let your kind rent rooms here" applied to tens of millions of people is another. Or "you can eat back in the kitchen with the help" (if you got that at all).

Remember ol' Shep? In the early 70s (about 1973, it was after Heart of Atlanta Motel, but not much after), my dad and ol' Shep had to make a 100 mile commute each way to a job site, because that was the distance to the closest town that had a hotel that would rent a room to a "******." They couldn't even EAT DINNER in the ****ing jobsite town (in Nebraska) because it had a reputation as a "sundown town" and both my dad and Shep, being southern boys, didn't want to chance seeing how well deserved that reputation was.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Inevitably, Ben will turn every talk of every struggle to a 'me' thread. I was surprised it took 80 posts before it went there.

I thought that was your MO.

[Alexander's Horse]

where and why did that happen?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Waco, Texas, 1916. A possibly illiterate, possibly retarded black teenager was accused of raping and killing a white woman who was the wife of a prominent cotton farmer. He worked on the farm, so he had the opportunity, but there were no witnesses. The sheriff arrested him, and initially, to protect him, had him in custody in Dallas for about a week, after he "confessed." The locals didn't like that much, so the sheriff brought him back from Dallas, and they had an hour long trial (at which he supposedly pled guilty), then the jury took four minutes to reach a verdict and the judge immediately sentenced him to death. The lynch mob was already waiting, and they even had a photographer on site who wanted to make commemorative postcards and sell them. Folks in Waco thought it was a grand old thing (burning was actually pretty common in lynchings, pre or post mortem), but it got a lot of other kinds of attention elsewhere in the country and was one of the first issues where the NAACP had a prominent role.

Since the city officials and sheriff and his deputies watched and did nothing, and it was pre-planned (not much time to get set up in an hour long trial, it holds a special place in the history of American lynchings in the south, since it's sort of at the intersection of a mob lynching with a judicial execution.