Yesterday I had a discussion on line with one of the many out there that have decided that this nation was only introduced to racism after the election of President Obama. Just a cursory look at the nation during the history of my family here in America. See if you can spot which of these laws President Obama helped to enact or which travesty he was involved in. My great great grandparents were held as chattel slaves in Tennessee before the Civil War. • The U.S. Supreme Court decides the Dred Scott case. (1857)…Blacks, free or slave, had no rights that a white was bound by law to respect. • About one in four of all people living in Tennessee in 1860 were slaves. My great grandfather was born on a plantation in TN sometime around 1880. • Tennessee is credited with the first Jim Crow law (1881), which ordered segregation in train cars. • In the 1890s an average of 187 lynchings occurred every year My grandfather was born in TN in 1908. • Streetcar companies could be fined $25 for each offense of white and black passengers riding together. My Father born 1931 in Alabama • Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites. • In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for blacks and whites to play checkers or dominoes together. My mother is born in TN in 1942 • 1946 she begins attending first grade in segregated school in Brownsville, TN I was born June 18, 1966. • Twenty-one months later Martin Luther King Jr is assassinated in Memphis while supporting my father, grandfather, and other sanitation workers, who aside from other injustices were not allowed to use the “white only” break room and two workers were killed trying to find shelter from a storm in the back of a garbage truck. 1985 while in military training a Hispanic (from CA), a Black (from Chicago), a white (from Texas) and I took a short cut to Pizza Inn across the GA border into SC and come up on a cross burning. The guy I was chatting with asked when are "we" gonna stop playing the race card and get over it.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 08:59:45 +0000
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