01-02-2017, 08:07 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-02-2017, 08:14 PM by Eric the Green.)
(01-02-2017, 07:34 PM)Danilynn Wrote: It's been nearly 2 centuries since Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Let it go. move the &^&%% on already. there are no slaves, nor slaveholders in America.
Maybe, but it's not been 2 centuries. Sharecroppers and blacks imprisoned for no reason and used for slave labor and terror lynchings predominated in the South until the 1960s, and today blacks and whites are still segregated there in many ways and live in an unequal society.
The world of 1935 had changed very little from the world of 1860 in Dixie. And the world of 1935 still resonates today.
http://www.ourmockingbird.com/
As Joan Rivers might have said, can we talk? We need to talk, says Bryan...
https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenso..._injustice
who says "I don't think we're free in America"
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/02/i-do...stevenson/
Aiming to confront and reclaim that history, the Equal Justice Initiative, led by civil rights attorney and author Bryan Stevenson, launched its “Lynching in America” initiative, a years-long effort to compile the most comprehensive record of racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The project includes a detailed report of more than 4,000 lynchings in 12 states in the South, including 800 that were previously unreported, as well as plans for a museum in Montgomery, and an effort to erect markers in the places where lynchings took place.
That the effort has so often met the resistance of local officials is, to Stevenson, just another sign of how urgently this public conversation is needed, as is an honest assessment of the ways in which the racism of the past endures today. Earlier this year, vandals once again shot up a sign marking the site in Mississippi where in 1955 Emmett Till’s brutalized body was found. In December, President Obama signed a reauthorization of the Emmett Till Act, which directs the DOJ and FBI to continue the investigation of cold civil rights-era hate crimes.
To Stevenson and those fighting to promote greater awareness of the nation’s racial history, this is hardly about history alone. Since the November election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented 1,094 hate incidents across the country. But as manifestations of the country’s persistent racism have multiplied, so have attempts to discount it. Shortly after the election, The Intercept spoke with Stevenson about America’s failure to come to terms with its racist past — and therefore its present......