Repost: Black History Month: Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you that I would have loved to have known her; that she is an inspiration to me, to stand up....or sit down....when you want to make a change.

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her childhood brought her early experiences with racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. After her parents separated, Rosa's mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards, on their farm. Both her grandparents were former slaves and strong advocates for racial equality.

In one experience, Rosa's grandfather stood in front of their house with a shotgun while Ku Klux Klan members marched down the street. The city of Pine Level, Alabama had a new school building and bus transportation for white students while African American students walked to a one-room schoolhouse, often lacking desks and adequate school supplies. Rosa knew that, merely because of the color of her skin, she would not be treated equally.

In 1929, while in the eleventh grade, Rosa left school to care for her sick grandmother in Pine Level. She never returned to school but instead got a job at a shirt factory in Montgomery. In 1932, she married a barber named Raymond Parks who was an active member of the NAACP and with his support, Rosa finished her high school degree in 1933 and she, herself, soon became actively involved in civil rights issues.

Rosa Parks joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, and served as the secretary to the president, E.D. Nixon until 1957.

Now, in those days, not so very long ago, in Montgomery, Alabama, city code required that all public transportation be segregated, and that all bus drivers be given "powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions" of the code.

While operating a bus, drivers were required to provide "separate but equal"—there's that old chestnut again—accommodation for white and Black passengers by assigning seats. This was accomplished with a line, an actual sign, roughly in the middle of the bus separating white passengers in the front and African Americans in the back.

But African Americans didn't just have to ride in the back. When they got on the bus, they would pay their fare, then get off the bus, walk to the back and board the bus again. No one wanted “colored” people walking in between the white people.

If the seats in the front of the bus filled up, and more white passengers got on, the bus driver would simply move the sign back, separating Black and white passengers, and ask Black passengers to give up their seats so the whites could sit down.

On December 1, 1955, after a long day working at the Montgomery Fair department store, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home. She got on, paid her fare, got off, walked to the back, got on again, and found a seat in the first of several rows designated for "colored" passengers.

Though the city's bus ordinance did give drivers the authority to assign seats, it didn't specifically give them the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone regardless of color. However, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the custom of requiring Black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers when no other seats were available. If the Black passenger protested, the bus driver had the authority to refuse service and could call the police to have them removed.

As the bus Rosa was riding continued on its route, it began to fill with white passengers. Eventually, the bus was full and the driver noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. This apparently was unacceptable. He stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row and asked the four Black passengers in that row to give up their seats. Three complied, but Rosa refused. She stayed seated.

The driver demanded, "Why don't you stand up?"

Rosa replied, "I don't think I should have to stand up."

Can I get a You Go, Girl.

The driver called the police, who arrested Rosa at the scene and charged her with violation of Chapter 6, section 11 of the Montgomery City code. She was taken to police headquarters where later that night she was released on bail. On December 8, Rosa faced trial and in a thirty-minute hearing was found guilty of violating a local ordinance. She was fined ten dollars, plus a four-dollar court fee.

The very evening she was arrested, E.D. Nixon, head of the local chapter of the NAACP, began to organize a boycott of Montgomery's city buses. Ads were placed in local papers and handbills were printed and distributed in Black neighborhoods. Members of the African American community were asked to stay off the buses Monday, December 5th in protest of Rosa's arrest. People were encouraged to stay home from work or school, take a cab or walk to work. With most of the African American community not riding the bus, organizers believed a longer boycott might be successful.

On Monday, December 5, 1955, a group of African-American community leaders gathered at Mt. Zion Church to discuss strategies. They determined that the effort required a new organization and strong leadership. They formed the "Montgomery Improvement Association"--the MIA--and elected Montgomery newcomer Dr. Martin Luther King, as their first president.

The boycott of December 5th was a success, and so it was continued. Some African-Americans carpooled; others rode in African American-operated cabs. But most of the estimated 40,000 African American commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles to get to work.

Public buses sat idle for months, severely crippling the transit company's finances. But the boycott faced strong resistance, with some segregationists retaliating with violence. Black churches were burned and both Martin Luther King and E.D. Nixon's homes were attacked. Other attempts were made to end the boycott as well. The taxi system used by the African American community to help people get around had its insurance canceled. Other Black people were arrested for violating an old law prohibiting boycotts.

See, the Black folks weren't allowed to protest, or have an opinion, or stay seated.

But the African American community also took action. Under the Brown v. Board of Education decision that said "separate but equal" policies had no place in public education, a black legal team took the issue of segregation on public transit systems to federal court.

In June of 1956, the court declared Alabama's racial segregation laws for public transit unconstitutional. The city appealed and on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling. With the transit company and downtown businesses suffering economic loss and the legal system ruling against them, the city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses.

The combination of legal action, backed by the unrelenting determination of the African American community made the 382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history.

That's right, people. The boycott lasted over a year!

Although she was now a symbol for the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks suffered as a result. She lost her job at the department store and her husband lost his after his boss forbade him to discuss his wife or their legal case. They were unable to find work and eventually left Montgomery.

Rosa Parks moved her family—her husband and mother—to Detroit, where she made a new life for herself, working as a secretary and receptionists in U.S. Representative John Conyer's congressional office. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In 1987, at age seventy-four, Rosa Parks, along with life-long friend Elaine Eason Steele, founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The institute runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, introducing young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country.

In 1992, she published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography recounting her life in the segregated South. In 1995, her memoirs, Quiet Strength, focused on the role religious faith played in her life.

Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime including the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP's highest award. She also received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award. On September 9, 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch. The next year, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch. In 1999, Time magazine named Rosa Parks one of the 20 most influential people of the twentieth century.

On October 24, 2005, at the age of ninety-two, Rosa Parks quietly died in her apartment. She had been diagnosed the previous year with progressive dementia. Her death was marked by several memorial services, among them lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C. where an estimated 50,000 people viewed her casket. Rosa was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel's mausoleum. Shortly after her death the chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.

All of that because she wouldn't give up her seat. People used to say that Rosa wouldn't get up because she'd worked all day and was tired but she, herself, said she wasn't physically tired, she was just "tired of giving in."

I know that feeling all too well.

Repost: Black History Month: Ida B. Wells-Barnett

An uncompromising woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, Ida's parents were able to support their seven children after the war because her mother and father were skilled workers—as a cook and carpenter. When Ida was fourteen, however, Yellow Fever killed her parents and youngest siblings, and Ida took it upon herself to keep the family together. She took a job as a teacher, working to continue her own education at nearby Rust College.

It was in Memphis, where Ida moved to live with aunt and younger sisters, that she first began to fight—literally—for racial and gender justice. In 1884 the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company asked Ida to give up her seat to a white man—she was ordered into the smoking, or "Jim Crow," car.—and she told the man …

“I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”

Ida Wells was forcefully removed from the train as the white passengers applauded.

Back home in Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad and won her case in the local circuit courts. But the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.

Her suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company gave rise to a new career as a journalist. Many newspapers wanted to hear the story of the 25-year-old schoolteacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.

In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper owned by Rev. R. Nightingale—the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as a schoolteacher.

In 1892 three of her friends—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—were  lynched because their grocery store, People's Grocery Company, had taken away customers from competing white business. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all of them.

Ida Wells  wrote in The Free Speech:

“The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Many people took Wells' advice and left town; others in the Black community organized a boycott of white-owned businesses to try and stem the threat, the terror, of lynchings. Ida's newspaper office was destroyed as a result of her stories of the murder of her three friends and she opted to leave Memphis for Chicago, where she continued her blistering attacks on Southern injustices, especially through investigation to expose the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.

In Chicago, she developed numerous African American women’s organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a tireless worker for women's right to vote and marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers, Attorney F. L. Barnett, and announced she would retire to the privacy of her home.. She didn’t stay retired for long; she continued to write and to organize, and in 1906 she, along with W. E.B. DuBois and others, further the Niagara Movement—a civil rights organization that fought against racial segregation and disenfranchisement for African Americans—and she was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909.

As late as 1930, disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, making her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States.

A year later, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

I wonder what she might have said about a woman running for president in 2008, about a Black man becoming president in 2008 and I like to think she was smiling and saying:

"I told you so."

Repost: Black History Month: Separate But Equal

Plessy vs. Ferguson

Some sixty-three years before Rosa Parks, on June 7, 1892, a 30-year-old colored shoemaker named Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was only one-eighths black and seven-eighths white, but under Louisiana law, he was considered black and therefore required to sit in the "Colored" car.

One drop of "colored" blood made you "colored."

Plessy went to court and argued, in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. He was found guilty of refusing to leave the "white" car.

Homer Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which upheld Ferguson's decision. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard Plessy's case and found him guilty once again.

The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, showed incredible foresight when he wrote:

"Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law...In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case...The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution."

Over time, the words of Justice Harlan rang true. The Plessy decision set the precedent that "separate" facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were "equal." The "separate but equal" doctrine was quickly extended to cover many areas of public life, such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. Not until 1954, in the equally important Brown v. Board of Education decision, would the "separate but equal" doctrine be struck down.

With the blessing of the Supreme Court, the floodgates opened in the years following the Plessy decision, almost every former Confederate state enacted "separate but equal" laws that merely gave the force of law to what had become a fact of life; slavery under a new name.

But who was Jim Crow?

It's thought that he was a slave from Cincinnati, Ohio; others say he was from Charleston, South Carolina. Another faction holds that Jim Crow derived from old man Crow, the slaveholder. A final group says that the Crow came from the simile, black as a crow. Whatever the case, by 1838, the term was wedged into the language as a synonym for Negro.

Thus, "Jim Crow laws" meant Negro laws.

Repost: Black History Month: Medgar Evers

Civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, was born in Decatur, Mississippi, in 1925. At age eighteen he left Mississippi and enlisted in the United States Army, where he fought in both France and Germany during World War II before receiving an honorable discharge in 1946.

In 1948, he entered Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year, Evers married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley; they later had three children: Darrell, Reena, and James. After graduating in 1952, Evers moved his family to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he worked as an insurance salesman.

In 1954, the year of the momentous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which should have ended segregation of schools, Medgar quit the insurance business; he applied for, and was denied, admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate Mississippi’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of the NAACP’s national office.

Medgar Evers moved to Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As such, he recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of white-owned companies that practiced discrimination; he worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who had allegedly been killed for talking to a white woman.

As early as 1955, Evers’ activism made him the most visible civil rights leader in Mississippi. As a result, he and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions over the years, including a firebombing of their house in May 1963. Then, on June 12, 1963, at 12:40 a.m., Medgar Evers was shot in the back, in the driveway of his home, in Jackson.

He died less than a hour later at a nearby hospital.

A police and FBI investigation of the murder soon had a suspect--Byron De La Beckwith, a white segregationist and founding member of Mississippi's White Citizens Council. Despite substantial evidence against him--a rifle found near the scene was registered to Beckwith, had his fingerprints on the scope, and witnesses placed him in the area—Beckwith denied shooting Evers. He maintained that the gun had been stolen, and produced several witnesses to testify that he was elsewhere on the night of the murder.

Two trials followed; Beckwith received the support of some of Mississippi's most prominent citizens; then-Governor Ross Barnett appeared at Beckwith's first trial to shake hands with him in full view of the jury. In 1964, Beckwith was set free after two all-white juries deadlocked.
After the second trial, Myrlie Evers moved with her children to California, where she earned a degree from Pomona College and was later named to the Los Angeles Commission of Public Works. Convinced that her husband's killer had not been brought to justice, she continued to search for new evidence in the case.

In 1989, the question of Beckwith's guilt was again raised when a Jackson newspaper published accounts of files from the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an organization that helped the maintenance of segregation. The accounts showed that the commission helped Beckwith's lawyers screen potential jurors, but a review by the Hinds County District Attorney's office found no evidence of jury tampering. The DA's office did locate a number of new witnesses, including several individuals who would testify that Beckwith bragged about the murder.

In December 1990, Beckwith was once again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. After a number of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of a third trial in April 1993. Ten months later, testimony began before a racially mixed jury of eight blacks and four whites. In February 1994, nearly 31 years after Evers' death, Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in January 2001 at the age of 80.

It took thirty years for justice to be served. That is unconscionable. 

Repost: Black History Month: The Civil War

The Dred Scott Case

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford--a victory to supporters of slavery; it also fueled the fires of northern abolitionists.

During the 1830s, the owner of a slave named Dred Scott had taken him from Missouri—a slave state--to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois, where slavery was against the law, according to the Missouri Compromise. Once returned to Missouri, Scot sued for his freedom on the idea that since he’d been taken to a free state he was now free.

The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was a slave and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.
The verdict, in effect, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

The South rejoiced; antislavery northerners were furious.

____________________

John Brown’s Raid

John Brown was a restless man; he struggled throughout life trying to support his family, moving from place to place in an effort to do so. He had assisted the Underground Railroad in Missouri, and fought in battles between pro– and anti–slavery forces in Kansas in the 1850s. Still, he was anxious to strike a more extreme blow for the cause.

During the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led less than 50 men in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown wanted to obtain enough ammunition to lead a larger operation against Virginia’s slaveholders. Brown’s men, including several blacks, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was tried for his crimes;; his trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859

__________________

Civil War and Emancipation

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts between the North and South erupted into civil war; eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

President Abraham Lincoln, although vocally anti-slavery, whose mere election as America’s first Republican President was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the south to secede, did not want the Civil War to be seen as a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln simply wanted to preserve the Union; and he knew that few people even in the North would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

In the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer.

After the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and then, on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure. He did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists. But, by freeing 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Some 186,000 black soldiers--nearly all of them former, or runaway, slaves--would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

_________________

The Post–Slavery South

Though the Civil War gave over 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, but the status of freed slaves in the south was in flux. White southerners eventually reestablished civil authority, and enacted a series of laws known as the “black codes,” designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force.

Impatient with the leniency shown former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination, so–called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This essentially put the South under martial law, and the following year the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves.

Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

The growing influence of former slaves angered many white southerners, who felt control slipping away. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise blacks by using voter fraud, intimidation and, finally, violence .

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks were left with little improvement in their economic and social status; the political gains they had made oftentimes eradicated by white supremacist forces.

Repost: Black History Month: Frederick Douglass

As an infant, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was separated from his slave mother—he never knew his white father—and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read and when her husband discovered this he ordered his wife to stop, declaring that learning would make him unfit for slavery. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

In 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a laborer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass decided to write his autobiography in 1845; it was revised several times over the years and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Yet he was still considered a runaway slave and to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglass left America for a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union’s victory Douglass dedicated himself to securing his community’s rights to this new freedom. He strongly supported the 14^th Amendment, which granted Black people citizenship, but he realized that this new citizenship status needed to be protected by suffrage. He was a longtime supporter of women’s rights, but realizing a universal suffrage amendment would fail under Reconstruction politics, Douglass then supported Black male suffrage with the idea that Black men could help women secure the right to vote later.

Frederick Douglass held numerous government appointments; he was the first Black U.S. marshal in 1877 when he was appointed to that post for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford B. Hayes; in 1881 President Garfield appointed him to the high-paying position of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia; President Harrison named Douglass  the U.S. minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti in 1882.

During the later years of his life, Douglass remained committed to social justice and the African American community. Douglass was the most photographed American man in the 19th century and used those pictures as deliberate contradictions to the visual stereotypes of Black men and women at that time, which often exaggerated their facial features, skin color, and physical bodies and demeaned their intelligence. He served on Howard University’s board of trustees from 1871 to 1895.

Frederick Douglass died in his Cedar Hill home on February 20, 1895; a remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president to icon.

Kathy Schwab Wants To Be A "Straights Only" Marriage Licensor

The other day I was talking to my boss and told him that there are parts of the job that I don’t like; and parts that I like a lot. And so, I asked if there was a way I could just do part of my job and then skip others.

He fired me. Okay, so I kid about that last part, but doesn’t that seem like a ridiculous thing to do, requesting to be allowed to stop performing certain parts of your job?

Then please to explain about these court clerks, county clerks, deputy clerks, mall clerks … okay, maybe not mall clerks … who are saying that, in light of that pesky marriage equality ruling by SCOTUS, they only want to do part of the job for which they were hired and paid, and still collect the same amount of money.

Sure, some people aren’t playing, like Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear, who told his clerks to follow the law or quit, while others, like Texas Governor Greg Abbott had his attorney general encourage the state's clerks to assert their "religious freedom" rights and refuse.

What to do? Well, not this …up in North Dakota they’ve opted for a “separate but equal” choice, where some clerks will help gays and some won’t because God.

In North Dakota, the job of issuing marriage licenses belongs to elected … by the people, all of the people … county recorders, and in Stark County that person is one Kathy Schwab.

Now, Kathy don’t like the idea of giving out gay marriage licenses so she has asked Stark County State's Attorney, Tom Henning, to allow her to appoint a Gay Marriage License Person who will assist The Gays.

Yeah, they have to have a separate person give out licenses to same-sex couples because Kathy Schwab’s religious beliefs apparently supersede the laws of the state and the job for which she is paid.

And that’s what happened. The Stark County Commission voted to allow the deputy recorder, Kim Kaslan, to be the Gay Marriage License source in Stark County, which means that Kathy Schwab will be working less amend still earning the same pay, while Kim Kaslan will do more work — licensing all couples and same-sex couples — and not being paid more.

Note to North Dakota: vote Kathy Schwab out of her job because she refuses to work for all of the people of your state because, when Kathy Schwab took office she took this oath as well:

"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of North Dakota, and I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of County Recorder to the best of my ability, so help me God."

I guess the part that said she doesn’t have to uphold the US Constitution if she thinks the Baby Jeebus won’t like it was left out of her oath.

I cannot help but think this is akin to separate drinking fountains — one for whites, one for blacks — or separate places to sit on the bus, or in the movie theaters or the lunch counters. I mean, the water in the drinking fountain is all the same, right, so who gets hurt saying blacks cannot use the white faucet? And who gets hurt saying the blacks cannot sit anywhere on the bus? Who gets hurt saying The Gays have to wait for their special license source before they can get a marriage license?

It hurts all of us because it’s separate but equal and if we don’t know by now that that doesn’t work, Goddess help us all.

NCRM

How Would You Like Your Marriage Voided?

I know firsthand what a feeling it was to go from being “partnered’ to being married; it’s really a subtle difference, maybe a change in speech — This is my husband versus This is my partner — but it felt huge.

Now, imagine that you’ve married your partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, significant other, and you’re feeling that joy, that sense of newness, that sense of equality, only to have the rug yanked out from under when a Circuit Court decides that marriages bans against the gays are just fine.

That’s what happened when the 6th Circuit Court recently ruled that marriage bans are legal and, somehow, just. And since that ruling the state of Michigan is trying to declare that the 300 same-sex couples who received licenses last March, and were subsequently legally married in the state, are now no longer husband-and-husband or wife-and-wife.

How’s that for equality?

The weddings were performed by county clerks March 22, a day after U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman struck down Michigan's same-sex marriage ban; that same day the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati issued a stay on those marriages, but it came after those 300 couples had legally completed the steps to be married.

Now, Michigan Governor, and ISBL Asshat winner, Rick Snyder would like those marriages voided since the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Michigan's ban on same-sex marriage, along with bans in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

You can’t get married; you can get married; now your marriage is void. It never existed. You don’t exist as a married couple. Ain’t that America?

Lawyers for the governor, and for the state of Michigan, are saying that "from a legal standpoint, because the marriages rested solely on the district court's erroneous decision, which has now been reversed, it is as if the marriages never existed.”

I mean, bad enough that we are being treated like second-class citizens; bad enough that we are expected to do as everyone else in this country is supposed to do, work, pay taxes, be responsible citizens, vote, and yet we do not have the same rights as those other citizens; bad enough. But to allow us the opportunity to get married when the law is changed, and then to change it back and sue to have our marriages declared void?

That is not America; that cannot happen. These cases need to go before the Supreme Court and have marriage equality declared the law of land everywhere in this country.

Case closed.

Appeals ruling voids300 gay marriages, Michigan argues

North Carolina: Six Judges Resign Over Marriage Equality and the Law

It was just a few years ago that the people — at least some of the people, a bigoted majority — of North Carolina voted to add a ban on same-sex marriage to the state Constitution, and a lot has changed since then; except for the bigoted people part.

Last month, when the Fourth circuit Court ruled that Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, and there struck down, it also included the bans on marriage in West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. And while Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina accepted the ruling, South Carolina’s asshat Governor Nikki Haley and its asshat Attorney General Alan Wilson, have vowed to stand in the way of equality for as long as it takes to keep South Carolina in the Dark Ages.

Okay, rant about South Carolina over, because this is a rant about judges in North Carolina.

Since same-sex marriage was legalized in the state on October 10 six North Carolina judges have resigned from their benches because they do not want to go against their Christian faith and conduct wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.

I say, Good bye! Hope you find work wherever Bigoted ex-judges find work. Surely there’s a website for that … HatfeulMagistrates.com?

Those judges, those, and let us not forget this part, public servant are John Kallam Jr., Gilbert Breedlove,  Bill Stevenson, Tommy Holland, Gayle Myrick and Jeff Powell; they say they are waiting on God to give them direction in starting the next phases of their lives.

I think God is thinking, You’ve chosen your direction, now live with it.

Bill Stevenson is the latest judge to have publicly stepped down from his position, rather than marry a gay couple:

"It was something I had to do out of conscience. I felt like to perform same-sex unions would be in violation of the Lord's commands, so I couldn't do that."

Now he is out of a job that paid him $50,000 a year to uphold the law, all of the laws, in his state. And, again, goodbye, and don’t let the door hit you where the Good Lord split you.

Here’s the deal: as a judge your are a public servant, elected, or appointed, to, ahem, serve the public; and that means all of the public, not just the parts of the public you agree with, or even like. Your job was to put your own personal bias out of the way and do your job.

You cannot do that? Then go. I hear the Piggly Wiggly is looking for bag boys.

Former judge, since he cannot do his job the way it was intended, Tommy Holland, who is also Baptist, said he knew he had to resign as soon as he got a memo from the state saying that magistrates would have to honor the new marriage law no matter what their beliefs on same-sex marriage were:

"When the federal judges ruled that gay marriage was legal and North Carolina honors that, and part of a magistrate's job is to perform marriage ceremonies, I knew I couldn't honor that law. It's against my belief. It's against what the Bible says … I was raised a Southern Baptist. God has always taken care of me."

God; as I said, She’s up in heaven just shaking her head, because even She knows that the United States is not now, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation; even She knows we have a Separation of Church and State in this country, which means you, as judges, should keep your church out of the state’s business.

But, since you can’t do that, can you ride a bike? Maybe you can deliver pages, though I worry that your black robes will get caught in the gears. 

And former judge Gayle Myric echoed the hateful sentiment when she resigned:

"I believe that marriage was ordained by God to be between a man and a woman. For me to do what the state said I had to do, under penalty of law, I would have to go against my convictions, and I was not willing to do that. I want to honor what the Word says."

Um, most folks believe God’s word is Love, Gayle, but I guess you think God’s word is Hate the Fags. I picture you trading your black robe for a white one, and your gavel for a torch.

Now, the Six Looney Judges are but a small portion of the 670 county magistrates that serve in North Carolina, and other, so-called, Christian judges who haven't resigned have indicated that they will simply not conduct the same-sex marriages as required by law, which could lead to their dismissal.

Good. Bye. If you cannot do the job for which you were elected, or appointed, to uphold the laws of North Carolina then you have zero business of the bench; unless it’s a park bench and you’re feeding the pigeons and looking through the help wanted section.

Of course, these wingnut judges have the support of wingnut politicians-mostly Republicans, of course; Republican state senator Phil Berger, and 27 other Republicans, have requested the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts to protect state officials who refuse to participate in gay marriages because of religious beliefs. Berger is said to be drafting a bill that will grant protections to state officials who refuse to either issue marriage licenses or conduct gay marriages, out of religious belief.

But, again, if we allow this handful of Bigot Judges to decide what laws they want to uphold and what laws they don’t then why have judges, or courts or laws at all? Why not just let the mayhem ensue?

Your job is the law; the law says marriage equality is legal.

Uphold the law, or get off the bench.

source

Wedding Week Repost: Equal Rights Aren't Special Rights

This first appeared on ISBL back in December 2008, and it reinfoirced the belief I had then, and the belief I have now, especially given that I am getting married this week, that, while some folks were all gung ho for Civil Unions, they were "less than."

Equal Rights Aren't Special Rights

This is a good day for gay marriage. Another step in the right direction, toward equality. 

After allowing civil unions, the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission has come out with a report that says Civil Unions don't work, that the only fair, equitable solution, is for New Jersey to join Massachusetts and Connecticut, in allowing gay men and women the right to marry. 

Marry. Say it with me. Marry! 

Because, as they say, it is still 'separate but equal,' this civil union business. It creates problems for gay couples, and gay couples with children regarding medical care and so on. 

A few years back, when we were still living in Miami, Carlos had appendicitis, and we had to rush him to the Mount Sinai on Miami Beach for surgery. Of course, he's in absolute pain and we have to admit him and fill out paper work and all that rot, but I found something interesting. 

They were asking him who to notify, in case of emergency. He pointed to me; the nurse asked if I was his brother, or another family member. I thought I knew where this was going and I tried to jump in before Carlos answered, but I was too late. 

He's my significant other, Carlos said. 

The nurse gave us a look, stared at the computer screen for a moment, and then smiled. I get to use the new form, she said. We have a category now for same-sex couples, to put down the contact person as a significant other, or spouse or partner. She told us they hadn't been able to do so in years past and it created difficulty for gay couples. 

Now, I could make decisions for Carlos if necessary. I could stay in the room with Carlos while he was hospitalized. i was allowed to wait in the Family Waiting Room when he had surgery and the doctor came out after the procedure to tell me Carlos was fine. 

I would have hated to be at Mount Sinai in 'years past' and been denied visitation because I wasn't family, been denied information because I wasn't family, denied being treated equally because I wasn't family. 

Of course, now we're in South Carolina and I don't know if that same generosity of spirit, that understanding of what makes a family, what makes a couple, exists here. But New Jersey is showing us that it can, and it should. 

I don't want to be treated differently than anyone else, I want to be treated the same.