I STILL Have That Dream

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

The time is always right to do what is right.

We’ve learned to fly the air like birds. 

We’ve learned to swim the seas like fish. 

And yet we haven’t learned to walk the earth like 

brothers and sisters.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

No, violence is not the way. Hate is not the way. Bitterness is not the way. We must stand up with love in our hearts, with a lack of bitterness and yet a determination to protest courageously for justice and freedom in this land.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

 

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

 

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the  narrow confines of his  individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

 

So even though we face difficulties of 

today and tomorrow, 

I still have a dream.

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: Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer was a highly publicized campaign in the Deep South to register Black people to vote during the summer of 1964. Thousands of civil rights activists, many of them white college students from the North, descended on Mississippi and other Southern states that summer to put an end to the long-time political disenfranchisement of African Americans in the region. Although Black men had won the right to vote in 1870, thanks to the 15th Amendment, for the next 100 years many were unable to exercise that right.

White local and state officials systematically kept Black people from voting through formal methods, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and through cruder methods of fear and intimidation, which included beatings and lynchings.

The inability to vote was just one of many problems Black people encountered in the racist South, but the civil-rights officials who decided to zero in on voter registration understood its crucial significance; so did the white supremacists. An African American voting bloc would be able to effect social and political change, especially in the South with its large African American population.

Freedom Summer marked the climax of intensive voter-registration activities in the South that had started in 1961. Organizers chose to focus their efforts on Mississippi because of the state's particularly dismal voting-rights record: in 1962 only 6.7% of African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote, the lowest in the nation.

The Freedom Summer campaign was organized by a coalition called the Mississippi Council of Federated Organizations, which was led by the Congress of Racial Equality--CORE--and included the NAACP, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--SNCC.

By mobilizing volunteer white college students from the North to join them, the coalition scored a major public relations coup as hundreds of reporters came to Mississippi from around the country to cover the voter-registration campaign.

The organization of the Mississippi Freedom Party--MFDP--was a major focus of the summer program. More than 80,000 Mississippians joined the new party, which elected a slate of sixty-eight delegates to the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City. The MFDP delegation challenged the seating of the delegates representing Mississippi's all white Democratic Party.

While the effort failed, it drew national attention, particularly through the dramatic televised appeal of MFDP delegate Fannie Lou Hamer. The MFDP challenge also led to a ban on racially discriminatory delegations at future conventions.

Freedom Summer officials also established 30 "Freedom Schools" in towns throughout Mississippi to address the racial inequalities in that state's educational system. Mississippi's Black schools were invariably poorly funded, and teachers had to use hand-me-down textbooks that offered a racist slant on American history.

Many of the white college students were assigned to teach in these schools, whose curriculum included Black history, the philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement, and leadership development in addition to remedial instruction in reading and arithmetic.

Freedom Schools had hoped to draw at least 1000 students that first summer and ended up with 3000. Schools became a model for future social programs like Head Start, as well as alternative educational institutions.

Freedom Summer activists faced threats and harassment throughout the campaign, not only from white supremacist groups, but from local residents and police. Freedom School buildings and the volunteers' homes were frequent targets; 37 Black churches and 30 Black homes and businesses were firebombed or burned during the summer of 1964; and the cases often went unsolved.

More than 1000 black and white volunteers were arrested, and at least 80 were beaten by white mobs or racist police officers. But the summer's most infamous act of violence was the murder of three young civil rights workers, a black volunteer, James Chaney, and his white coworkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

On June 21, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner set out to investigate a church bombing near Philadelphia, Mississippi, but were arrested that afternoon and held for several hours on alleged traffic violations. Their release from jail was the last time they were seen alive before their badly decomposed bodies were discovered under a nearby dam six weeks later. Goodman and Schwerner had died from single gunshot wounds to the chest, and Chaney, the only African American in the trio, from a savage beating.

The murders made headlines all over the country and provoked an outpouring of national support for the Civil Rights Movement. But many black volunteers realized that because two of the victims were white, these murders were attracting much more attention than previous attacks in which the victims had been black, and this added to the growing resentment they had begun to feel towards the white volunteers.

There was also growing dissension among the ranks over charges of assumed white elitism. Black volunteers complained that whites seemed to think they had a natural claim on leadership roles, and that they treated the rural Black people as though they were ignorant. There was also increasing hostility from both Black and white workers over the interracial romances that developed the summer. Meanwhile, women volunteers of both races were charging both the Black and white men with sexist behavior.

But despite the internal divisions, Freedom Summer left a positive legacy. The well-publicized voter registration drives brought national attention to the subject of black disenfranchisement, and this eventually led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, federal legislation that, among other things, outlawed the tactics Southern states had used to prevent blacks from voting.

Freedom Summer also instilled among African Americans a new consciousness and a new confidence in political action. As Fannie Lou Hamer later said, "Before the 1964 project there were people that wanted change, but they hadn't dared to come out. After 1964 people began moving. To me it's one of the greatest things that ever happened in Mississippi."

Repost: Black History Month: Mildred and Richard Loving

Nearly sixty years ago it wasn't same-sex marriage, it was interracial marriage.

Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Perry Loving were married in June of 1958 in the District of Columbia; they'd gotten married in DC because they couldn't get married in Virginia due to that state's Racial Integrity Act—a law banning marriages between any white person and any non-white person.

Oh yeah, Mildred was a Black woman; Richard was a white man.

After marrying, they returned to Carolina County, Virginia and were charged with violating the ban. Mildred and Richard Loving were asleep in their own bed in their own house when it was invaded by police officers who hoped to find them having sex—an altogether different crime.

Mildred Loving pointed to the marriage certificate on the wall in their bedroom. The police, rather than seeing they weren't committing some kind of interracial sex crime, used the certificate as evidence for a criminal charge since it showed they had been married in another state.

The Lovings were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified "miscegenation"—a mixture of the races especially through marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race –as a felony punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia.

The Lovings were being run out of town because of who they loved. Sound familiar? The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, said:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Using God as a way to keep people from marrying? Sound familiar now? Mildred and Richard Loving moved to the District of Columbia, and in November of 1963 the ACLU filed a motion to vacate the judgement and set aside the sentence because it ran counter to the 14th Amendment—equal protection under the law.

The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court and, in October of 1964, after their motion was still undecided, the Lovings began a class action suit in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In early 1965, the three-judge district court decided to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Virginia Supreme Court Justice Harry Carrico wrote an opinion for the court upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the criminal convictions. Carrico said the 14th Amendment didn't apply to the Lovings case because both the white and the non-white spouse were punished equally for the "crime" of "miscegenation."

But then the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and Black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. In its decision, the court wrote: 

“Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings. 

Richard Loving died in a car accident eight years later.

On June 12, 2007, Mildred Loving issued a rare public statement, which commented on same-sex marriage, prepared for delivery on the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision of the US Supreme Court., saying in part:

“Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Mildred Loving died of pneumonia on May 2, 2008. Her daughter, Peggy Fortune, told the AP:

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble—and believed in love."

Part of the Washington Post’s obituary read:

“A modest homemaker, Loving never thought she had done anything extraordinary. ‘It wasn't my doing,’ Loving told the AP in a rare interview a year ago. ‘It was God's work.’"

It was just loving.

Repost: Black History Month: Strange Fruit

One of the first political songs ever written. It's been called a declaration of war. The beginning of the Civil Rights movement. One of the ten songs that changed the world.

Billie Holiday Strange Fruit

Repost: I "Still" Have That Dream

 Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

 

The time is always right to do what is right.

 

We’ve learned to fly the air like birds. 

We’ve learned to swim the seas like fish. 

And yet we haven’t learned to walk the earth like 

brothers and sisters.

 

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

No, violence is not the way. Hate is not the way. Bitterness is not the way. We must stand up with love in our hearts, with a lack of bitterness and yet a determination to protest courageously for justice and freedom in this land.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Faith is taking the first step 

even when you don't see the whole staircase.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

 

An individual has not started living 

until he can rise above the  

narrow confines of his  

individualistic concerns 

to the broader concerns

of all humanity.

 

So even though we face difficulties of 

today and tomorrow, 

I still have a dream.

I Still Have That Dream

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

 

The time is always right to do what is right.

 

We’ve learned to fly the air like birds. 

We’ve learned to swim the seas like fish. 

And yet we haven’t learned to walk the earth like 

brothers and sisters.

 

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

No, violence is not the way. Hate is not the way. Bitterness is not the way. We must stand up with love in our hearts, with a lack of bitterness and yet a determination to protest courageously for justice and freedom in this land.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 

'What are you doing for others?'

 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Faith is taking the first step 

even when you don't see the whole staircase.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

 

An individual has not started living 

until he can rise above the  

narrow confines of his  

individualistic concerns 

to the broader concerns

of all humanity.

 

So even though we face difficulties of 

today and tomorrow, 

I still have a dream.

John Lewis: His Final Words

Shortly before he passed, John Lewis wrote this essay, and asked that it be published on the day of his funeral:

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, though decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

His march goes on ….

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Don't Forget John Lewis Also Stood For LGBTQ+ Equality

While heading to the Georgia State Capitol, where his body would lie in state, the funeral procession carrying the body of John Lewis made several quick, but poignant stops.

My favorite was when the hearse stopped in the intersection of 10th Street and Piedmont and sat surrounded on four sides by the LGBTQ Pride flag crosswalks as those gathered to pay tribute to Lewis’s allyship with our community and his vocal support of LGBTQ rights throughout his political career.

John Lewis was one of the first Democrats, and first African American, to officially support same-sex marriage when he came out in favor of equality over twenty years ago; fifteen years before the Supreme Court legalized the unions. Lewis lobbied for the Human Rights Campaign during the ’90s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ era, and was one of two Georgia lawmakers who refused to sign the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Lewis also stood out against Georgia’s ban on gay adoption.

He compared the struggle for the equal treatment of LGBTQ people to his work on the front lines of the civil rights movement in an October 2003 Boston Globe editorial:

“We cannot keep turning our backs on gay and lesbian Americans. I have fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation. I’ve heard the reasons for opposing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Cut through the distractions, and they stink of the same fear, hatred, and intolerance I have known in racism and in bigotry. Some say let’s choose another route and give gay folks some legal rights but call it something other than marriage. We have been down that road before in this country. Separate is not equal. The rights to liberty and happiness belong to each of us and on the same terms, without regard to either skin color or sexual orientation. Some say they are uncomfortable with the thought of gays and lesbians marrying. But our rights as Americans do not depend on the approval of others. Our rights depend on us being Americans.”

Remember; John Lewis thought equality belonged to everyone in this country, regardless of race, creed, color or sexual orientation of gender identity, and he was fighting our battle long before a lot of us even got here.

RIP.

h/t Towleroad

ISBL Asshat of the Week: Will Dismukes

Down there in Alabama, the Democratic Party, and some in the GOP, are calling for state Representative Will Dismukes to step down after he posted on social media that he had a “great time” honoring Confederate Army General and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest over the weekend.

The very weekend John Lewis was being honored for his decades of service and his fight for Civil Rights following his death last week.

Dismukes posted on Facebook that he had a “great time” celebrating a Klan Leader’s birthday and said he was honored to give the invocation for the festivities:

“Always a great time and some sure good enough eating!!”

Dismukes is a chaplain for the Prattville Dragoons, a chapter of the Sons of the Confederacy whose Mission Statement reads:

“To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we will commit the vindication of the cause for which we fought. To your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier’s good name, the guardianship of his history, the emulation of his virtues, the perpetuation of those principles which he loved and which you love also, and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.”

Dismukes took the post down by Monday and said that the photo and posting “was in no way glorifying the Klan or disrespecting” John Lewis” who was being celebrated in Alabama over the weekend.

Huh; two celebrations you can attend in Alabama as a representative of the people. One is the celebration of the birthday of a Klan leader and the other is a memorial to the life of a Civil Rights activist.

And Dismukes chose to celebrate a racist which makes him the ISBL Asshat of the Week.

Tuesday Thought #2

I Still Have His Dream

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

The time is always right to do what is right.

We’ve learned to fly the air like birds. 

We’ve learned to swim the seas like fish. 

And yet we haven’t learned to walk the earth like 

brothers and sisters.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

No, violence is not the way. Hate is not the way. Bitterness is not the way. We must stand up with love in our hearts, with a lack of bitterness and yet a determination to protest courageously for justice and freedom in this land.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 

'What are you doing for others?

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

An individual has not started living 

until he can rise above the  

narrow confines of his  

individualistic concerns 

to the broader concerns

of all humanity.

So even though we face difficulties of 

today and tomorrow, 

I still have a dream.

Why We Kneel: John Crawford III

In 2014, John Crawford III was at an Ohio Wal-Mart, buying whatever one buys at that store, when he happened upon a pellet gun.

On surveillance video, Crawford is seen holding the gun, which was not packaged, while talking on his cell phone, allegedly to the mother of his two children; perhaps was asking if he could buy it …

At the same time, another man, Ronald Ritchie, was on his cellphone, calling 911 to say that that there “was a gentleman walking around with a gun in the store” and that “he’s like pointing it at people” and “waving it back and forth.”

The video shows Crawford continuing through the store, looking at this and that, and appearing to still be on his phone. The gun is pointed at the ground and several people pass him by, seemingly unconcerned.

Then, police enter the frame to his side and Crawford turns his head, falls to the ground, scrambles in the other direction, then turns back around before ultimately falling again to the ground.

It’s unclear whether he dropped the gun before being shot or after. What is sure is that he was killed for being a black man in a Wal-Mart with a BB gun.

Now, I get it that he was a man with a gun, I get it that police officers have to be cautious, and  I get it that they were responding to a call from Ronald Ritchie saying Crawford was waving the gun around and pointing it at people.

The trouble is, once the surveillance footage was released, Ronald Ritchie changed his story and said Crawford never pointed the gun at anybody.

Too late, though, because James Crawford III was shot to death, because a white man feared the image of a black man with a gun; and police officers didn’t take two seconds to ascertain what kind of gun Crawford had and what he was doing with it.

And, to be clear, I know, I know, that, had it been me, or any other white guy, this would have ended quite differently.

Still, there was a trial, like there was a trial in the Emmett Till murder. After a grand jury watched hours of video, listened to audio recording and heard the testimony from 18 witnesses, they decided, after three days. that the officers were justified in the shooting.

Ronald Ritchie is 2018’s Carolyn Bryant and James Crawford III is 2018’s Emmett Till.

Two black men were murdered after being wrongfully accused by white people.

It isn’t over; I don’t know if it will ever be over, but I do know that we all need to speak up when we see racists in action, when we hear racists in action, when we realize that a racist is sitting in the Oval Office.