Segregation

Alabama Joins The List

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Ah, who am I kidding? Alabama has always been on the list. But stories like this don’t give me much hope that it will be coming off the list of pariah states any time soon. Apparently, now, a “Christian” organisation known as Christian Identity Ministries is planning to hold a three-day, whites-only conference in Lamar County, AL.

According to this report from MSNBC:

A three-day whites-only religious conference — which will conclude with a flaming cross — in Lamar County, Alabama, has some residents upset at the racist implications while the minister complains that his freedom of speech is being violated.

The church espouses the belief that “The Anglo-Saxon-Keltic-Germanic-Scandinavian People are Israel”, which interestingly would seem to exclude the Israelites themselves, not to mention a certain rather crucial person called Jesus, and though the group insists that they harbour no ill-will or prejudicial thoughts against God’s darker-skinned outcasts, they explain their whites-only policy to the local CBS News affiliate on these grounds:

“We don’t have the facilities to accommodate other races and we have nothing not one bit of animosity no racism whatsoever,” said Pastor William J. Collier, Christian Identity Ministries.

I can sympathise. Who among us has not tried to organise a party or social event, and been forced to cancel it because we were simply unable to accommodate the people of diverse races who wanted to attend? I’m sure fried chicken and watermelon are hard to come by in Lamar County, so the poor black folk would have nothing to eat, and that just wouldn’t be fair to them. And with a busy conference agenda to get through there would be no time for breaks or siestas, so how would our Mexican and latino friends cope? We’re all just so darned different, it makes organising any kind of large integrated gathering impossible. Isn’t it just far better that we all remain separate? But equal, of course.

The event will culminate with a “Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony”, which Christian Identity Ministries insists is a symbolic rite of purification, but which the rest of the world knows as a Ku Klux Klan ritual of intimidation toward black people.

Local CBS News interviewed the president of the local chapter of the NAACP, who with great understatement said this of the planned cross-burning:

“The only context that I’m familiar with is one that is not very positive. And one that really symbolizes an era that many of us have hoped to put behind us. And that is this whole era of Jim Crow, this whole era of white supremacy, this whole era of discrimination and racial hatred.”

“I think it’s really hard to clarify what’s going on, but it seems to be some vestiges of what we call white supremacy here in Alabama. We just have to be honest about it.”

Yes, perhaps just a couple of small vestiges of white supremacy remaining there in Lamar County. Way to go, Alabama.

Birtherism Antidote

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

A nice short piece from NPR yesterday, about a courageous mother who stood up to a hostile neighbourhood and antigonistic police to let her black son swim in the newly-desegregated swimming pool in their town:

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154100293/when-mom-is-right-and-tells-police-theyre-wrong?sc=fb&cc=fp

Even at the age of 13, Holmes felt the animosity. The neighborhood had a private swim club that opened up to anyone who participated in the Memorial Day parade. Holmes was in the band.

“I arrived at the pool on Memorial Day having marched in the parade with my uniform still on, and they called the police,” he says.

The pool managers and the police department told Holmes’ mother that her son was not allowed in the pool. She started to ask why, but then she stopped herself. Instead, she told Holmes to crawl under the turnstile and go into the pool.

“I looked at my mother; I looked at the police,” Holmes says. “And I will tell you that as a 13-year-old, I was more inclined to do what my mother said than to be afraid of the police. So I did it.”

A policeman told Holmes’ mother to get him. Holmes distinctly remembers her response: “If you want him out of the pool, you go take him out of the pool. And by the way, as you take him out, you tell him why he can’t go in the pool today.”

“No one came. No one got me out, and I stayed in the pool,” Holmes says.

I think I needed to post something positive – albeit from 1956 – as an antidote to all of the Donald Trump / Birtherism nonsense that has been dominating the US news recently.