Time for Recall in Virginia

Virginia’s new Attorney General is one of the whack jobs. So whacky in fact, some voters are beginning to have doubts about “Kookanelli’s” qualifications to hold office. In this interview, Attorney General Cuccinelli threatens to get to the bottom of the Obama Birth Certificate “issue”.  Looks like things are going to get very rough here in Virginia with our new Republican Governor and AG. I’m not sure the state’s laws would support a recall election – but with the Birth Certificate issue, impeachment may indeed be a legitimate recourse.

Kookaneiili also raised the ire of throusands of College kids around the state -

Students irate at Cuccinelli over gay-rights policies

Campus activists across Virginia put spring break on hold Monday to mobilize against Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, who has riled student groups with a letter advising public universities to retreat from their policies against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

More than 3,000 people joined the Facebook page “We Don’t Want Discrimination In Our State Universities And Colleges!” Nearly 1,000 people joined another, started by activists at the College of William and Mary. The University of Virginia group Queer & Allied Activism urged students to protest on Cuccinelli’s Facebook page and on Twitter.

Students at Virginia Commonwealth University, one of the few in the state not on break, planned a rally for noon Wednesday, with several hundred students committed. At Christopher Newport University, student Republican and Democratic leaders will discuss their next steps at a bipartisan meeting Friday.

Remembering Bloody Sunday

This report from a participant in the celebration of the courage and tenacity of Civil Rights workers in the 1965 Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March which was attacked at Edmund Pettus Bridge by Police in Selma, Alabama.

more about “Remembering Bloody Sunday“, posted with vodpod

Black Trailblazer Freezes to Death… Alone.

The sad story of Juanita Goggins, former State Congresswoman and trailblazer.

Once-revered SC lawmaker freezes to death alone

Juanita Goggins is seen in a 1974 AP file photo in Rock Hill, S.C. Goggins was the first black woman elected to the the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, and was hailed as a trailblazer at the time. Three decades later, Goggins died alone and freezing in the home she rented for 16 years, just four miles from the gleaming Statehouse dome.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — When Juanita Goggins became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, she was hailed as a trailblazer and twice visited the president at the White House.

Three decades later, she froze to death at age 75, a solitary figure living in a rented house four miles from the gleaming Statehouse dome.

Goggins, whose achievements included key legislation on school funding, kindergarten and class size, had become increasingly reclusive. She spent her final years turning down help from neighbors who knew little of her history-making past. Her body was not discovered for more than a week.

Those neighbors, as well as former colleagues and relatives, are now left wondering whether they could have done more to help.

“I’m very saddened. People like her you want to see live forever. She had quite a gift for helping others,” said state Sen. John Land, a fellow Democrat who was first elected to the House the same year as Goggins.

Goggins, the youngest of 10 children, grew up the daughter of a sharecropper in rural Anderson County, about 130 miles northwest of the capital. She was the only sibling to earn a four-year college degree. Her bachelor’s in home economics from then-all-black South Carolina State College was followed by a master’s degree.

She taught in the state’s segregated schools, married a dentist and got into politics. In 1972, she became the first black woman to represent South Carolina as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Two years later, she became the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Dept. of Education Starts to Enforce Civil Rights Laws Again

After a 8 year hiatus in enforcing any Civil Rights Laws, except those of the majority population – the new Administration has finally turned it’s focus on to enforcing Civil Rights again. I’m not sure what took the Obama Administration so long to figure out the Civil Rights well had been poisoned by the anti-Civil Rights conservatives of the Bushit Administration leading to a number of structural issues from education to jobs to the destruction of Minority Small Business…

But they seem to have gotten there – if a bit belatedly.

What will be interesting about the DOE’s efforts, is how they intend to execute against this objective. Since the Supreme Court hasn’t seen a Civil Rights violation it couldn’t overlook since the appointment of the infamous 5-4 majority – legal action, even in egregious cases isn’t likely to be successful. The SCUMUS 5 are no more likely to be sympathetic to the Civil Rights of Minority children, than a KKK Grandmuckus to the victim of a lynching. And that doesn’t even get into the issue of the lower courts poisoned with ideologues and syncopates during the Bushit.

Officials Step Up Enforcement of Rights Laws in Education

Bloody Sunday, Police Attack Civil Rights Workers in Voting Rights March. Cong John Lewis is seen on the Ground After Being Hit in the foreground.

Seeking to step up enforcement of civil rights laws, the federal Department of Education says it will be sending letters in coming weeks to thousands of school districts and colleges, outlining their responsibilities on issues of fairness and equal opportunity.

As part of that effort, the department intends to open investigations known as compliance reviews in about 32 school districts nationwide, seeking to verify that students of both sexes and all races are getting equal access to college preparatory curriculums and to advanced placement courses. The department plans to open similar civil rights investigations at half a dozen colleges.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is to announce the initiatives in a speech on Monday in Selma, Ala., where on March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten by Alabama state troopers.

Mr. Duncan plans to say that in the past decade the department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities,” according to a text of the speech distributed to reporters on Sunday.

It continues, “We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”

At the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as black students, and more than four times as likely to be ready for college algebra, department officials said. White high school graduates are more than twice as likely to have taken advanced placement calculus classes as black or Latino graduates…

Some civil rights advocates said they had hoped the administration would move more quickly last year to ramp up the activity of the Office for Civil Rights, the department’s second-largest, with 600 employees.

“This whole area has been a dead zone for years, and people were worried that new actions were too slow in coming,” said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington group that monitors federal policy and practices. “There had been strong hopes that they would move more quickly. This sounds like positive movement, which we’ve all been asking for.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries – Bloody Lowndes

This one is a few months old – but well worth watching . One of the interesting revelations is where the Black Panther symbolism actually came from…

11 Martin Luther King Quotes

Sometimes it’s good to go back and review a few lessons from the Master. In that vein – 10 +1 Quotes from MLK -

1. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
2. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. –Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Dec. 10, 1964
3. Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.
4. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars… Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
5. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
6. When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
7. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. –letter from Birmingham jail, April 16, 1963
8. The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers. –”Strength to Love”
9. I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
10. 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. –”Strength to Love”

And Number 11?

The one Mssrs Robertson and Limbaugh, and a bunch of their ilk, should have tattoed to their foreheads -

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Beck’s Witch Hunt: The New McCarthyism

My father was the object of a McCarthy witch hunt. It was never mentioned in our house, and I was too young at the time to know about it. I didn’t find out about it until I was in College, and a History Professor pulled me aside and told me the story.

From the McCarthy era onward, first McCarthy, and then the FBI under Hoover tried assiduously to tie black intelligentsia to communism as a method to suppress the Civil Rights movement.

My father’s “crime”?

In a Government class, teaching about the political and economic system of communism along with the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Democracy, as well as Fascism and government/corporate fascist states in a segregated black school.

The issue wasn’t what was being taught, as the curriculum and content had been approved by the school administration, peers,  and Board…

It was to Who.

more about “Beck’s Witch Hunt: The New McCarthyism“, posted with vodpod

On Massive Resistance and School Integration in Virginia

Black students recount early days of integration

I remember this period vividly, as I was one of the first wave of black students in my County to integrate a previously white school. In my case a Junior High School, covering grades 7 and 8. There were 7 of us, 5 girls and 2 boys, who in 1963 volunteered as part of the rolling integration plan, which had started in 1960 with the integration of a few Elementary Schools by a few volunteers. We were a select group, considered the brightest kids in our area, out of the pool of potential candidates, and received some special counseling by both our parents and the local NAACP relative to how to react to some of the things which undoubtedly would be thrown our way – both physically and mentally.

Modern, brick, Farmville School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, serving white Children

Moton School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, for Black Children built out of plywood and tar paper

RICHMOND — For some of the black students who took the first steps toward integrating Virginia’s public schools more than a half-century ago, the memories of their hardships have not faded with time.

“That was the worst two and a half years of my life,” said Andrew Heidelberg, one of 17 black students to attend previously all-white Norfolk public schools in 1959, as Virginia’s efforts to resist racial integration began slowly to unravel.

The NRA is a “Civil Rights” Group?

This from a whackjob righty who claims the NRA is the nation’s oldest Civil Rights Group -

Granny got her gun

The Washington Post’s front-page Obama story on Friday includes a glaring error. Reporters Krissah Thompson and Cheryl Thompson began with a reference to Barack Obama’s first speech before the “nation’s oldest civil rights organization.”

This is a standard claim in stories on the NAACP, but it’s untrue – the NAACP just turned 100, but the National Rifle Association was founded in 1871. This is only true if “civil rights group” can only be used as an honorific synonym for “black interest group.” If the election of Obama ends one era of the “civil rights” struggle, can reporters stop using the “civil rights” tag just for black groups?

So what? If they dig up Moses (Charlton Heston) and make him President…

They going to stop using guns to kill people?

Obama to the NAACP – No Excuses!

President Obama’s Address to the NAACP.

What I’ve seen this AM is that a lot of (mainly conservative) folks are trying to paint this as a “Bill Cosby” moment by President Obama…

They are lying to themselves – and anyone else stupid enough to listen.

more about “Obama Addresses the NAACP“, posted with vodpod

President Obama on Affirmative Action, Post Supreme Court 5-4 Ricci Decision

President Obama tries to be politic about the recent 5-4 Supreme Court abortion on Ricci today in an AP Interview -

This is how then future President Obama responded to George Stephanopolos last year -

Obviously the Ricci decision was politically motivated, making law from the bench – instead of a narrow reading of the Constitutional Law as it applied to the case.The issue here isn’t what should have been done relative to Ricci and the other 19 firefighters – the issue here is how the court attempted to make law by making that decision relevant to other cases.

The New Jim Crow… Indeed.