9 Republicans Vote Against Naming a Post Office for Maya Angelou

Now…These were the guys a few years ago who were trying to name every rest stop and bat room on the nation’s interstate after Ronnie Raygun.

Yet another example of the racism, and racial pettiness of the Republican right…

Maya Angelou at Howard

9 Republicans Vote Against Naming Post Office After Maya Angelou

On Tuesday, several Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against renaming a post office in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, after Maya Angelou, an acclaimed writer and civil-rights activist. The measure ended up passing with 371 votes,with nine Republicans voting against the bill, and one voting present.

One lawmaker cited communism for his vote.

“Congressman Harris voted against the Maya Angelou post office naming because she was a communist sympathizer,” a spokeswoman for Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), told NBC News. “His parents escaped communism and he feels that he cannot vote to name a post office in the United States in honor of someone who supported the communist Castro revolution in Cuba.”

Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) said in a statement that “naming post offices is one of the most benign and bipartisan duties we perform in the House of Representatives, and there is rarely any opposition,” and that he was “shocked today as nine Republicans voted against naming a post office after Maya Angelou, indisputably one of our country’s greatest poets, authors and civil rights activists.”

Angelou, who passed away in 2014, left behind a legacy of fighting against segregation and apartheid. She also supported Democratic candidates such as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

The other eight Republicans include congressmen Ken Buck (CO), Mo Brooks (AL), Michael Burgess (TX), Jeff Duncan (SC), Glenn Grothman (WI), Thomas Massie (KY), Alex Mooney (WV), and Steven Palazzo (MS).

An ongoing campaign in the area posting “not welcome” signs at local businesses for Andy Harris

 

Maya Angelou’s “Note to self”

Maya wrote this when she was about 15…

Dear me, myself then… first I know that you know how to listen. When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

Once you appreciate one of your blessings, one of your senses, your sense of hearing, then you begin to respect the sense of seeing and touching and tasting, you learn to respect all the senses.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

The person may have keener eyesight, a better ear, the person might have a more live body and can dance, but the person cannot be more human than you.

That is very important because that ensures you that you are a human being and nothing human can be alien to you.

You will be able to go around the world, learning languages, speaking to everybody, because no one can be more human than you or be less human.

They can be meaner or crueler, or sweeter or prettier, younger, richer, but they can’t be more human than you. Remember that.

 

Some Issues With Martin Luther King Memorial Surface

Taking a few words at their meaning, out of context with the events, or in some cases hundreds of words surrounding them is a recipe for disaster. In particular, the Rev. Martin Luther King, whose speeches and collective will driven by the righteousness of our cause shook our national psyche to it’s very foundations, left us with a number or speeches and written words left us with a number of “quotable moments” which cannot be distilled without context.

My parents, being educators collected a number of King’s Speeches and much of his oratory on old 33 1/3 RPM records allowing us to go back and review and rehear his speeches, discussions, and debates again and again. I would guess that well North of several thousand published works document the Civil Rights period, making it, WWII, and the Great Depression the most documented and detailed events of the past century.

So it is a little distressing when they get it wrong on the Memorial…

At King ceremony, a chance to bend toward justice

 

The arc of a mistake is long, and it now stretches from the Oval Office over to the Mall.

An error has been etched in marble on the grand Martin Luther King Jr. memorial that was to be dedicated Sunday, on the 48th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Some of King’s speeches and writings have been inscribed in the memorial. But one of the sayings on the wall by the Tidal Basin is incorrect — or incomplete — in its attribution.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

According to David Remnick’s biography of Obama, that is the president’s “favorite quotation.” Obama brought the idea back into present-day parlance and even had it sewn into the rug in the Oval Office when he redecorated last year. But as I wrote on this page last September, King is not the source of that quote.