Wednesday, December 29, 2010

A Wrongful Death Verdict

From CNN: A Massachusetts jury awarded $71 million in compensatory damages and $81 million in punitive damages to the family of a woman who died of lung cancer. "Suffolk Superior Court ruled . . . that Lorillard Tobacco Company lured black children into smoking by providing them free cigarettes."

Hat Tip: MJD

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Haley Barbour's Reality-Blind, Revisionist, And Disingenuous World

Profiling Mississippi Governor ("and likely presidential candidate") Haley Barbour in The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson asked Barbour why Barbour beleived that Yazoo City, Mississippi "was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence." Barbour's response:

"Because the business community wouldn't stand for it. You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City." (Note how Barbour did not give the full title of the Citizens Councils: they were "White Citizens Councils." As Diane McWhorter writes at page 98 of her book Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001), the White Citizens Council was "a resistance group started in the summer of 1954 in Mississippi by an Ole Miss football star turned plantation manager as a discreet alternative to the Ku Klux Klan. Its purpose was to mobilize the middle class behind the fight against the Brown decision. Its basic strategy was summed up by the Selma lawyer who had organized the first Alabama chapter: 'We intend to make it impossible for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage.")

On growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, Barbour said: "I just don't remember it as being that bad. I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white." (The following year Medgar Evers was assassinated by KKK member Byron De La Beckwith in Jackson, Mississippi.)

Ferguson also notes that Barbour's two sons were educated at the Manchester Academy, a private K-12 school built (in the words of Harold Kelly, Barbour's high school football coach and former principal of Yazoo High) "for people who didn't want their children to go to public schools after integration."

Called on his apologia for the White Citizens Council, Barbour isued the following statement:

"When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time." Um . . . OK (not). Now maybe he can explain what he meant in the early 1980s when he warned a staffer who commented about "coons" at campaign rallies that if the aide "persisted in racial remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

Did Jean Toomer Pass For White?

Read this.

Teena Marie, Rest In Peace

Teena Marie has passed away at the age of 54.

Dionne: Don't Spin The Civil War

In his Washington Post column E.J. Dionne writes that "[t]here remains enormous denial over the fact that the central cause of the [Civil War] was our national disagreement about race and slavery, not states' rights or anything else." Dionne notes that in his March 21, 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" the Confederate's vice president, Alexander Stephens, stated that the "proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization" was "the immediate cause of the late rupture" and that Thomas Jefferson was wrong in his belief "that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature." Stephens continued: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the white race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth."

Dionne concludes that "there is to this day too much evasion of how integral race, racism and racial conflict are to our national story. We can take pride in our struggles to overcome the legacies of slavery and segregation. But we should not sanitize how contested and bloody the road to justice has been. We will dishonor the Civil War if we refuse to face up to the reason it was fought."

For South Carolina's, Mississippi's, Georgia's, and Texas' secession declarations, click here.

Richard Nixon On Blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians

From the mouth and mind of President Richard Nixon as captured in newly released recordings from the Nixon White House's secret taping system:

Commenting on Secretary of State William P. Rogers' views on the future of black Africans and Rogers' "blind spot on the black thing because he's been in New York": "My own view is I think he's right if you're talking in terms of 500 years. I think it's wrong if you're talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that's the only thing that's going to do it . . ."

"The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality."

"The Jews have certain traits. The Irish have certain--for example, the Irish can't drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I've known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish."

"The Italians, of course, those pople . . . don't have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but . . ."

Discrimination Against Black Lawyers In Toronto

The Brampton Guardian recently reported that a "prominent Toronto lawyer has won a discrimination case against the Peel Law Association after he and two black colleagues were singled out in a rom full of lawyers and asked for identification."

Flava Flav's Fried Chicken And Liquor

From the "really?" category: "In his quest to continue to set the race back 400 years, Flava Flav is launching a chain of fried chicken restaurans called Flav's Fried Chicken. Did we mention he is also launching a brand of liquor called 'Le Flav Spirits'? No, we are not making this up, and you are not having a nightmare."

Race Riots In Russia

Read this story.

The Talented Tenth In Pictures

From The Root.

Monday, December 27, 2010

"Why They Call Us Uncle Toms"

John McWhorter addresses why he and other black conservatives are called Uncle Toms.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Patrick Hall, Rest In Peace

Patrick Hall, the son of my favorite cousin Pat, was killed on Friday in a home invasion in Dayton, Ohio. Killed at the age of 30. I have no words for this.