civil rights tagged posts

New Jersey Governor and presidential candidate Chris Christie, hewing close to his party’s line on the Charleston atrocity:

“Laws can’t change this. Only the goodwill and the love of the American people can let those folks know that that act was unacceptable, disgraceful, and that we need to do more to show that we love each other.”

From Rand Paul:
“There’s a sickness in our country, but it’s not going to be solved by our government.”

Carly Fiorina:
“We ought not to start immediately rushing to policy prescriptions or engaging in the blame game.”

No, oppressive laws or “policy prescriptions” from an overreaching “socialist” government can never change anything.

Of course, there was that tiny matter of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

And the Supreme Court, those “big government” meddlers, deciding in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) to ban segregation in public schools.

The Civil Rights ...

Please forgive the impossibly pretentious headline above. I think Rev. Martin Luther King would both forgive and understand it, because he above all would appreciate the tremendous sense of solidarity engendered by his justifiably famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and all the other events of 1963 in this quintessentially Southern town that would so change the course of history.

I arrived here on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of George Wallace’s theatrical standing in the University of Alabama school doors to ostensibly prevent the admittance of black students in defiance of a federal court order. (Wallace at least had enough sense not to actively defy the federal marshals and troops sent there by President Kennedy and his attorney general and brother Bobby to enforce the law.) I paid respects with my family at the now historic 16^th Avenue First Baptist Church where Ku Klux Klansmen murdered four...