Women's Struggles

September 2, 2010 ColorLines Direct. News and commentary from Colorlines.com

Domestic Workers Lead the Way to 21st Century Labor RightsAn historic New York victory demonstrates what today’s labor movement needs to look like.

 

 At Park51, Praying for an End to the “Ground Zero Mosque” Hatred

The real hate we should all fear is the one that smears a peaceful Muslim congregation and incites violence around the country.

 

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Facing Race 2010
Civic innovator and author Chris Rabb is excited to emcee Facing Race 2010, happening September 23-25!  “With Kamau Bell, Rich Medina and the other stars performing at Facing Race, this conference is not to be missed!” Rabb says. “Looking forward to sharing the stage with these phenomenal change-makers.”Be one of the 1000 participants looking to define justice and make change. arc.org/facingrace

 

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SVC PLANS TO ‘CELEBRATE’ RACIST CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT

by  Mark Potok on August 31, 2010

The American Civil War was the costliest, most devastating conflict in the history of our country. At least 620,000 soldiers died, as did some 400,000 civilians who fell to disease, suicide, murder and similar causes. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered horrible wood-saw amputations and terrible wounds. In the four years the war lasted, it cost $2.5 million daily — an incredible amount at the time. In the end, the South was laid waste, its industries, its grand homes, its roads and its farms largely destroyed. It would be a century before the region fully recovered.

Yes, it was a splendid little war — that is, if you believe the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Southern heritage society that in the last decade has seen a large number of racial extremists in influential and sometimes top positions.

“CELEBRATE THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFEDERACY IN MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA,” the SCV wrote its members in a breathless announcement on its E-mail list Monday. The event, scheduled for Feb. 19, 2011, will feature a parade up Dexter Avenue to the Alabama State Capitol — the end of the very same route taken by Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others who participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1963. It is to be followed by other events around the South commemorating the sesquicentennial of each year of what some Southerners still call the War of Northern Aggression.

But the SCV isn’t interested in commemorating King or the civil rights march. And it’s certainly not interested in the end of slavery, or the Fourteenth Amendment that gave freedmen citizenship. Instead, it plans to reenact the swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as the president of the Confederate States of America and fire off a few cannons to ensure that “the Heritage of the Confederacy … is remembered and portrayed in the right way.”

The right way. Whatever can they mean?

Well, if you take a look at the essays — and essayists — on the SCV’s “150 Years: History, Heritage & Honor” website, it isn’t too hard to figure out. There’s the Rev. John H. Killian – he used to be a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that has described blacks as a “retrograde species of humanity” — complaining about how “liberals, Yankees, scalawags and the generally misguided” have been unfairly making white Southerners feel guilty about slavery and racism. Killian still backs the “righteousness of our cause” and concludes in an essay on the page that “the South was right!” Then there’s Chuck Rand, who once belonged to the racist League of the South, which opposes racial intermarriage, defends slavery and argues that the war had nothing to do with “the peculiar institution.” Rand writes on the SCV page that “there is no difference between the invasion of France by Hitler and the invasion of the Southern States by Lincoln.” He argues that Lincoln’s purpose was never to free the slaves.

That may not have been Lincoln’s original intent, but it certainly became a major war aim — as anyone who has read any serious Civil War history knows. The years leading up to the war were marked by endless battles over the extension of slavery to the new territories, a move that Southern rulers, fearful of losing control of the nation to an abolitionist Congressional majority, backed virtually without exception. And, contrary to the revisionist history offered by the SCV, the authorities of the South at the time were perfectly clear on what secession was aimed at. The Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession, for example, explained plainly that the free states were “proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality for all men, irrespective of race or color,” adding that blacks were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race.” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, put it like this in his infamous “Cornerstone” speech of 1862: “Our new Government is founded on 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 superior race — is his natural and moral condition.” As definitively shown by scholar Charles Dew in his Apostles of Disunion, states throughout the South adduced the same reasons for secession — a defense of “white supremacy” and an attempt to spread the institution of slavery to more states. At around the same time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, hugely popular in the North, was critically important in building Yankee abolitionist sentiment.

Of course, the SCV honchos behind the upcoming sesquicentennial commemoration of the South’s bloody defense of slavery don’t see it that way. Just listen to the Rev. Steve Wilkins, who complains on the SCV page that the war was really about replacing a federal republic with a centralized federal government. “Slavery,” he writes, “so far from being the cause of the war, was merely the pretext for revolution.” And that, if you read some others of Wilkins’ writings, was a pretty pathetic pretext. Together with a far-right Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson, Wilkins offered this highly unusual take on antebellum slavery in the book Southern Slavery, As It Was: “Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” the two men wrote in their 1996 tome. “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”

SOURCE

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“Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” the two men wrote in their 1996 tome. “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”

Oh, really?

So, all those White men who crawled on top of enslaved Black women and girls, showed much “mutual intimacy and harmony” while raping and sexually coercing defenseless females?

So, Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Wilson, those filthy, diseased ridden (gonorrhea, syphillis, smallpox, tuberculosis) White slave masters, White sons of the slave masters, White overseers, White brothers, White male visitors to the plantations, poor White males who lived near the vicinity of the plantation—-every last one of them showed, what did you call it:

“a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”

….towards enslaved Black women and girls?

The garbage that enslaved Black females, the garbage that denigrated, debased and debauched an entire race of women, the feces that raped not only Black women and girls, but, also sodomized, buggered, and defiled Black men and boys—they practiced so much love and tenderness towards those they hated and commiteed atrocities against?

Really?

As for the many poor Whites who did not own slaves, their asinine allegiance to a sick sadistic cause shows how little they used their brains.

Hell, you don’t even own slaves, and you are going to fight a war to keep a system going that is destroying you (poor Whites) economically?

Talk about rank imbecility and gross meat-headed behaviour.

As for the following comment:

“Slavery,” he writes, “so far from being the cause of the war, was merely the pretext for revolution”

There is never a revolution that has ever existed that based its premise on enslaving another human being.

Only a low-life piece of trash keeps another human being enslaved.

As for the South’s “righteousness of our cause” and “the South was right!” ……

….the South that legally sanctioned slavery was never right.

Committing abominations and blaspheming against God is never logical, never humane, never righteous.

#1 R&B Song 1967:  “Baby I Love You,” Aretha Franklin

Born:  Sam Gooden (the Impressions), 1939; Joe Simon, 1943; Rosalind Ashford (Martha & the Vandellas), 1943

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1955   Alan Freed held his historic Labor Day Rock ‘n’ Roll Show at the Brooklyn Paramount featuring the Moonglows, the Cadillacs, Chuck Berry, the Harptones, and the Nutmegs.

1957   The Channels’ legendary version of “That’s My Desire” was released.

1967   The Parliaments’ “I Wanna Testify” peaked at #20 pop (#3 R&B) for the future funk group’s first of forty-seven R&B chart records through 1996.

1968   Muddy Waters performed at Sultan, Washington’s Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter-Than-Air Fair with bands including the Youngbloods, Santana, and the Grateful Dead.

1976   Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five performed at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. It was their first major performance. Grandmaster (Joseph Sadler) earned a degree in electronics before he became a pioneering rapper.

1978   Balladeer and heart throb Teddy Pendergrass performed at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in the first of numerous concerts for women only. The concept was the brainchild of Teddy’s manager, Shep Gordon (who arranged for the ladies to receive teddy bear-shaped lollipops at the concert), and there was no known reaction from the ACLU as to the ethics of such gender exclusivity.

1988   A worldwide charity tour to raise money for Amnesty International began with a concert at London’s Wembley Stadium featuring Tracy Chapman, Bruce Springsteen, and Sting.

1995   Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone,” produced and written by R. Kelly, hit #1, thus becoming the first single ever to debut in the top spot.

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