Aging Leftists Hold a SNCC Reunion and Inadvertently Reveal the Old Days are Over
What motivated SNCC activists, Carson shows, was that the slogan of black power “aroused blacks and disturbed whites,” and was meant to “stir racial emotions.” Eventually, Carson says, Carmichael and SNCC “moved ever closer to an ideology of black separatism.” And, a bit later, it joined the anti-Vietnam War movement and sided with the radicals in that effort, seeing the war as part of American imperialism’s thrust. SNCC also tried to move American blacks to adopt hatred of Israel as a major part of its anti-colonialist program, and became one of the first black organizations to support Yassir Arafat’s PLO, as Fatah was then called.
Carmichael’s analysis was made clear in the following excerpt from a speech he gave on June 15, 1966:
The advocates of Black Power reject the old slogans and meaningless rhetoric of previous years in the civil rights struggle. The language of yesterday is indeed irrelevant: progress, non-violence, integration, fear of “white backlash,” … One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to this point there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghettos and the black-belt South. There has been only a “civil rights” movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of middle-class whites. … We had only the old language of love and suffering. And in most places — that is, from the liberals and middle class — we got back the old language of patience and progress. … There is no black man in the country who can live “simply as a man.” His blackness is an ever-present fact of this racist society, whether he recognizes it or not…. “Integration” as a goal today speaks to the problem of blackness not only in an unrealistic way but also in a despicable way…. “integration” is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.
And before his death from cancer in November of 1998, Carmichael, by then called by the African name Kwame Toure, said the following as he reflected back on his life and prepared to take an illegal solidarity trip to Libya:
In the 1960s, we said “Hell No, we won’t go” to Vietnam, to fight against a people who never called us a nigger, and we didn’t go. We said that they would defeat U.S. imperialism, and the heroic Vietnamese People, under the sterling example and leadership of the eternal Ho Chi Minh, did. Today we say “Hell yes, we are going to Libya” … and we warn the U.S. government not to interfere. We are certain today that the people of Cuba and Libya, under the steadfast leadership of Fidel Castro and [Libyan President] Muammar Qadhafi, will be victorious.
By then, Toure had come to support Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Learning that he had advanced and irreversible prostate cancer, he told the press that it was “an FBI induced cancer,” the result of the never ending attempt of the US government to assassinate him and part of “the white man’s arsenal of chemical and biological warfare.” Maybe it was fortunate for their reunion that Carmichael is no longer with us, for his presence would have made their attempt to transcend “old antagonisms” and hide the truly extremist direction to which SNCC had moved impossible.
Nevertheless, Bob Moses told the meeting that SNCC’s work was not yet done. Black people were “second-class constitutional people,” he said, who will only leave that position if there is a constitutional amendment guaranteeing them a right to a quality education.
One could ask, “Don’t all Americans deserve a quality education?” — and would a constitutional amendment really bring it about? At least his chimerical demand is less absurd than demanding the U.S. government award reparations to all the black people in America for slavery. It is certainly better than the unfortunate violent turn SNCC took at the end of the 1960s.
Ron: Excellent article and analysis of both the past and presence re SNCC. I looked up “chimerical” – 1. existing only as a product of unchecked imagination : fantastically visionary or improbable 2. given to fantastic schemes. Having been in Mississippi with SNCC in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 and been a room-mate with Bob Moses a year or so before that, I remember being an admirer as well as a participant in the SNCC led civil rights movement.
Some thoughts I had while reading your blog:
Bob Moses when he returned to the U.S. from Africa started a program to teach algebra to young people as a way to give them a hold on what they had to know to be successful in life. I am not sure what he means by a “constitutional right” to a quality education – and you ask the right question – aren’t all children deserving of such a goal – but the big big question is how such a goal will be achieved – what with the various teacher unions protecting their own and refusing to cooperate in new and inventive programs. I wonder if the complete speech that Bob gave might have some more down to earth concepts.
As for Stokeley – my former wife who was down there with me, was very aware of his sexist views of women, and I have seen this reported in at least one book on those times. After so many young white people went down South that summer and winter, and two Jewish young men lost their lives along with a black Mississippian – to speak in an undifferentiated way about what a racist society American was seems to me not only untrue but racist in itself.
SNCC defeated itself by going racist. It alienated so many of us who would have continued to help but found refuge in other communal, many times negative, efforts. I wrote a kind of rap song about the summer of 64 crediting the many folksingers (mostly white with the notable exception of Julius Lester) who came down to lend moral support to the movement, “Shadows on the Light” which ended with the verse: “Later things fell apart as things tend to do/When hatred is driving some rowers in your crew/On this spinning ship the Captain’s high above/When you’re looking for justice, keep your eye upon the dove” – I wonder how many at this SNCC reunion recognize and would admit openly not only about the wrong turn their organization took, but about the importance of the Black Churches and religion in their movement, which most of us young folk were both ignorant of and opposed to. I wonder how many of them now embrace or at least participate in the Judaic-Christian tradition of justice, mercy and love.
Thanks for your Blog. Shalom, Cantor Bob Cohen
Yes, and wasn’t it my fellow Bronx Science alum Carmichael who was once quoted as saying that the only position for women in the civil rights movement was prone?
Can public education even be saved? What can we do about the self-serving teachers unions? When will school administrators be able to discipline troubled students? Children of color are also often not encouraged within their own community to acquire an education. They are accused instead of “acting white”. On top of that, when are these so-called radical black leaders going to come out against affirmative polices—which have resulted in inflated grades? There are countless numbers of youths of all racial and ethnic groups who cannot even read their own high school diploma.
in 1965-6 I was a college dropout, VISTA Volunteer with the responsibilty to work with gang youths in East LA as part of the Great Society’s “War on Poverty”. Having been raised in privileged circumstances in a very small southern town, and as an idealistic, rebellious nerd in the throes of a prolonged adolescence, I was searching for a way for me personally to move our racist society toward a more genuine commitment to equality before the law and equality of economic opportunity.
By chance I was in the audience in san francisco’s fillmore auditorium for the SNCC annual convention. It was the occasion for Stokely Carmichael’s induction as the new president of SNCC, and his inaugural speech was meant to mark a new direction for the organization. He certainly succeeded: that was the first time I heard the verbal formula that quickly came to focus public discourse about equality before the law and equality of economic opportunity: apparently Carmichael believed that the answer to all of the problems that concerned him was “black power.”
Stokely’s palpable rage and provocative language really shocked me and elicited a great deal of indignation. (I implicitly assumed that movement leaders realized that the only way blacks could improve their position in American society was to welcome sympathetic whites –like myself — appreciatively instead of alienating them.) obviously his program was “too extreme” and the organization would have to distance itself from that kind of rhetoric.
what did I know?
(the main thing I learned about myself during that extraordinary year was that the world was a lot wider and more diverse than my life in “Mayberry RFD” had indicated. Eventually I came to understand that I had a lot of work to do on myself, and I’m still workin’ at it.)
I tend to agree with you about the “pat on your own back” culture. WWII vet, SNCC Vets, Vietnam vets, Tragedy Vets and on and on. Although I do have a friend in the hospitality business and he tells me there is big money in “memory lanes”. I have trouble even making my high schools reunions, lol. I guess I am eligible for many reunions and always want to go, but with being overseas so much, it is tough, so I am a bit jealous of those that get to attend those events. However, I can also see folks get together to share memories. Good article, thanks. Now where did I put my old VFW BBQ hat?
PC: Are you intentionally stupid or unintentionally ignorant?
“Now where did I put my old VFW BBQ hat?”
In any suitable orifice on your person.
Ciao.
Sorry if there was any misunderstanding. I was not talking to you, or your girlfriend blooto.
“VFW BBQ hat”?
Any idea just what VFW members had to go through just to live to wear a hat at all?
Perhaps you’re aiming at satire. If so, not a good effort.
David Thomson,
The “acting white” charge made me furious even back in the 60s and 70s. It was these thugs that made it uncool for poor blacks to learn to read, and now they whine because blacks are denied a quality education. The honorable black teachers who valued work and self discipline were vilified as Uncle Toms and denied their a place as role models for young people. I had black friends and acquaintance with degrees from Howard, Temple, and Penn, and I saw how some were accused of selling out. The poorly educated welfare mom who wanted better for her kids had a hard time competing with the street. The complicity of people like Leonard Bernstein in elevating the Panthers to coolness was inexcusable, and the self congratulation the radicals are indulging in is disgusting.
leonard bernstein was an icon and a jewish new yorker and rich, he and jews just like him were at the forefront of supporting blacks in all civil rights battles. this had been true since the founding of the naacp. even when the movement turned very nasty and aggressive and hateful, pushing out whites, especially jews, the liberal jews like bernstein still funded them and promoted them. the black panthers were the guests of honor at his park avenue digs for continual fund raisers.
when it was good it was very sweet and natural because it was the right thing. when it turned bad it never got good again. obama and holder are the results of the bad, not the good.
Carmichael d. 1998, not 1988
As a student in the sixties I recall one experience with a member of the “most self centered” generation at the college cafeteria. This rather dim witted left wing radical was bragging that he stole his books from the College bookstore and this was his way I attacking the establishment. When it was brought to his attention that all he really did was to make the rest of us pay more for our books since the bookstore would absorb its loss by raising everyone’s costs and since we were not amoral sleazy leftists we did not approve of theft. He just looked on with a dull dumb look. I am sure today in his dotage he is probably basking in the feeling he had when he stole books or he is an advisor to the present regime in Washington.
Thomas Sowell points out that black children in the north were receiving a better education—before the advent of the civil rights movement. I am convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr. unintentionally made things far worse in the so-called ghetto areas. He is the one who helped to significantly open the door to the non-violent left-wing radicals. Please note my emphasis on non-violent. The Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver types often got more publicity because of their violent rhetoric. It was the quieter ones, however, who usually possessed academic credentials behind their names that really caused the enormous damage with their egalitarian doctrines. They encouraged both Lyndon B. John and Richard Nixon to push through some awful bills through congress. Edward Banfield warned in 1968 that things were going off the rails in his insightful, The Unheavenly City. Regrettably, he was ignored.
How many lefties are also campaigning against high black illegitimacy rates? This issue is rarely touched. And yet, we know that children raised in such dysfunctional circumstance have the odds heavily against them. Few are able to eventually learn to read and write even at an eight grade level.
“. . . caused the enormous damage with their egalitarian doctrines.”
egalitarian – “asserting, resulting from, or characterized by belief in the equality of all people”
That sounds oddly familiar. Where have I heard that before? Something about self evident beliefs . . . where was that . . . somebody help me out here . . . .
Do you ever manage to post something that is relevant?
You are as aware as the rest of us, that in this context egalitarian refers to equal outcomes, not equal treatment.
skeeziks’ MO appears to be embrace some fake outrage on HuffPo or Kos or some other fever swamp and then scamper off to troll with it. He either doesn’t care or more likely doesn’t understand whether his latest nonsense is even relevant to a discussion or not. He just tosses it out. Perhaps he thinks he gives the impression of being well-informed and is truly unaware what a jack@@$ he is.
MarkTheGreatPretzel . . . doctrine does not equal outcome . . . doctrine, which is the context the poster offered here, means beliefs or principles, hence . . . my point . . . as opposed to your point, which is to deny the meaning and motivation of words uttered by your conservatard friends . . . and the founding principle of this great nation, that all men are created equal. Then again, conservatives have never really understood or supported our founding principles. Here, I’ll get you started: Read Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli. In fact, read it aloud at your church.
You should quit while you’re behind.
Here we have the Omniscient Political Science Expert in Everything Modern Liberal grasping at anything “cute” that bubbles up from the cesspool inlet. Tripoli? Tripoli? Trip 11….? A new TV show? Could you be more smarter please? Reading tea leaves is one thing, but reading the latest Modern Liberal sewage discharge is quite another. The funhouse mirror must be quite bored. Really, 1 out of 100. Vegas calls!
Be useful. Where is that version of Van Jones and Kyber barking out their version of The Internationale to the melody of the Beverly Hillbillies? Maybe Mr. Hollywood Penn will add a groove to it. Great spoon player. That’s big.
And behind? How about a blast of methane from the Mr. President Magic Money Flatulence Machine? That will keep the sleazits moho mojo going for another few minutes while cruising for Great Value dog food chocolates.
“…conservatard friends…”
Don’t let your ’60′s radical communist knee grow. It might make insensitive remarks about mentally challenged individuals.
Speak Kyber.
Whatever.
and the founding principle of this great nation, that all men are created equal.
In terms of their rights, or in terms of their character?
A highly important point, glossed over.
Busted again.
It’s really sad the way liberals claim the sole right to determine what words mean.
It’s really funny, the way the actually believe anyone else cares.
egalitarian – “asserting, resulting from, or characterized by belief in the equality of all people”
[citation needed]
That’s not what “egalitarian” means, dimwit. Egalitarianism pertains to “equality of results” (cf. John Rawls), not “equality before the law”.
Your conflation of these discontinuous meanings marks you as dishonest. Not that that’s news, but it’s just so patently obvious.
Keep digging, Seerak, I hear Sean Hannity defines egalitarian as “analyzing with great detail and specificity the wants, needs and desires of a the our greatest ever nation earth has ever in history of the greatest things known but is now being destroyed by Obama.”
Hope that helped. Rawls was an elitist Harvard hack doing the same thing you’re doing – interpreting (guessing at) the precepts of our founding. Why would you pay attention to that Ivy League socialist? I suggest you stay tuned for Glenn Beck’s definition. Talk about crazy. That’s the one you’ll want to use.
Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice and the co-founder of the Panthers, seems to have been purged from Civil Rights history. He had the audacity to go to Africa to see socialism in practice. This turned him into a enthusiastic supporter of free enterprise. The most famous and admired Black Panther became a great embarrassment to his former comrades. Had he lived, I suspect he would have been a speaker at Tea Party rallies.
Really? Is that what you suspect? I suspect if Lincoln had lived he would be Olberman’s co-host on Countdown.
I suspect that if you had a brain, you would make sense.
Wow, good one. No, make that “great” one. Mark Levin would be proud.
Yes, you’re right – Lincoln was a Democrat. Or, at least this is what the current text books say.
I didn’t say Lincoln was a Democrat. I said I suspect he would be a liberal today.
Maybe this had something to do with the purging of Eldridge Cleaver:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_c8LNGp0k9_c/RvrZ39dpiFI/AAAAAAAABE0/mOE2WWSlE6o/s1600/cleaver.jpg
Whe the Lefties are OK with Bill Cosby speaking out again, I will know they are serious about addressing black inner city literacy.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
[For a light hearted take on our present peril]
BTW, Ron, you apparently didn’t get the memo. You’re supposed to ban my posts. I’m down to about 1 in 100 seeing the light of day. I think it’ s because I’m Italian. We’re dark, you know.
Yeah, the Modern Liberal Cesspool is quite the dark place.
“I’m down to about 1 in 100 seeing the light of day.”
Indeed. The perfect definition of beating one’s head against a brick wall to get attention. Good dog!
You’re just not barking loud enough Kyber. Can you hear that dog whistle calling you moho… and Van Jones?
Whatever.
That explains it. It’s probably only about 1 in 100 of your comments that serves the only useful purpose you own – supplying comic interlude. The rest are just your usual inane maundering.
Get a new thesaurus did we? How winsome.
It’s best not to feed the troll
And it’s dangerous
No, at it’s worst, it’s merely irritating. Much of the time it’s higly amusing. In a cute sort of way.
Police officers interrogating a suspect often employ the soft cop/hard cop routine. The first one screams and yells—and the other one eventually “saves” the suspect from his irate partner. This may well explain the inadvertently strategy between the non-violent and violent radicals of the 1960s. The Black Panther types would threaten violence—-but it was the non-violent one who worked out the agreements with the “establishment”. Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Saul Alinsky worked somewhat in the background, but they were the ones who caused most of the destruction. All of them had a PhD behind their name and rarely, if ever, even raised their voice in anger.
“It is the same argument once used by Stalinists to justify the terror of the Soviet regime under Stalin.”
Well, you should know, Ron, having taken the well-worn path from Stalinism to neoconservatism. But you are right about the old days being dead and gone. Of course, bring back the draft and the ’60s will return in a nanosecond.
Egad, the Trolls are becoming truly pathetic.
Before, they used Alinsky tactics—you know, scream insults and try to bully the opposition by shouting at them. Now they’re just burbling nonsense.
As Mark says, if they had a brain, they’d make sense. But they don’t, and they do not.
Ron,
Since you so strongly support the early civil rights movement, how do you square this with your writing for a site that continually spews hatred for Moslems and allows outright hate speech from its readers – “Islime,” “Islam is at its heart a sado-masochistic perversion” – with the excuse that it’s “too loosely defined” to detect? (Btw, the moderators almost never fail to detect my protests against such hate speech.)
This is hate speech. The people who speak out against the terrorists do so because they have read their various writings about themselves, and their intent, including theHamas Covenant.
If you’re going to be in this conversation, you need to pay attention.
“The more crazy it acts, the more powerful it becomes. Just a few weeks ago, in Nigeria, Muslim gangs slaughtered 500 Christians, including many children and pregnant women and old people – hacked them to death with machetes.”
You can defend Islam all you want-until you are blue in the face, please, but the truth is always going to be told.
Tool!
The truth is not hate speech, no matter how much some hate to hear it.
Actually, the alleged “well-worn path” was from Trotskyite to neocon. But good on you, Mister Joseph, seeing that you remain parked there in Stalinism, having avoided such an awful fate. Regarding the ’60s, if you claim to have remembered them, you musta not been there.
It is interesting that, even given the amount of negative press Holder has been operating under in the past few months, that Ron Radosh @ PJM is the ONLY media reference I’ve come across reporting/commenting on Holder addressing the SNCC reunion.
I have seen a couple of C-Span authors try and pull off similar scholarly malpractice as far as what Radosh reports from Peniel Joseph. One likewise came from the same ideological neighborhood and had much the same method. It was some academic who had written a loving biography of the Panthers – and gave his spiel to a Panthers reunion. Needless to say it was quite the opposite of the story given by folks like David Horowitz.
Having lived through the Hough riots in Cleveland in ’66 as a child, I find a striking similarity between the historical blind spots that endured for decades of one party control in congress following FDR’s New Deal with the one party allegiance on the part of blacks since the mid-sixties.
Until writers like Tom Sewell and Shelby Steele the narrative of such academics as Ron mentions have gone unchallenged. Even now there remains a cottage industry for urban mythology – as opposed to writers willing to challenge the conventional wisdom/history like Amity Shales and others have with FDR.
Is it possible that the race riots of the sixties – and the subsequent appeasement social engineering that took place under Nixon’s terms – far more than during LBJ’s push for the Great Society programs – have yet to be truly studied and denounced for the failures there were? I certainly believe so.
But Obama obviously doesn’t. To the contrary; his stealth campaign to re-establish big government is drawn directly from this era and the methods then employed.
When doing the re-selling – it’s crucial that the Holder/Peniel Joseph view predominate.
The French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror.
Liberalism always does.
Ron,
I read the Hayden article in the Nation that you critiqued. I did not find it so bad as you did – in fact there were some hopeful aspects to it. During the movement to integrate public accomodations and win universal voting rights, SNCC was truly heroic. It had gifted organizers like Bob Moses, James Foreman and yes, Stokley Carmichael, who built and sustained a mass base and were responsible for positive social change.
The notion of the good SNCC and the bad SNCC is simple-minded at best. When the problems SNCC had to face become far more intractable, like income inequality, employment and housing discrimination and inferior education, its leadership (minus the masses) turned to radical black nationalism. Instead of heroism, they resorted to empty rhetoric that blamed abstractions like “institutionalized racism” rather than having the courage to condemn and confront the many problems within the black community, like child abandonment, black on black crime, drug and alcohol addiction and contempt for education.
The fact is that these racial demagogues have faded into oblivion or jail. But what was encouraging about the Hayden piece was that there are still some heroes left, like John Lewis and Bob Moses. However naive his notion of a constitutional amendment for quality education (can’t you see the trial lawyers licking their lips!), he is in Mississippi developing math literacy and the Algebra Project. These activities prepare young blacks to succeed in a world where public accomodations are integrated and voting rights are assured but where everyone, white and black, struggles to make their mark.
I agree with much of what Sam Leiken writes. SNCC was truly heroic, as he says. Bob Moses, however, was the complete opposite of a charlatan like Stokely Carmichael. He eschewed rhetoric and the limelight, and quitely went off to Africa to avoid the mantle of sainthood everyone was putting on him. (They used to sing: “We are the children Bob Moses led,” from the old spirtual, with Bob put before Moses.) However, I definitely would NOT include James Foreman in the same group. He was a sectarian ultra-left Marxist-Leninist, and if not a formal CP member, was another dues chiseler. He was among the group that tried to lead SNCC towards the old discredcited popular Front policies of the World War II Communist and fellow-travelers, and was instrumental in getting the Communist front National Lawyers Guild to represent SNCC, against the advice of people like Bayard Rustin and Allard Lowenstein.
Finally, you are, I think, completely correct in your assessment of what he is now doing in terms of the Algebra Project. Again, quite the opposite of what Stokely et al did. Thanks for writing. Ron
I was down South in 1966 just at the time of the turning to the Black Power movement, doing voter registration work in the black community, etc. I was sitting in the SNCC office in Atlanta when this guy walked in who was running for office. He had a raft of papers under his arm with the symbol of the Black Panther Party of Lowndes County, Alabama (where it came from). That was the first I had seen or heard of that. He was going to walk precinct and I asked if I could help. He said no and it was clear to me, for the first time, it was because I was white. We were both roughly the same age (very early twenties) and I remember feeling hurt and confused by the rejection. I asked the guy his name and he said it was Julian Bond.
To quote Dick Cheney . . . So?
“During the movement to integrate public accomodations and win universal voting rights, SNCC was truly heroic.”
I sharply distinguish between the activities of the overall civil rights movement in the Old South and the rest of the country. Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, accomplished an enormous amount of good in breaking down the firmly ensconced Southern racist system. Nonetheless, he also caused much destruction when later jumping on the socialist bandwagon. The irony is that King’s assassination probably saved his image. Gallup no longer rated him as among the top ten most admired Americans. He was becoming a somewhat marginal figure.
In the book Coretta Scott King wrote she noted that Martin Luther King Jr was an admirer of Edward Bellamy. If the name means nothing to you than I suggest a google search, you just have to get past some of the irrational writing from someone named Rex Curry. In a nutshell however, Bellamy wrote a Utopian novel called Looking Backwards, published in the late 1800′s. At the time it was published there was only one book that outsold it, and that was Uncle Toms’ Cabin. He descends from Joseph Bellamy, a famous Calvinist preacher in Massachusetts. Edward Bellamy may be described as the beginning of what I like to call secular Calvinism. Oliver Cromwell whose lost the belief in God but determined to make everyone live to his version of morality.
His cousin was Francis Bellamy, the originator of the Pledge of Allegiance, which bears almost no resemblance to the one who recite now, nor is the history of it as nice as some would like. Including the original hand position that looks like a Nazi salute. One can find old pictures of it on the internet. The cousins were firm admirers of the French Revolution and German Education. What could go wrong with that?
The history is quite fascinating, particulary when you realize that MLK Jr. found Looking Backwards worthwhile reading.
I encountered Stokely Carmichael in 1963, when I taught a course in Political Philosophy at Tufts University. He was brought in by a student, Antony Camejo, (unanounced), whose brother was a Communist leader in a country in Central America (I have forgotten which). Carmichae lectured us on how whites impose their standards of beauty on Negroes – “full lips, light skin, straight hair.” I pointed out that Jackie Kennedy and Bridgitte Bardot had full lips, and whites sunbathed to get tans, and that women with straight hair curled it. But the real issue, of course, was what any of this had to do with civil rights. It had nothing to do with civil rights, only Carmichael trying to whip up racial hatred and practicing his speech on us. He was a Communist, as his association with Camejo indicated.
Julius Lester in his memoirs writes that cities burned right after Carmichael visited.
“THEY’RE calm demeanor . . . ” ?????!?!?!?!!!!!!
Ron/editor: If conservatives (like me) are going to be taken seriously, we’d better make sure we can write correctly.
Does that group really mean to say we elected a “second class” President?
Yeah. I think these intellectually-dishonest haters of freedom, these philosophical descendants of Jefferson Davis and the KKK, do indeed want to continue trying to call us all racists and perpetuate racial tension (instead of seeing that no one is born a racist).
Electing a Black man President only proves our racism to these treasonous illegitimi…
Geesh – pass the Viagra – what a bunch of navel-gazing, self-righteous dinosaurs
Note: I’ve never seen a self-righteous dinosaur myself, but I hear they’re frightening animals. Stay indoors and call the proper authorities if you spot one.
And it was forty to fifty years ago. How long should a crisis exist before it ceases to be a crisis? How long can you dine-out on a good story?
See Rahm Emanuel say something that really makes scents.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNqcUga-Tk
Good question, Mikey. It seems that Ron and his ilk are fearless champions of what no longer needs championing; warriors ready to put on the armor for battles long since decided. As for today’s battles that take guts to fight … well, maybe in another 50 years.
It will be a fine day in our country when all of the boomers who revered the 1960s are finally, completely out of power.
Yes, the boomers had a couple of redeeming qualities: the music and the push for common sense environmental protections on the air and the water.
But….my God. These narcissistic grasshoppers will consume 3 generations of wealth while lecturing the rest of us – who are stuck paying the bill – about their moral superiority. Pretty easy to feel morally superior when you are the most spoiled generation in the history of the planet.
Perhaps we’d be better off in the hands of contemporary conservatives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIXxzCBS36Q
“FBI-caused cancer”?? Whoa! They can do that?? Way to go, dudes!! Carry on!
Yes,all well and good,however the result of the choices can be seen in the decay of cities. This is where the “Boomer” generation had alienated the generation after.My father had left the city in’68 for many reasons,but still delivered the freight in them. I was born in ’65 and had ridden along with him since I was five,warehouses we worked out of, were once places that manufactured something once. Empty buildings,some burnt in the riots no longer of value to use.
When you drive out industry, cities become a storage for the lower economic rungs managed by a well paid parasitic class. Urban renewal will not fix the underlying problem of not having industry in a city, and industry where not wanted will leave.
Cities have become a soft or low-level form of incarceration of “Broken” people, people who are harder or impossible to educate and thus advance up the ladder of better jobs and living. It is a slavery of invisible chains. Who runs the cities? Who created the laws of a city where the rich with money and lawyers glide past,on their way to “donate” to politicians? If one had deliberately set out to build a tragedy, I could not envision a more accurate result than what is today.
I think a nice thing about the reunion rally was that the revolutionary organizers timed it so the firebrand radicals could catch the early bird special at the Waffle House and still get back to the hotel in time for Wheel Of Fortune.
if there are problems in american education most of them can be lay at the feet of these same sixties radicals. from open admissions in teachers colleges, to courses with no grades, to the complete politicizing of the curriulum, these marxists did everything in their power to destroy the quality of education in america.
I read the link that Prof. Radosh included and what Hayden says Bob Moses called for was “to “think about” pushing for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to quality education for every single American.” Note those last four words. Now this may or may not be a good idea, but I wonder how Ron can spin this to suggest Moses wants an amendment to guarantee only blacks a quality education. The proposal as stated is colorblind.
Human nature – and that is common to all races and ethnic groups, for we are all made of one blood – leans to a certain treacherous slope: we start out wanting equality, but end wanting revenge.