Category Archives: Black & White & Other Colors

The Red Hen vs the Lunch Counter: Which Values Apply?

On the one hand, the report of it sets off alarms and bring back vivid memories from my young activist years. Then  most restaurants, especially in the South, were racially segregated. And it took long hard months of protests (that had really started on a small scale years earlier) to begin to break through and open up this part of public space to nonwhite Americans.

Soon after, when a major Civil Rights bill was moving through Congress, one of the toughest, longest fights over it focused on the provision that would make “public accommodations:”(especially restaurants, lunch counters, stores and hotels) open to all regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. And those of us who supported it were thrilled when this provision was voted in.
Rising comedian Dick Gregory managed to wring rueful jokes out of all this:
“We tried to integrate a restaurant, and they said, `We don’t serve colored folk here,’ and I said, `Well, I don’t eat colored folk nowhere. Bring me some pork chops.'”
And: “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months. When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
So when the great Civil Rights Act was finally passed in the summer of 1965,  one of its first and most visible impacts was the opening up of “public accommodations” to hungry customers of all shades and denominations.

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Nikki Haley’s Got A Lot of Nerve; She Really Needs a Waffle

A good friend works the late shift in a 24-hour diner near here. During the slow hours, the diner is a stopping place for homeless people. For the last couple of nights, one particular homeless man has come in. Last night he handed over a grimy five dollar bill and ordered some eggs & bacon.

Halfway through eating it he stood and asked for a  take-out box. When  handed it, he walked around the nearly-empty diner, scooped into it all the scraps and leftovers from plates that hadn’t been cleared, then left.

Such scavenging is strictly against the house rules; but my friend studiously ignored it. She’s become particularly permissive since she got acquainted with two young women camping out behind the dumpster in the back parking lot.

She met them during the recent dry weeks. Then the rains came for several days, often pelting and blowing, and the young women are gone. We’re in the third week of another dry spell, and newcomers are here, crouched behind a different dumpster by the gas station up the block. They sweat through the mid-nineties days and scrounge for food that’s enroute to becoming trash.

Which brings me to Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN, who just threw a fit because that body’s poverty investigator (aka special rapporteur) after making an extensive study trip cross the nation,  dared to call for examining poverty in America.

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Culling a Clue about Kids from our Carolina Crackpots

Wouldn’t somebody in that batsh*t crazy crowd around the White House have realized –ahead of time– that this plan would blow up on them? That it would produce thousands of heart-rending images of kids under threat? That it could even upset some evangelicals?

Evidently not. In fact, their anti-immigrant inside guru, Stephen Miller bragged to the Atlantic just the other day that this plan was a guaranteed political winner.

Maybe he knows something I don’t know. After all, Miller’s in the White (supremacy) House, and I’m just a geezer in — well, I AM in North Carolina.

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A Visit to the Border

I’m a long way from the Mexican border. But like many others, I can’t tear my eyes away from it, via  the media. Many journalists are doing fine work this week, bringing the rending of families there into sharp focus. Here’s a sampling; hope the images and text make some impact. From the Jackson, Mississippi … Continue reading A Visit to the Border →

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Slavery, The Bible, Southern Baptists & Irony

The Southern Baptist Convention just adopted a resolution condemning the view that the Bible supports slavery, which was the main premise on which the SBC was founded back in 1845. To back up this new view, it cites Bible verses used by 18th Century abolitionists to condemn slavery, which the early SBC long & steadfastly denounced as heretical, subversive, etc. That’s Irony #1.
Irony #2 is that the abolitionists were wrong & the early SBCers were correct: the Bible DOES support slavery, in numerous texts; and Jesus, who spoke of slaves often, never said a negative word about the practice.

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