Dave19,
I’m going to share a little bit of US history of which you are likely unaware. It should give you more perspective which you sorely lack as well. Let’s wind the hands of time back to 1963, the year before I was born. Three events occurred that year which would become a watershed in the civil rights struggle here in the US.
First, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who self-identifies as African-American, graduated from the University of Georgia, a public institution. It had taken several lawsuits just to allow her to enroll years earlier as well as the dispatching of national guardsmen to the campus to ensure her safety when she first arrived. That same year she entered into a doomed marriage with a white fellow which was widely regarded as illegal due to anti-miscegenation laws on the books in the state that accidentally granted them the marriage license. They subsequently remarried in a neighboring state that permitted what was then termed an interracial marriage.
In the neighboring state of Alabama, black Americans Vivian Malone and James A. Hood successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama, a public institution. Earlier attempts of blacks to enroll in then-called white colleges throughout the state including that one had met with fire hoses, attack dogs, police batons, and bottles thrown by white students and townsfolk. There is a widely-viewed video of then governor George Wallace attempting to block the entrance to the university registrar’s office in protest of a federal order to desegregate the university.
Still later that year, Robert G. Anderson, Henrie Monteith Treadwell, and James L. Solomon became the first three black students to enroll at the University of South Carolina after years of litigation. Litigation to desegregate schools in South Carolina had been an ongoing concern for many years before 1963. The battle encompassed primary and secondary schools as well. See Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952).
The three events highlighted above occurred nearly a decade after the US Supreme Court had ruled state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). So you see, it literally took the Supreme Court's intervention to spread seeds of social cohesion that you believe so easily attainable simply by working your will on it.
There is still a generation of Americans living with fairly fresh memories of the harshness of the nation’s entrenched color line which is arguably just now beginning to dissipate. Many of us call those doyen and doyennes “mom and dad” or “grandma and grandpa”. And in some cases, the cancer of that generation has not been completely eradicated. Positive change does not occur overnight. Nonetheless, neither revisionist history nor suppressing the heritage of any community aids progress towards that end.
This nation is not homogenous in any way, shape, form, or fashion. There are organizations that appeal to the mainstream and others which cater to a particular community by choice. Furthermore, each citizen and/or resident is permitted to do whatever it takes within the law to improve their lot in life, as well as that of their family and whichever community they claim, as they see fit. This may come as a surprise, but the ways in which we conduct our affairs do not require your mother****ing seal of approval.
#FactsMatter...your feelings not so much.
Updated On: 2/4/16 at 01:15 PM
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