Re: Drawing the Wrong Lessons From Selma About America Today?

On 3/13/15, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason L. Riley trots out the statistics to prove that minorities
> really didn't have it so bad back in the 40's through the 60's. His
> facts show Black Americans integrating and finding work at a much
> faster pace than today, despite all the regulations by Liberal
> Government.
> So, I don't have a bunch of studies to point to. All I have are my
> memories of those times. I was 20 in 1955 when I dropped out of
> college for the first time. I remember the big fight at the
> University of Washington over allowing a couple of Negroes on the
> varsity team. Both were superb athletes, but their color caused
> criticism, even though after the coach insisted they play, they became
> the backbone of the team.
> I saw virtually no Black students among the some 30 thousand students
> attending the U. in 1955. In down town Seattle, I was startled when I
> saw the first Black person walking along the sidewalk in front of the
> Bon Marche department store. I recall about the same time when I
> almost fell back off the steps of the city bus because I found myself
> looking into the Black face of the driver. The first Black bus driver
> in the city. Along the same time I was stopped in my tracks when I
> saw a White woman walking arm in arm with a Black man. Everybody on
> that street turned and glared at the couple. Looking back I have to
> admire their guts.
> When my first wife and I went house hunting in 1962, Red Lining was a
> common practice. Black families were never shown houses in certain
> areas. In fact, that was most areas outside the Central Area. I had
> no Black school teachers or professors. No Black doctors or nurses
> during my several stays in hospitals, while undergoing eye surgery.
> No Black mail carriers until well into the 70's. No Black janitors in
> any of the schools I attended. No Persons of Color in any of the
> several churches I attended. Around 1963, a young couple, both Junior
> High School teachers, moved themselves and their two sweet little
> daughters into our neighborhood. What an uproar! "Just you watch",
> my father-in-law told me, "property prices are going to go down the
> toilet and those Negroes will take over the neighborhood". By the
> way, this couple kept the neatest yard on the block. One day I looked
> out the window and saw the two girls walking, hand in hand, up the
> road to the Evangelical Church, the same church my wife and I
> attended. Our Christian brothers and sisters turned a solid cold
> shoulder to those two little girls. They came another couple of
> Sundays, and then stopped.
> Another time I was scolded for befriending a Mexican fellow who came
> and sat in the back pew. He was given the entire pew. It was
> Thanksgiving, so my wife and I invited him to join us for dinner. He
> did. And in return he insisted on doing our yard work without pay.
> We insisted, but he said to give it to the poor. When he did not
> attend again, I told my wife I was no longer a member of that church.
> The pastor and I had several long discussions, and he was a good,
> caring man, but he was unable to bring himself to challenge the Board
> of Trustees.
> And I almost forgot Al. Al was a talented Black musician, a transfer
> to Ballard high school in 1953. He had a band, and played several of
> the local nightspots. No one ever checked Al to see if he was old
> enough to play in those taverns. Al was Ballard's only Black student.
> We also had one Asian girl, one Mexican girl and one Native Alaskan
> Indian boy. Everyone else was pure European descent. Mostly sons and
> daughters of Norwegian and Swede fishermen and mill workers.
> So my elder sister invited Al to our Halloween Party in 1953. About
> two days later my best friend in high school came to the house and
> asked if he could speak to me in private. He told me that he was
> speaking for "the group", and they wanted me to know that next time we
> planned to have Al at a party, they would appreciate knowing in
> advance, so they could refuse to attend.
> As I said, I have no statistics to trot out, but that's the world I
> grew up in. There was blatant discrimination. Not only toward
> Persons of Color, but toward women, too. Why would Jason L. Riley and
> others try to sell us a different, Make Believe World? We were, and
> we are a very prejudiced people. And we will not change easily.
> Especially if we continue to deny it. Let's quit pretending that by
> changing names, and situations that things are better.
> And by the way, calling the Obama administration Liberal, is one more
> big, fat old Fairy Tale.
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
>
>
> On 3/12/15, R. E. Driscoll Sr <llocsirdsr@att.net> wrote:
>> All:
>> I found this to be interesting. Some new thoughts to me and perhaps to
>> others. Certainly is not what I have been seeing and reading in local
>> sources of news or over the national TV news.
>>
>> http://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-l-riley-drawing-the-wrong-lessons-from-selma-about-america-today-1426028297?mod=rss_opinion_main
>>
>>
>> Drawing the Wrong Lessons From Selma About America Today
>>
>>
>> Ferguson, Mo., in 2015 is not Alabama in 1965. But liberals have
>> reasons to pretend otherwise.
>>
>> By
>> Jason L. Riley
>> March 10, 2015 6:58 p.m. ET
>> 155 COMMENTS
>> <http://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-l-riley-drawing-the-wrong-lessons-from-selma-about-america-today-1426028297?mod=rss_opinion_main#livefyre-comment>
>>
>>
>>
>> When National Public Radio on Sunday asked Selma's mayor how--not
>> whether, but how--"what happened in Selma 50 years ago fits into the
>> current conversation about race relations in this country," he rejected
>> the query's premise.
>>
>> "I'm not so sure how it fits," said George Evans, the Alabama city's
>> second black mayor. "We have a lot more crime going on in 2015 all over
>> this country than we had in 1965. Segregation existed, but we didn't
>> have the crime. So now, even though we've gained so much through voting
>> rights and Bloody Sunday, we've stepped backwards when it comes to crime
>> and drugs and the jail system--things like that."
>>
>> The interviewer pressed him. "What is life like for the average citizen
>> in Selma," which is 80% black, she asked. "I mean, your city does have
>> challenges. You've got chronic unemployment rates. What are the biggest
>> problems from your vantage point?"
>>
>> Selma Mayor George Evans in January Photo: Getty Images
>>
>> Still, Mr. Evans wouldn't give her the answer she was fishing for. He
>> wouldn't play the race card. "Well, from the standpoint of jobs, we have
>> a lot of jobs. It's just that there are a lot of people who do not have
>> the skill level to man these jobs. And that's the biggest problem we
>> have. There are industries and businesses here that are searching for
>> people to come to work. But many times they're not able to get the jobs
>> because they're not going back to pick up that trade or that technical
>> skill that's needed in order to take that job."
>>
>> The mayor's comments are noteworthy because so many others have used the
>> anniversary of the historic march to score political points and draw
>> tortured parallels between the challenges facing blacks a half-century
>> ago and those facing blacks today. In remarks last weekend at the foot
>> of the bridge in Selma where police billy-clubbed and tear-gassed
>> peaceful protesters on March 7, 1965, President Obama decried
>> "overcrowded prisons" and "unfair sentencing" without ever mentioning
>> black crime rates. He repeatedly invoked Ferguson and called
>> photo-identification laws "voter suppression." Maybe someone should send
>> Mr. Obama a link to the NPR interview with Mayor Evans.
>>
>> Ferguson, Mo., in 2015 is not Selma, Ala., in 1965. Black people in
>> America today are much more likely to experience racial preferences than
>> racial slights. The violent crime that is driving the black
>> incarceration rate spiked after the civil-rights victories of the 1960s,
>> not before. And if voter-ID laws threaten the black franchise, no one
>> seems to have told the black electorate. According to the Census Bureau,
>> the black voter-turnout rate in 2012 exceeded the white turnout rate,
>> even in states with the strictest voter-ID requirements.
>>
>>
>> Opinion Journal Video
>>
>> Manhattan Institute Fellow Jason Riley on why the parallel between 1965
>> Alabama and present-day Ferguson is bunk. Photo credit: Associated Press.
>>
>> The socioeconomic problems that blacks face today have nothing to do
>> with civil-rights barriers and nearly everything to do with a black
>> subculture that rejects certain attitudes and behaviors that are
>> conducive to upward mobility. Yet Mr. Obama has a political interest--and
>> the civil-rights industry has a vested interest--in pretending that the
>> opposite is true.
>>
>> "Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral
>> manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life
>> in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs," writes
>> the Hoover Institution's Shelby Steele in "Shame," his timely new book
>> on political polarization and race relations in the U.S. This
>> liberalism, he adds, is "not much interested in addressing
>> discrimination case by case; rather, it assumes that all minorities and
>> women are systematically discriminated against so that only
>> government-enforced preferential policies for these groups--across the
>> entire society--can bring us close to equity."
>>
>> Liberalism, moreover, tends to ignore or play down the black advancement
>> that took place prior to the major civil-rights triumphs of the 1960s
>> and instead credits government interventions that at best continued
>> trends already in place. Black poverty fell 40 percentage points between
>> 1940 and 1960--a drop that no Great Society antipoverty program has ever
>> come close to matching. Blacks were also increasing their years of
>> schooling and entering the white-collar workforce at a faster rate prior
>> to the affirmative-action schemes of the 1970s than they were after
>> those programs were put in place to help them.
>>
>> The civil-rights battles of the 1960s have been fought and won, thanks
>> in part to the thousands of brave souls who marched 50 years ago from
>> the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma to the
>> Montgomery Statehouse. The racial disparity that persists today is not
>> evidence that too many blacks face the same challenges they did in 1965,
>> that "the march is not yet finished," as Mr. Obama asserted. Rather, it
>> is evidence that too few blacks--as Selma's mayor told NPR--have taken
>> advantage of the opportunities now available to them.
>>
>> /Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor,
>> is the author of "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder
>> for Blacks to Succeed" (Encounter Books, 2014)./
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ---
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