Month: April 2018

Innocent Black Men Arrested in Starbucks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/04/16/two-black-men-were-arrested-at-starbucks-ceo-now-calling-for-unconscious-bias-training/?utm_term=.bc65fc2b400e

 

After our discussion today in class and reading DR. King’s blog post about continued inequality and discrimination in the United States for black people, I was reminded of a story on the news I saw a couple of days ago. Last week two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks just for waiting for a friend. The store manager called the police on the two black men who were waiting to meet a friend saying that they were trespassing. Soon six police officers arrived  and arrested the men for “not complying and trespassing.” This was absolutely discrimination, there is no doubt in my mind that if the two men were white that the store manager would have never called the police. This act has led to protests in Philadelphia and a boycott of Starbucks. The CEO of Starbucks now plans to implement training for all employees to try and eliminate discrimination in his stores.

Blacks Still Face a Red Line on Housing

Blacks Still Face a Red Line on Housing

By the Editorial Board

“For generations of white American families, homeownership has been a fundamental means of accumulating wealth. Their homes have grown in value over time, providing security in retirement and serving as an asset against which they can borrow for education or other purposes.

But African-Americans were essentially shut out of early federal programs that promoted homeownership and financial well-being — including the all-important New Deal mortgage insurance system that generated the mid-20th-century homeownership boom. This missed opportunity to amass wealth that white Americans took for granted is evident to this day in a yawning black-white wealth gap and in worse health, living conditions and educational opportunities for African-Americans.

The Fair Housing Act, which turned 50 years old last week, ended the most egregious forms of discrimination and brought a modest rise in black homeownership. But those gains — and the hard-won wealth they represented — were wiped out a decade ago in the Great Recession, which reduced the African-American homeownership rate to levels not seen since housing discrimination was legal in the 1960s.

These losses reflect the persistence of financial racism in America and the fact that black people who were eligible for affordable credit were victimized by predatory loans that paid off handsomely for brokers and lenders but led borrowers to foreclosure.”

Memorial to Lynching Victims

 

“Oprah Winfrey brings 60 Minutes cameras into a new memorial dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynching that took place over a 70-year period following the Civil War. It will be the first time the public sees the inside of the structure and its 805 steel markers, each bearing the names of people murdered – often with thousands of onlookers amid a picnic-like atmosphere. Her report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, April 8 at 7:00 p.m., ET/PT on CBS.

Each marker represents a state county and contains the names of victims of documented lynching from that area. The memorial takes up six acres in the heart of Montgomery, Alabama, perhaps the best known city in the struggle for civil rights. Alabama was also the scene of 361 documented lynchings.”

Ruby Bridges

Ruby Bridges Goes to School

Right up there through the history books honoring brave students who lead the integration movement was a kindergartner names Ruby Bridges. Many don’t know a lot about this brave little girl but I think she played a prominent role in the civil rights movement. She had a mother with a dream: for a daughter to have better opportunities than she did. Her mom knew the white school nearby was better than the black schools so she marched holding her daughter’s hand to make a change.

For one little girl entering into their school many parents pulled their kids out of school, threatened her and her family, she had to spend the first day at the principal’s office for protection, and she was put in a class by herself with the only teacher willing to teach her. That was just the tip of the iceberg, as her father lost his job, her grandparents got evicted from their sharecropping farm, and even the grocery store stoped selling goods to her mom. All this didn’t deter her and she kept going to school until more black students started enrolling in the school.

Ruby was only in kindergarten and was already civil rights activist through her actions. She had to have four federal Marshall’s escort her to schools through a screaming mob, and she still went to school everyday. Some may say as a kid, she only followed her mom’s orders, but if my mom was moving me away from my friends and sending me to a school like that, I would have thrown so many tantrums, that she would have no choice but to let me back into my old school.

Emmett Till



The Emmett Till story is very heart wrenching for me because it showed how cruel the Jim Crow Era really was. For a young boy to be tortured to such an extreme, and then killed in that manner just because he was accused of just whistling at a white woman. At that point black people were not regarded as humans, because hatred and racism blinded most.

In Southern Horrors Ida B. Wells highlighted that such acts were done just to validate white supremacy and most of the men accused of rape were not given trial, and some were even taken out of jail to be killed. The white people saw it as the only way to restore white rule. In cases where the sexual encounters did occur, they were mostly consensual but the white women in question, were often forced to talk about rape, and if they refused they were shunned. On the other hand, it was perfectly fine for a white man to seduce a black woman as well as they don’t try to marry them.

The worst people in these situations were not those doing the violence and lynching but those who sat there and did nothing- choosing to stay ignorant. Many in the North ignored the true conditions that a lot of black people were going through, and though many black people moved to the North for better opportunities, they still met with racism.