By Ken Hughes | Published Thursday, September 24, 2009
On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously outlawed imposed racial segregation in public schools anywhere in the United States.
On Aug. 28, 1955, Money, Miss., 14 year-old Emmett Till of Chicago, in Mississippi visiting relatives, is kidnapped, beaten to death, tied to a piece of heavy machinery and tossed into the Yazoo River about 15 miles north of Money. One eye was gouged out, and his crushed-in skull had a bullet in it. The corpse was nearly unrecognizable. What was his "crime?" - speaking to a white girl in a tiny Mississippi country store.
In Jackson, Miss., on March 29, 1956, with the blessing of Governor Coleman, the state created the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission "to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi." Its intent was one thing and one thing only - the perpetuation of racial segregation and white supremacy.
June 12, 1963, in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Miss., Medgar Evers, wearing a "Jim Crow Must Go!" T-shirt was shot in the back and killed by the "brave" White Citizen's Council and Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. Tried twice in 1963 with a deadlocked jury both times, he was eventually convicted in 1994 and died in prison in 2001.
On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated, a crime to which James Earl Ray, after being captured at London's Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, and returned to Tennessee, confessed March 10, 1969. Sentenced to 99 years, Ray dies in prison April 23, 1998
With the above as a backdrop to outrageous charges and talk since President Obama's election, one sees that continuing into the 21st century, civil rights in America still runs a torturous path forced upon it at almost every opportunity. From Alaska and Texas, as well as other southern states there's talk of secession, state sovereignty and armed nutcases at so-called town hall "meetings." It's clear that America has a lot to learn from its racist past if we are to have a future open to all its citizens and immigrants. At long last America has its first-ever President who is equally American as African, equally "white" as "black" and still the racist past looms as a racist future if Americans allow it to happen. That's sad, very sad indeed.
