[informavoracious]

Only those of us of a certain age remember when black Americans had solid families with married parents, fathers who worked every day - many owning successful businesses, sent their kids to school every day with clean faces and clean clothes, disciplined them if they misbehaved went to Bible-believing churches and tried to live the Ten Commandments. Many young people think it always has been the way it is today, that black men don’t marry and support their women because from the beginning slaves were torn from their families and they never had a chance to bond. They don’t know that at one time more blacks were married percentage-wise than whites.

[RipSawyer]

I know about those days. I know why there used to be an expression in the South, “Workin’ like a ———. Because in those days most black men worked very, very hard indeed. That was when they wanted equality of opportunity. Now they have it and more but all too many now want not equality of opportunity but superiority of outcome guaranteed by government. Some actually are calling for white people to be killed as if they don’t realize that puts them in the same class with the very worst of the white racists who ever lived in bygone years. I have lived in South Carolina for seventy years and if I want to find a real hard core racist now I can find a black one quicker than I can find a white one.

[Verginius Rufus]

Yesterday C-SPAN3 (the American History Channel) played a 1944 film called "The Negro Soldier." It was a government-produced film to encourage support for the war effort. The black people depicted in the movie were very patriotic Americans determined to do the best they could with their lives.

For obvious reasons they ignored negative items like segregation in favor of emphasizing the contributions black soldiers had made in earlier American wars, the contributions made by Booker T. Washington, George Carver, Jesse Owens, etc., and the blacks then serving in the US military (including the Tuskegee airmen). But the whole tone was 180 degrees apart from what the media gives us all the time nowadays.

[Nepeta]

Only those of us of a certain age remember when black Americans had solid families with married parents, fathers who worked every day - many owning successful businesses, sent their kids to school every day with clean faces and clean clothes, disciplined them if they misbehaved went to Bible-believing churches and tried to live the Ten Commandments. Many young people think it always has been the way it is today, that black men don’t marry and support their women because from the beginning slaves were torn from their families and they never had a chance to bond. They don’t know that at one time more blacks were married percentage-wise than whites.

I remember that.

My friends who were black came from families like that, and they were not unusual.

[cherry]

at the Marriot in Annapolis there used to be a display of photographs of American blacks from decades before....all dressed to the hilt, attending some dance in a very fancy place....

there may have been segregation back in the old day, but I dare say, blacks were happier establishing their own traditions and rituals and that included education,marriage, and prosperity...

[gusty]

A couple of decades ago, there was a show on the local ABC affiliate called Tony Brown's Journal. Brown would talk about towns in the South that were black that had a vibrant economy going. Despite the injustice of segregation on its face, it did create a parallel economy that was vibrant and prosperous. In sports, the Negro Baseball Leagues were a major sports league owned and run by blacks. The unintended consequence of integration was that it killed off this economy. It couldn't survive the competition from its new and stronger white competitors. I have wondered what might have happened if anyone back in the Civil Rights Era had taken this into consideration. It seemed the civil rights leaders had no idea who among those they represented would be hurt.

[tomkat]

I remember that time.