Black History month series( As told by a Liberal Newspaper in NC)

By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE, News Editor In Sunday's edition, the Daily News will begin publishing a month-long series of stories focusing on local people, places and events vital to the civil rights movement.

Area, state and national perspectives on the movement and its long-range implications will be provided in the stories, which will run through the final weekend of next month.

The occasional series will examine legal and cultural gains sparked by the movement, but it also will take into account the progress civil rights activists say must be made to ensure racial equality and guarantee the survival of advances codified over years of American law and history.

Above all, the series will afford opportunities for participants in the movement, and some from outside it, to tell their stories in detail not often seen in the mainstream media.

The series' title, "Miles to Go," is drawn from the Robert Frost poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The poem, which speaks of a traveler pondering woods filling with snow, ends with the following lines:

The title also evokes the name of Miles Davis, the fiercely creative and intelligent jazz musician whose music blended with the anthems of the civil rights movement. In addition, the title is reminiscent of the miles walked by marchers who protested segregation and fostered the adjustment of racial attitudes.

Among the stories planned or already completed for the series are the following:

a column featuring Martin County educator Clarence Biggs (the column appears on today's Editorial Page).

"Having grown up in Eastern North Carolina, I believe the region has made great strides over the years in improving relations between the black and white residents," said Rachel Brown Hackney, executive editor of the Daily News. "However, I feel the stories we will be telling over the next few weeks will open the eyes of those both new and native to the area.

"If our efforts can foster even better relations between the races, we will feel we have accomplished one of the most noble goals for which a newspaper can strive."

Named after a 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped blacks, Jim Crow personified the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

Under Jim Crow, blacks were denied political, economic, educational and social equality by unjust laws and social customs that began after slavery ended and lasted nearly 100 years.

In "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow," winner of a 2003 Peabody Award, author Richard Wormser details the long life of the oppressive Jim Crow system.

Jim Crow practices are what made Reconstruction a dirty word in history for decades to follow, with evidence of the cruelty still existing today.

Yet, Reconstruction was a period that held much promise for blacks. Laws were passed to promote black rights; out of them a successful black middle class began to emerge. In turn, so spread the white supremacist reaction, hell-bent on destroying the fledgling black political power.

During the two world wars, black activism began to gain ground, ultimately resulting in the Brown v. Board of Education landmark decision, which desegregated public schools and paved the way for freedom at last.

The Civil War, according to some accounts, was not fought to end slavery, but to protect states' rights.

The question then becomes, as one historian put it, "So which states' rights were being threatened?"

All the historical evidence points to the right to hold slaves as the right most at stake.

It might not have been the immediate issue, but it certainly was the most important issue.

During the war between the states, the radical Republicans, the party's abolitionist wing, urged President Abraham Lincoln to abolish slavery by proclamation.

Lincoln, at first, declined. He was primarily concerned with preserving the Union and did not want to jeopardize losing the border states to the Confederacy.

In 1862, as the war dragged on, Lincoln used a preliminary proclamation to threaten the rebel states into seceding. He gave Confederate states until the end of the year to return to the Union if they wanted to maintain slavery.

When the Confederacy refused, Lincoln issued the final proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, officially abolishing slavery.

After the Confederacy surrendered, the federal government set up conditions for southern states to follow in order to be allowed back into the Union, a period which came to be called Reconstruction.

Each state was required to accept the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution.

The 13th Amendment incorporated the abolition of slavery into the U.S. Constitution. The 14th granted citizenship to the former slaves.

According to one historian, the failure of Reconstruction was greatly exaggerated.

The humiliation of losing the war, mixed with the regulations that were imposed and former slaves being freed and brought up to full citizenship (guaranteed the right to vote) led to the emergence of the infamous Jim Crow laws and race riots and lynchings.

Many white southerners rallied around the Democratic Party as the party of white supremacy. Terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, murdered and intimidated blacks who tried to exercise their right to vote or receive an education.

Between 1870 and 1871, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Enforcement Acts -- criminal codes that protected blacks' rights to vote, hold office, serve on juries and receive equal protection under laws.

The acts targeted the formerly unchecked KKK, which had terrorized and killed thousands of blacks without provocation.

Before the Enforcement Acts, many states were afraid of cracking down on the organization for fear of triggering a race war. Once these terrorist tactics became federal crimes, the situation started to improve. Hundreds of Klansmen were tried and sent to jail. By 1872, the Klan was temporarily disbanded.

According to Wormser's Jim Crow stories, the Republicans made a last-ditch effort to protect Reconstruction by passing the Civil Rights Act in 1875.

The Civil Rights Act guaranteed the freedom of access to public facilities, regardless of race.

It was rarely enforced and eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883.

As a political policy, Reconstruction was a failure. But it succeeded in its goal of reconstructing the Union.

In the presidential election of 1876, the race was so close that an Electoral Commission composed of eight Republicans and seven Democrats had to decide the victor.

Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, was the commission's selection to be the next United States president. The commission voted, along straight party lines, 8-7 to accept all of Hayes' electoral votes and reject the Democrat's claims.

The impasse was broken in the proverbial smoke-filled room, Wormser notes, when southern Democrats agreed to support Hayes' claim for the presidency if he would agree to end Reconstruction.

With the end of Reconstruction and the Supreme Court ruling that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional, segregation was legalized, paving the way for Plessy v. Ferguson.

Speaking of history,
http://www.neoperspectives.com/blackconservatism.htm
Regarding welfare reform:

How many African American will come to Newt Gingrich's funeral? Gingrich may not have done anything for 'Civil Rights', but what exactly is the definition of 'Civil Rights'? If Civil Rights means the 'Advancement of Colored People' (to steal the phrase from the NAACP), then is white, southern, Republican, Newt Gingrich the leader of the modern African American civil rights movement? If we judge him by his results - Yes! And why should we believe his intentions are any different then those of Reverend Jackson and Georgia Representative John Lewis? How strange then, that this man should have so little support from the African American community. We again have the opportunity to witness the contrast between overt explicit racism - met head on and defeated by Johnson, Jackson and Lewis (a real hero in this) and the subtle implicit racism of the 'bigotry of low expectations' perpetuated by the previous three men and defeated by Gingrich and the Republicans. Should we call it teamwork? I dunno... it doesn't quite fit because Gingrich isn't trying to bring back any of old civil rights laws (and Republicans helped pass them anyway), but Jackson, Sharpton, Lewis, Brown, and the rest of the black leadership, along with liberal Democrats, are trying to overturn, or 'fix', the progress that Gingrich and the Republicans have made.

Today, some Conservatives, rather understandably, don’t often appreciate the role that the modern 'civil rights' groups still play in combating explicit racism because they see them as the front-runners of leading their people into implicit slavery through welfare programs etc… Far too often these 'civil rights' groups inexcusably play on their peoples' fear of explicit racism to advance their own agenda and brainwash voters [example 2000 Florida and 2004 Ohio recounts]. This is not to say that the African American leaders, the NAACP, and other organizations don't have a legitimate purpose in fighting overt racism where it still exists, but why can't they fight both kinds of racism? Why did (do) they support the slavery of welfare?

Initially, they may not have had much choice. During the 50s and 60s a great political upheaval took place across the solidly Democratic South as some Southern Democrats, who since the civil war had led the fight against the civil rights movement and desegregation, grew disgusted with the national Democratic leadership and bolted to the Republican party. Over the years various historical revisionisms have been put forth that label(ed) the Southern Republican party as the new 'party of the racists'. In truth, there were many differences between the Southern Democrats and the new leftward movement of their national party and racist attitudes were fading. Cultural issues, taxes, pacifism, and the growing religious movements all contributed to the slow exodus from the Democratic party. In the 1968 Presidential election it was a segregationist Democrat, George Wallace, who carried the South. In 1976 Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat (who ran as a centrist) and a strong civil rights supporter, swept the South.

But the fact that some leftover extremist elements entered the folds of the Republican party (where some remain today - like the CCC) was enough to cause African American groups to, understandably, choose the opposite path. Having ancestors abused as slaves and then living through the bitter experiences of discrimination and segregation drove the newfound African American political movement to embrace socialism almost by default. Old style 'moderate' Southern Democrats like George Wallace were more interested in rolling back civil rights gains then tackling the racial problems of the South, and the growing Southern Republican party was also indecisive, attempting to pander to it's many constituencies. The only place African Americans found acceptance and true outrage over the racial conditions in the South was on the far left of the American political spectrum. Early civil rights marches, especially in Washington, were also attended by labor unions. Martin Luther King Jr's SCL (Southern Christian Leadership) civil rights organization received much of it's funding from New England liberals. King was a socialist, and was accused (perhaps often unjustly) of having communist sympathies.

Nonetheless, one can only agree that it would be better to live as a socialist then as a slave or second class citizen. Having listened to Martin Luther King Jr's autobiography (250), read Malcom X's autobiography (249), and attended a 2000 Monmouth University speech by Black Panther co-founder Bobby Searle, I can certainly appreciate the effectiveness of King's nonviolent methods in bringing change. As progress against explicit racism advanced through this method, we must then ask at what point does the harm through implicit racism (via welfare) begin to overshadow the good achieved through combating explicit racism? And did the civil rights movement have to be fought this way? How would African Americans be living today if the civil rights movement was fought using King's nonviolence, but with a conservative ideology? Would it have gotten the same support amongst African Americans at the time? The innately deceptive and ultimately destroying promises of (economic) liberalism must surely have found acceptance amongst the poorer black populations and garnered additional support for the civil rights movement. All of these questions are not easily answered. In the end, African Americans did achieve civil rights - but at what a cost! And when will this economic stagnation and family dissolution finally stop? When will an African American leader stand up and shout, "Enough is enough - we are free - now let's take off these chains!"?

The most amazing thing is that liberal black leaders and organizations, to this day, attack conservative African Americans as "Uncle Toms". Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, the highest ranking elected Republican in the country had Oreo cookies thrown at him - black on the outside, white on the inside - during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign (238). Black leaders don't apologize and admit that conservative African Americans were right about Welfare Reform; they attack and demean them.

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