Posted on 10/30/2011 12:22:14 PM PDT by thecodont
Reporting from Yosemite National Park— Their Yosemite Valley tour was nearing its end, and the church ladies and gents from South Los Angeles had heard enough. Almost.
"He's been telling us stories he thinks we want to hear for two hours," said Ann Hale, 70, heaving a sigh of frustration from the back of the tram.
In fact, guide William Fontana had been regaling his listeners — most of them white — with stories about John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, about fur trappers and rock climbers.
"We're still waiting for at least a few words about Yosemite's African American Buffalo Soldiers," Hale grumbled to a fellow passenger.
After filing off the tram, some women from Grace United Methodist Church surrounded Fontana on the sidewalk outside the Yosemite Lodge.
"Questions, ladies?" he asked.
"Yes," Hale said. "We want to know why you left out Yosemite's African American story."
Fontana seemed puzzled. "I don't have enough time to talk about Buffalo Soldiers in a two-hour tour," he explained.
Hale nodded politely and walked away.
For more than 60 years, the National Park Service has been trying to reach out to African Americans and Latinos. But its 395 parks, monuments, waterways, historic places and recreational areas remain largely the province of white Americans and tourists from around the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
BTW did you ever drive around the west end? I wasn’t able to unclench my hands for a week...
Since there really were some Buffalo Soldiers at Yosemite, spending a couple of minutes on their role in a two-hour tour would make sense, but there are an awful lot of other topics at Yosemite deserving of attention. They shouldn't overlook Gifford Pinchot, one of the patron saints of the environmentalist movement, and his support for the Hetch Hetchy dam--good for San Francisco, bad for people who can't see what a beautiful place it was before the dam.
Pinchot created the template for the left-wing character-assassination hit job with his attacks on Sec. of the Interior Richard Ballinger. When Ballinger resigned, President Taft said he had been "the object of one of the most unscrupulous conspiracies for the defamation of character that history can show."
Pinchot is also the one who had the bright idea of reintroducing deer into areas of the eastern US where they weren't found--soon to become a major nuisance because of the lack of natural predators to keep the numbers down.
No
We were told the leeward west side of the island was really very dry with little of interest to see and the road was even worse.
Oh wait! Here is how the NPS REALLY describes it:
“Even though the Buffalo Soldiers wore the uniform of the U.S. Army, their ethnicity combined with the racial prejudice of the time made the performance of their duties quite challenging. In the early 1900s, African-Americans were routinely abused, or even killed, for the slightest perceived offense. They occupied one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder; a fact which served to undercut the authority of any black man who served in any position of power. Yosemite and Sequoia’s Buffalo Soldiers had to be simultaneously strong and diplomatic to fulfill the duties of their job but to avoid giving offense.”
http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/buffalo-soldiers.htm
“In the early 1900s, African-Americans were routinely abused, or even killed, for the slightest perceived offense”
This happens in 2011, in any inner city, a dozen times each day.
“This happens in 2011, in any inner city, a dozen times each day.”
Very, very well said.
Driving Hana by yourself is impressive. My husband wanted to do that until I pointed out that he’d miss everything trying to navigate all the hairpin turns. Make that the _wet_ hairpin turns.
We took a great bus trip, with a funny, informative driver, a *diverse* collection of tourists, all of whom got along with each other, and we could have waded in the pools, but chose not to. Come to think about it, we may have been running short on time.
I agree. This reads more like a leftist journalist school fantasy than an actual event.
Interesting! I lived in the SF area for a number of years, and I remember when they tried to thin the herd of Angel Island (for those who don’t know, this is a little island in SF Bay near Sausalito, where deer were introduced years ago and were chewing through evertying on the island to the point that they had gone through all the vegetation and were starving to death) and hysteria broke out throughout the North Bay...
On the other hand, they were promoting wildcats on Pt Reyes, so I guess that maybe the eco-agenda actually may have worked out in the long run. But Bambi is toast in any case.
Yosemite is awesome all on its own.
El Capitan, Half Dome, Vernal Falls, the Merced River, the giant sequioas -- not one of these care about the skin color of the person beholding them.
Could be. But TR at least managed to popularize it, and as we all know, success goes to the person who stakes the claim!
As for the rest of it, anybody in the universe can go to a National Park, and I can’t see any earthly reason that the parks wouldn’t be visited by non-whites, which according to the press seems to be a pretty broad group, including many whites from non-English speaking white ethnic groups. I’m not sure what constitutes the press definition of “white,” but it seems to be pretty restrictive.
I also don’t know exactly who the new park management is trying to attract, but if they just present history as it was, without the left-wing overlays, they’ll get people of every ethnic group from all over the US.
I really doubt that in 1951 the people running the National Park Service were sitting around asking themselves “How can we make the parks more appealing to African Americans and Latinos?” (In fact they would have found the first term odd and wouldn’t have known what to make of the term “Latinos.”) In 1951 the visitors were probably much “whiter” in composition than today, because fewer non-white Americans had cars to get to the parks and fewer foreign tourists were traveling to the US.
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