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Getting Woke before Woke Was a Thing
American Thinker.com ^ | February 28, 2021 | Joe Strader

Posted on 02/28/2021 5:55:31 AM PST by Kaslin

I am just old enough to remember a racist south. It is where I was born. The place where I lived was transforming around me as I grew up. We got “woke” before it was a thing. I was too immature to see it at the time and only came to understand what happened after many years of reflection on those events.

Some of the last vestiges of the Jim Crow south remained in my small community. Schools were still segregated when I started school. Only Whites were allowed to sit in the lower level of the movie theater. African-Americans had to use the balcony. Lunch counters were mostly White-only. It seemed normal but, even in my preteen thinking, it felt wrong.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement was growing. Mixed with the news from Vietnam were the stories from closer to home, places we had visited, such as Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis. It seemed unreal. Southern people were at the point of the spear and many could not understand. Southerners mostly thought that the remnants of retained racism were acceptable. It was as it always had been. There was denial.

An amazing thing began to happen. Southern people began to look at themselves and examine their attitudes. It was not something that could be seen from the outside. It was an intensely personal self-evaluation. Over a period of several years, many southerners had looked into themselves and they saw something they did not like. They decided to change but it was a long slow process.

Our churches were at the center of this change. My father was a deacon in his Baptist church, and he participated in public discussions seeking insights into what God would want. I saw my father spend many hours seeking answers.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
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To: Kaslin

Yes the New South is so wonderful

Memphis

Jackson Mississippi

Much of Atlanta

Tony Buckhead is dangerous due to the hood ratz

Nearly all southern cities are now dangerous as hell in black areas and completely governed by a cabal of black democrats with their hands out and a few white libs and a token GOPe here and there

Only thing saving any of them is the white hipster influx too naive to know they are living in danger or ironically the woke displacing the very people they claim to love and who “matter”

That is Nashville

It’s why people who want families usually leave cities now ...to suburbs etc

So it’s a mixed bag

It’s hard to envision but family wise and more blacks above poverty existed prior to so called segregation ending....and another stupid little observance is this steady yankee bloviation that segregation was only in the south

Yankees segregated too and still do

Even though blacks were far less a percentage there...


21 posted on 02/28/2021 7:19:20 AM PST by wardaddy (P IN 1999 JIM THOMPSON WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE BUSHES ...WE WERE WRONG)
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To: skepsel

I don’t mean to claim there were NO issues outside the South, but that segregation wasn’t as widespread as some claim. Of course, busing was controversial for many reasons and some people rioted over the State’s imposition of it, not necessarily the fact that it involved blacks. Having your kids bused to another location, further away put a strain on many families beyond any racial aspects.


22 posted on 02/28/2021 7:20:50 AM PST by Amberdawn (Want To Honor Our Troops? Then Be A Citizen Worth Fighting For.)
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To: skepsel

No apology needed, I understand where you’re coming from. I always defend Southerners if and when I hear someone spouting BS about them.


23 posted on 02/28/2021 7:22:01 AM PST by Amberdawn (Want To Honor Our Troops? Then Be A Citizen Worth Fighting For.)
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To: Kaslin

Woke doesn’t mean now what it meant then. It means so much more ... much of it lunacy and stupidity (hereafter I’m neglecting the communist or perverted sides of wokeness and only looking at the racial aspects).

Woke is the new bigotry. Not really against whites, though of course that’s there too, but notably against black people for all these things that wokeness now ascribes to whiteness: from math skill to good grammar to patriotism and other stuff like that there.

The old bigotry of the KKK could never get black people to agree that such were somehow white and part of how they were oppressed. The new Leftwing approved bigotry hobbles children ... but, hey, the race grievance hustlers behind wokeness can still get paid for keeping folks unhappier and angrier than they’d otherwise be!


24 posted on 02/28/2021 7:34:02 AM PST by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
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To: Cecily

I live in Manhattan in the 80s and it was very segregated yankees on this forum are as usual full of crap and self righteous

They have no clue what it’s like to live in a community that 3040 5060 7080% black no friggin idea but like good Yankees they can’t help but preaching tell us how to do it square heads always know best

Just look at Sweden today were a lot of these people come from all of the Evangelical Lutheran Church it can’t get more woke

The north today anywhere where there are a lot of black people is still very segregated about where people live and go to school and the people who live in urban areas pay for their kids to go to private schools so as not to go to school with ghetto black kids same as any where

Oh I’m a Yankee and I live where we have three black people in there so friendly shucks they remind me of the Cosby show

How far in their general directions

Come to Jackson Mississippi ill educate your dumb butts

I cannot believe how puffed up with self-righteous vigor so many northerners are even
in 2020

This has been in observance of mine here for 20 years it’s the first place I ever saw there were conservatives who hated the south they are listed on my homepage for anyone interested

I’ll tell you were boys and girls without the white south y’all are screwed

Unfortunately so many of your moving down here now so it might be a lost cause literally


25 posted on 02/28/2021 7:34:50 AM PST by wardaddy (P IN 1999 JIM THOMPSON WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE BUSHES ...WE WERE WRONG)
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To: Kaslin

The north was racist too. Talk about a racist South, should be talk about a racist country. Racism is not unique to the south or the world.


26 posted on 02/28/2021 7:44:04 AM PST by Carry me back (Cut the feds by 90%)
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To: Kaslin

The north was racist too. Talk about a racist South, should be talk about a racist country. Racism is not unique to the south or the world.


27 posted on 02/28/2021 7:44:13 AM PST by Carry me back (Cut the feds by 90%)
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To: All

I remember all those things the author describes, and my mother a classic liberal showed us what was right by her actions. When she drove our maid home, we sat in back seat and maid in front seat with my mother. Never discussed it was done. Also she told our maid to come to front door and not back. Word got out in black community that we were ok. So the children came to front door selling blackberries. We always bought them. I never thought about this until adult.

I met my first Republican in 1969 or 70. I was so shocked to meet a Republican, I asked him why he was that way. He told me and I said “I agree with that” and changed my registration. But what he told me had nothing to do with race, it was about economics. I remember him telling me the fish story. ie give a man a fish.....It just made sense.


28 posted on 02/28/2021 7:49:38 AM PST by Karoo
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To: Kaslin

What a great read! Thanks for sharing.


29 posted on 02/28/2021 8:48:36 AM PST by blu (Bagster's ping on the side)
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To: ClearCase_guy

I lived in the Jim Crow South too. Joe Strader’s father did ‘soul searching’ but many - if not most - democrats went from ‘blacks can do no right’ to ‘blacks can do no wrong’... A position equally damaging to the black culture.

As far as the South trending Republican - a large part of that was caused by northerners moving South and discovering in a one party region - the person who won the Democrat primary WAS the winner. So after a while Republican transplants registered Democrat so they would have a voice in picking ‘the least of the racists’ among democrats running... The big switch for democrat group-think happened around 1967 -’68.

Another story not told was in the early days of the civil rights movement there was resistance in the black community against the ‘people who were moving too fast’. In early ‘64 I was part of a group working out of the CORE Freedom House trying to get support in the black community for a civilian police review board. To say that the black community was - at that point - “conservative” is an understatement. We had to dump the idea of petition backing that idea... I think it was John Lewis who said he knew everyone in the Civil Rights Movement in 1964 and he didn’t know Bernie. First, Bernie had proof - and second that gives you some idea of how small the civil rights movement was when the 3 civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi.


30 posted on 02/28/2021 9:24:42 AM PST by GOPJ (Was Jussie Smollett working for "Homeland Security" when he faked his hate crimes?)
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To: Kaslin

I was born in the days of “Eeny meeney miney moe . . . .”


31 posted on 02/28/2021 9:32:14 AM PST by Fester Chugabrew (No audit. No peace.)
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To: sheana

I can imagine! Either way, it proves that there were different mores in different places, not standardized behavior nationwide.


32 posted on 02/28/2021 9:36:08 AM PST by Amberdawn (Want To Honor Our Troops? Then Be A Citizen Worth Fighting For.)
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To: Fester Chugabrew
And I was born in the days of:

Ich und du,

Mueller's Kuh

Muellers Esel

Das bist du!!!

33 posted on 02/28/2021 9:58:11 AM PST by Kaslin (Joe Biden will never be my President, and neither will Kamala Harris)
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To: SomeCallMeTim

Ronald Reagan was the first president I voted for in 1980, and I voted Republican ever since.


34 posted on 02/28/2021 10:07:26 AM PST by Kaslin (Joe Biden will never be my President, and neither will Kamala Harris)
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To: wardaddy
We bought or house in 1967. My husband lived in only for four month as he was on orders for Vietnam. Our two boys and I lived in until July 1968 when my husband came back from Vietnam, and was on orders for Germany. We rented the house out and drove down to Florida to spend his vacation with his parents until it was time to fly to Germany.

Anyway there were no blacks living in the whole area until my husband retired from the army in 1979, Then there were a few black people that had moved in. Two houses down from our house lives an elderly Black couple, and next to them a black family. On the other side of the street lives a black couple two houses down from the house across from ours. The had a son who went to school with my late son.

35 posted on 02/28/2021 10:39:01 AM PST by Kaslin (Joe Biden will never be my President, and neither will Kamala Harris)
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To: Kaslin

I picked up an old tourist map of Florida once, printed about 1959. There were little images of whites doing fun things. The only blacks were two kids grinning while eating watermelon. (People of all races usually like watermelon but for some reason black people eating watermelon became some kind of patronizing stereotype.)


36 posted on 02/28/2021 12:52:16 PM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: Kaslin
Ronald Reagan was the first president I voted for in 1980, and I voted Republican ever since.

Me too... To this day, I've never been more proud of a vote I made. I was SO DISSAPOINTED in 1976... I was just a few months to young to vote for Reagan in the primary.

37 posted on 02/28/2021 2:19:33 PM PST by SomeCallMeTim ( The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them!it)
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To: Cecily

Well said.


38 posted on 02/28/2021 4:11:59 PM PST by Pelham (Liberate the Democrats from their Communist occupation)
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