Former City Worker Sues City of Tampa for Firing Him Over Confederate License Plate

AP ^ | 03/12/2003

[Phlap]

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - A former city worker who was fired for refusing to remove a Confederate flag license plate from his truck is suing the city of Tampa.

In a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, Larry A. Carpenter, 47, said his First Amendment right to free speech was violated when he was fired over the dispute.

Carpenter was ordered in January 2002 to remove the license plate or park his truck off city property. He refused to do either, was cited for insubordination and was fired from his job as a traffic maintenance specialist in the Public Works Department.

Carpenter's attorney, J. Benton Stewart II, said his client, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, is proud of his heritage and merely wants the city to develop a written policy that is uniformly applied.

Stewart said other city workers who drive vehicles with bumper stickers bearing political slogans and offensive statements are allowed to park on city property.

Messages left with City Attorney Jim Palermo were not immediately returned. Carpenter declined to comment on the lawsuit Wednesday.

[hoosierskypilot]

you neo-rebs

Easy on your name-calling. You liberals seem to believe in freedom of speech, but only as long as it is your speech that is free.

For the tenth time, I never said Lincoln was not personally opposed to slavery. He was. I said, and your post confirms, that slavery was not his primary concern for the civil war.

[WhiskeyPapa]

At issue was a) the North wanting to preserve the Union and b) the South wanting to preserve their sovereignty.

The sovereignty of the United States rests on the whole people of the United States.

See Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), Martin v Hunter's Lessee (1816), Cohens v. Virginia (1821) and McCullough v Maryland (1819).

It's bad form to wait 70 years and say you don't agree.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

you neo-rebs

Easy on your name-calling. You liberals seem to believe in freedom of speech, but only as long as it is your speech that is free.

It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. You spout the neo-reb nonsense and lies.

Walt

[hoosierskypilot]

You spout the neo-reb nonsense and lies

Funny how you liberals resort to whining when you're exposed for the revisionist liars you are.

[WhiskeyPapa]

You spout the neo-reb nonsense and lies

Funny how you liberals resort to whining when you're exposed for the revisionist liars you are.

It was revision wheh you partially quoted the Greeley letter.

Now you're outed.

Walt

[cyborg]

http://www.dixieoutfitters.com/mission.html

BUMP

[hoosierskypilot]

the more I tried to understand and fit it

You cannot do it. No one can, except unreasonable people who feel the world owes them ...... the world.

That's why blacks are on the threshold of societal changes of cataclysmic proportions. Immigrants are flooding America who could gives a rat's hair about the classic black America civil rights struggle.

Immigrants are coming into America who are not going to feel compelled to feel guilty for imagined crimes against the noble black struggle.

Immigrants are going to see this as the bogus profit scheme it is. And as more and more immigrants and children of immigrants are elected into political office, the more you will see undeserved handouts to blacks disappear.

In a decade or so, the only blacks doing well will be those who earned it.

[DeathfromBelow]

"sometimes your right matters less than trying to find a way to coexist with other people peaceably. Some people seem incapable (or unwilling) of distinguishing between the two."

Yep those who are offended by everything. The anti-american students protesting the war or rumor of war, the black demanding reparations, the mexican demanding the return of texas and calipornia, the ... hell you name it. But when it comes to being AMERICAN without a hyphen or of Southern Heritage, than those rights don't mean S*it to you pacifists liberal, hanky waving, damn yankees.

[hoosierskypilot]

Not so. Your quote from Lincoln disproved your point.

And the game goes to the Hoosiers!

[DeathfromBelow]

Yep, but you'd better make sure you had a written policy and that you go get everyone of them scumbags and fire the lot or you will see your ass in court. That is America

[WhiskeyPapa]

Slave owners did not treat their slaves like Simon Legree did.

"Some punishments were associated with certain areas. According to William Wells Brown, slaveowners in Virginia smoked slaves. This involved whipping slaves and putting them in a tobacco smoke-house." Moses Roper claimed that in South Carolina they used to "drive nails into a hogshead so as to leave the point of the nail just protruding in the inside of the cask. Into this he used to put his slaves for punishment, and roll them down a very long and steep hill."

Lewis Clarke, a house slave in Kentucky, described in his autobiography the different methods used by his mistress: "instruments of torture were ordinarily the raw hide, or a bunch of hickory-sprouts seasoned in the fire and tied together. But if these were not at hand, nothing came amiss. She could relish a beating with a chair, the broom, tongs, shovel, shears, knife-handle, the heavy heel of her slipper, and an oak club, a foot and a half in length and an inch and a half square. With this delicate weapon she would beat us upon the hands and upon the feet until they were blistered. "

States with large numbers of slaves introduced their own slave codes. The main idea behind these codes was to keep the slaves under the tight control of their owners. The death-penalty was introduced for a whole range of offences. Slaves could be executed for murder, rape, burglary, arson and assault upon a white person. Plantation owners believed that this severe discipline would make the slaves too scared to rebel."

See this website:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASpunishments.htm

Walt

[hoosierskypilot]

It's bad form to wait 70 years and say you don't agree

It's so funny how small minded people such as yourself, are so predicable.

Your arguments are poor. And when your logic is exposed as flawed, you resort to insults.

You feel the only way to save face is to end the debate with insults.

You pathetic people are so predicable.

[WhiskeyPapa]

I've already posted Lincoln's thoughts on the matter. He felt slavery would die, by itself.

I don't think so. Quote Lincoln to support your statement.

Walt

[Charles Martel]

The county never said that he could not have the plates on his truck but that he could not park the truck on County Property.

I wonder if it was okay for him to drive it on county roads.

[cyborg]

That's why blacks are on the threshold of societal changes of cataclysmic proportions. Immigrants are flooding America who could gives a rat's hair about the classic black America civil rights struggle.

* I asked my mother if she knew anything was going on in the South during the Sixties. She said she was too busy working. The only incident she could think of was going on the business trip with my father. Segregation was legal at the time, and that sort of thing was very 'unusual' then. After Civil Rights, she said she noticed how 'nasty' reverse racism got when black hotel workers would pull my dad aside and ask him if he wanted a "white woman" instead of " that Dominican whore". Like a lot of other West Indians, grew up in a very racially diverse country. There were racial stereotypes on either end, esp. anti-black racism and stereotypes. A lot of foreigners come here with no preconceived notions about 'race politics' and are really shocked. My father never felt anyone owed him anything, and neither did my mom. I do not know how I would get along without that work ethic.

This is why the American cowboy will always be cherished in the American psyche. The 'cowboy' will always be seen as that equivalent to the hardworking immigrant pursuing the American dream. Ken Hamblin does a good job is explaining this in his book "Pick a Better Country".

[hoosierskypilot]

Some punishments

There you go again. Taking an exception and trying to make it the rule. Certainly there are examples of some slaves being murdered, but such was not the rule. That wouldn't be good business.

Wrong again!

[Rebelbase]

All your post shows is that there were some complete idiots(just like some in Gov't today) in the confederacy.

The people who lived it and passed the history down to their families merits consderation, not just the victor's publication of the "offical record".

When is the last time you walked 1500 miles to raise awarness for something? NEVER!

[WhiskeyPapa]

There you go again. Taking an exception and trying to make it the rule. Certainly there are examples of some slaves being murdered, but such was not the rule. That wouldn't be good business.

"The death of a large owner is the occasion usually of many families being broken up. Bankruptcy is another cause of separation, and the hard-heartedness of a majority of slaveholders another and a more fruitful cause than either or all the rest. Generally there is but little more scruple about separating families than there is with a man who keeps sheep in selling off the lambs in the fall. On one plantation where I lived, there was an old slave named Paris. He was from fifty to sixty years old, and a very honest and apparently a pious slave. A slave-trader came along one day, gathering hands for the South. The old master ordered the waiter or coachman to take Paris into the back room, pluck out all his grey hairs, rub his face with a greasy towel, and then had him brought forward and sold for a young man. His wife consented to go with him, upon a promise from the trader that they should be sold together, with their youngest child which she carried in her arms. They left two behind them, who were only from four to six or eight years of age. The speculator collected his drove, started for the market, and before he left the State he sold that infant child to pay one of his tavern bills, and took the balance in cash. This was the news which came back to us, and was never disputed.

I saw one slave mother, named Lucy, with seven children, put up by an administrator for sale. At first the mother and three small children were put up together. The purchasers objected: one says, I want the woman and the babe, but not the other children; another says, I want that little girl; and another, I want the boy. Well, says the Administrator, I must let you have them to the best advantage. So the children were taken away ; the mother and infant were first sold, then child after child - the mother looking on in perfect agony; and as one child after another came down from the auction block, they would run, and cling weeping to her clothes. The poor mother stood, till nature gave way; she fainted and fell, with her child in her arms. When she came to, she moaned woefully, and prayed that she might die, to be relieved from her sufferings."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASclark.htm

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

When is the last time you walked 1500 miles to raise awarness for something? NEVER!

I spent over six years in three different infantry battalions. I probably walked that far.

Walt

[hoosierskypilot]

These were not the rule. They were the exceptions.

During the Rodney King debacle, I saw some street trash drag a truck driver out of his vehicle and beat him senseless. By your logic, all blacks are guilty of this mentality.

Of course, not all blacks behave this way. That's because a few exceptions do not establish a rule.