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]

Easy. Not all us Yankees are traitors. Some of us (yankees) would like to ship whiney liberals like xenophobe and whiskeypapa to Mars.

[WhiskeyPapa]

These were not the rule. They were the exceptions.

Apparently not.

"Lincoln said at Springfield on June 18 that the condition of the Negroes in the United States had deteriorated sharply since the era of the fathers, "and their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years"

And yet harshness was no real part of the temper of Americans of the South, who differed no whit from Americans of the North. The main excitant impulse was fear, and they wanted to protect the institution, not to penalize the individual. It was because the free Negro menaced the institution, because manumission undermined it, because all self-help systems for the slave corroded It, that pro- slavery men urged new legislation. Their object was not to surround slavery with an atmosphere of terror. It was to shore up an institution built on quick- sand and battered bv all the forces of world sentiment and emergent industrialism.

Ruffin was personally the kindliest of masters. The unhappy fact was that it had become impossible to safeguard slavery without brutal violence to countless individuals; either the institution had to be given up, or the brutality committed.

The legislators of Louisiana and Arkansas, of Alabama and Georgia, with humane men like Ruffin and the Eastern Shore planters of Maryland, had faced this alternative. They had chosen the institution. The Richmond Examiner stated their choice in unflinching language:

It is all an hallucination to suppose that we are ever going to get rid of slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so. It is a thing that we cannot do without;that is righteous, profitable, and permanent, and that belongs to Southern society as inherently, intrinsically, and durably as the white race itself. Southern men should act as if the canopy of heaven were inscribed with a covenant, in letters of fire, that the negro is here, and here forever—is our property, and ours forever—is never to be emancipated—is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days.

This has the ring of the Richmond publicisher Fitzhugh, and would have been repudiated by many Southerners. But Jefferson Davis said, July 6, 1859, "There is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or the legal right of the institution of African slavery." Senator A. G. ' Brown said September 4, 1858, that he wanted Cuban, Mexican, and Central American territory for slavery; "I would spread the blessings of slavery . . . to the uttermost ends of the earth." Such utterances treated slavery as permanent, and assumed that it must be defended at every point."

-- "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton

Walt

[hoosierskypilot]

I spent over six years in three different infantry battalions

That's not what he said. He asked specifically about walking to raise awareness.

You really need to try to stay focused. Did you stop taking your psych meds, again?

Your rambling is reminiscent of your arguments on FR, viz., much talk but no substance. Just "cut-and-paste."

[hoosierskypilot]

Still isolated quotes from obscure references. Doesn't prove that all slaves, or even the majority of slaves, were subjected to the form of cruelty in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

After all, that's what we were talking about.

C'mon, old man. Lay off the whiskey and try to stay focused.

[Station 51]

That's ancient history! Black people in America had better be very grateful for slavery in America. If it weren't for slavery in America...

You are one sick SOB and an embarrassment not only to Free Republic but all Americans, Christianity and humanity itself. Your statement is the equivalent to anti-Semitics stating that Jews are better off because of the Holocaust because now they have their own nation. What a disgrace and embarrassment you are.

[WhiskeyPapa]

Still isolated quotes from obscure references. Doesn't prove that all slaves, or even the majority of slaves, were subjected to the form of cruelty in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

You've provided no quotes at all, except ones you perverted to show something they don't.

David Herbert Donald in Lincoln describes the scene on April 4, 1865, when President Lincoln went to visit the former Confederate capital, Richmond. Landing without fanfare from a barge on the James River, he was first noticed by some black workmen, undoubtedly freed slaves. Donald notes that:

Their leader, a man about sixty, dropped his spade and rushed forward, exclaiming, "Bless the Lord, there is the great Messiah! . . . Glory, Hallelujah!" He and others fell on their knees, trying to kiss the President’s feet. "Don’t kneel to me," Lincoln told them, embarrassed. "That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy." Quickly word of the President’s arrival spread, and he was soon surrounded by throngs of blacks, who shouted, "Bless the Lord, Father Abraham come."

http://www.whitehousehistory.org/02_learning/subs_9/activities_9/frame_act_903e.html

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

That's not what he said.

I really don't care what he said.

I didn't walk over 1,500 miles in six years so you could spread your manure unchallenged.

Walt

[hoosierskypilot]

Sorry. You're wrong. It is ancient history. And just because you're looking for cash-money in reparations means nothing to me. I've already paid billions in reparations. It's call affirmative action and reverse discrimination.

And, are you honestly going to suggest that African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had never been brought to America? You're delusional.

And, sir, you are the embarrassment. You're like every other liberal I've known, viz., you don't mind freedom of speech as long as it's your speech that is free.

And, finally, lesson #4 to the peanut gallery: We are not saying the slaves brought to America should have been thankful. We are saying what educated, conservative African Americans have already said, viz., that the descendants of slavery in America are much better off than if they had been born in Africa.

Try to keep up.

[cyborg]

I am not speaking for him, but he did go into more depth and explanation. You should check out our exchange. As for Jews during the Holocaust, well what can I say? Jews for Jesus has a book edited by holocaust survivors who tell stories of tremendous good coming out of evil. Also, if you look at a lot of the survivors on the whole, many became successful people here in America.

[hoosierskypilot]

The only foul odor I smell is coming from your direction.

Still subscribing to the one-bath-a-week theory?

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

How many black people living today are former slaves?

Millions, however the flags they were enslaved under have a preponderence of green, yellow, and black. Not easily confused with the stars and bars.

[hoosierskypilot]

Your cut-and-pasting says nothing. Try to keep up whiskey brain, er, ....whiskey dad.

Nobody ever said Lincoln did not oppose slavery. You keep babbling about a non-issue.

Tell you what, whiskey breath. Sleep it off, dry out, and then maybe you can keep up.

[hoosierskypilot]

You should check out our exchange

People like station 51 doesn't want to be confused by checking out the whole argument. He's afraid the facts might confuse him.

People like station 51 prefer to latch onto the first thing with which they disagree, then formulate and absolutely hysterical response with no basis in reality.

Mental combat with people like station 51 is like fighting an unarmed liberal..er..demonRat....er....poster.

[hoosierskypilot]

didn't walk over 1,500 miles in six years

In spite of it all, I do appreciate your service to our country.

[hoosierskypilot]

doesn't = do not

[hoosierskypilot]

call=called

[cyborg]

Sometimes people don't want to know the fact because they have another more sinister agenda such as Jesse Jackson. I never thought of the confederate flag as being 'racist'. I thought it was the Dukes of Hazzard flag when I was little. You go to re-education camps... I mean school and you're told a different story. Thankfully because I can read, I know history from all points of view. I never knew there were black confederates like HK Edgerton. Didn't the Rebs fight against black people? That's what I was taught in school. During black history month, you learn about underground railroad, the black units in the Union army,etc. but never learned about the black confederates. You definately never learned about the black slaves, even after emancipation, stayed behind to help their old masters.

[hoosierskypilot]

I understand, perfectly.

I grew up in the North and was educated in Indiana and Ohio. I learned a single perspective of the civil war, viz., the South was the devil.

Then I moved to the South for college and work. There I learned that sometimes there are two sides to a story.

Now I know that slavery, while being a catalyst, was not the sole ground for the civil war.

But what I was most amazed about was the fact that Lincoln, in spite of my early education, was, by today's standards, quite a racist.