Democratic lawmakers drafted civil-rights legislation that would challenge Jim Crow laws in the South while leaving de facto segregation in the North intact. When NBC News asked the civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin why many African American communities rioted the summer after the bill passed, he said, “People have to understand that although the civil-rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools…the civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.” Today’s protest movements against second-class citizenship in Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, and elsewhere are in part a legacy of the unresolved failures of civil-rights legislation.
Category: Opinion (Page 5 of 11)
By Ann Telnaes
The North Carolina legislature passes and Gov. Pat McCrory signs a bill which require transgender people to use bathrooms according to the sex on their birth certificates rather than what they identify with.
Paul Ryan’s penance has not been matched by a broader effort to change the substance beneath the words. Ryan has long been the intellectual torchbearer of a public policy that would immediately hurt the same people he has decided to stop calling “takers.” For years, he has put forth a budget that would provide the largest tax cuts in history for the wealthy while gutting income support and health care assistance for the middle-class and poor.
By Ann Telnaes
From a 4/26/15 lecture in Sperryville, Virginia, by Vernon Gras, Professor emeritus, English and Cultural Studies, Geroge Mason University.
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