The Louisiana Supreme Court resolved a racially tinged power struggle inside its own ranks, ruling Tuesday that Bernette Johnson should be the state’s first black chief justice…A long list of elected officials and civil rights advocates, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, called for Johnson to get the position. The New York Times published two editorials supporting her, one of which called the dispute an “unsettling example of how power can trample voting rights even where they should be sacrosanct.” The court said its ruling was based strictly on the law.
more.
Posts tagged Civil Rights.
“Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.”
Dick Gregory
The whole theory of the right of free speech is not your right to speak, but my right to hear. That was absolutely the rock bottom essential to have any sort of representative government or democracy is that people be able to examine all ideas and look at them, so if they don’t get a chance to hear the ideas, that can’t happen. So the real reason you need freedom of speech is so people can hear different ideas. Not just because I want to get up, pop off and speak, see. I say
it guarantees the right to organize because your right to speak, to meet, to print, to petition the government — that’s organizing is what it is. It’s the freedom to organize against policies of the government that are wrong. It was born in struggle. It was because people insisted on it and there’s been a struggle ever since to make it mean something. And the only time it’s meant something is when people struggled for it.
it guarantees the right to organize because your right to speak, to meet, to print, to petition the government — that’s organizing is what it is. It’s the freedom to organize against policies of the government that are wrong. It was born in struggle. It was because people insisted on it and there’s been a struggle ever since to make it mean something. And the only time it’s meant something is when people struggled for it.
— Anne Braden (via knowledgeequalsblackpower)
Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie awaiting arrest in Houston, TX 1955. Yes they were Freedom Riders too!
You don’t want to let anybody’s expectations down. People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. I should have seen life like that and stay out of trouble, and don’t do this and don’t do that. But it’s hard to live up to some people’s expectations, which [I] wasn’t cut out to be. I didn’t go to school to be ‘Rodney King’ and [be] beat up by cops and thrust into the limelight. It’s taken years to get used to the situation I’m in in life and the weight it holds. One of the cops in the jail [in a later encounter] said: You know what? People are going to know who you are when you’re dead and gone. A hundred years from now, people are still going to be talking about you. It’s scary, but at the same time, it’s a blessing.
— Rodney King • Speaking in an April interview with the Los Angeles Times about his legacy, which he seemed uncomfortable with. King, who died this morning of an apparent drowning, still suffered from injuries from the beating years after the incident. (via shortformblog)
I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice. I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder…Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize.
—Martin Luther King Jr. He accepted the Prize on this day in 1964.
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art: King, Selma March, 1965 by Steve Schapiro
While most people in DC for the MLK Memorial dedication were content with the spectacle of that, Dr. Cornel West decided to get arrested in front of the Supreme Court. Seems like the best way to get the full civil rights experience.
