Disgusting News from the Morning Newspaper

Freedom Riders mural defaced

Students’ work twice has been vandalized

By Jennifer Brooks and Chris Echegaray • THE TENNESSEAN • September 25, 2009

It took the students weeks to create the Freedom Riders mural that greets visitors to Jefferson Street.

It took a vandal with a can of silver spray paint seconds to deface it.

Along the length of the mural, the paint blotted out the faces of the civil rights marchers painted on the wall.

Not all of them. Just the black faces.

Painting the mural was supposed to be a lesson in civil rights history and civic pride for the student volunteers from three Nashville high schools who spent six weeks working with Franklin mural artist Michael Cooper on the design.

The defacement of the mural offers a lesson of another sort.

“The students should be encouraged to go and find other walls and make as many murals as they possibly can,” said former Freedom Rider Kwame Leo Lillard, who was there when the mural went up just four months ago.

30 Threats a Day

I was a child when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I do not want this to happen to President Obama. From alternet.org:

The right-wing hate speech polluting the debate over health care is generating more and more threats against President Obama, some truly frightening.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez reports that when President Obama visited Phoenix, Ariz. on August 17, local minister Steven Anderson of the Faithful World Baptist Church, who strongly expresses hatred for Obama in many of his sermons, told his congregation that he wished him dead. In a disturbing twist, it was discovered that Chris Broughton, the man who brought an AR 15 assault rifle to the Phoenix rally where Obama spoke, had attended Anderson’s sermon. In a later interview, Broughton said he concurred with his pastor’s wish to see Obama “die and go to hell.” As many as twelve men were seen walking around the Phoenix Convention Center with guns on that day.

President Obama faces 30 death threats a day, a 400 percent increase from former President Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, a veteran investigative journalist and conservative who recently authored a book about the Secret Service.

Kessler notes that funding cutbacks have already left the first African-American president in U.S. history particularly vulnerable. The book, which alleges that the cash-strapped Secret Service is endangering the president by cutting corners, has sent shockwaves through Washington. “There’s no question his life is in danger.” “Tomorrow, Obama could be assassinated … simply because the Secret Service was not doing what it used to do, ” said Kessler.

“We have half the number of agents we need, but requests for more agents have fallen on deaf ears at headquarters,” a Secret Service agent told Kessler.

“There’s a tremendous feeling within the Secret Service that they are risking an assassination,” Kessler told Canadian TV.

As CNN’s Rick Sanchez said on the air, “This looks serious. This almost looks like this is coming to the point where we are even beyond maybe where this nation was on November 22 of 1963, when JFK was assassinated, when there was also an environment of hate in this country.”

As racist attacks increase and protestors continue to bring guns to presidential events, it is strikingly clear that President Obama is vulnerable to harm. Are the Secret Service and FBI doing enough to protect him? Will they confront and investigate those who threaten our president so that they can be prosecuted and jailed?

We cannot allow funding problems to weaken the organizations charged with protecting the life of our nation’s president. In 2003, the Secret Service and FBI became part of the Department of Homeland Security and now must compete with 20 other agencies for oversight from their chief, Janet Napolitano. She must use her authority to ensure that the Secret Service and FBI put more agents on the ground to protect President Obama and confront and investigate those who threaten him. It is time for Americans of every stripe to insist that the Secret Service and FBI operate at the highest levels of effectiveness.

From the New York Times

Here is their headline from the past:

On Sept. 4, 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock.

Swastika Painted on My Street

When my husband told me that someone had painted a swastika on the street in our neighborhood, I did not believe it. Then I saw it.

I find this so disturbing. I immediately reported it to the Homeowners Association. A board member told me that two mailboxes in the neighborhood had been spraypainted with red paint. Also a sign cautioning residents to drive safely was painted red.

I am so disturbed by this graffiti that I cannot express how deeply upset I am.

NowPublic

Tags: Nashville | World | swastika | US Politics | neighborhood street

Was It Only a Dream?

I had a bizarre dream last night. I was put into the position of a minority in this country. In this dream, I was being treated like a criminal, although I was not. I was seated at a table, taking a test and had guns pointed toward me. I was filling out a form sort of like a job application. I could not think clearly with guns and authority figures hounding me. These people were yelling at me, and I could not defend myself.

I was freed and was told that our next stop was Auschwitz. I awoke.

I’m sure this dream was influenced by the Gates arrest in Boston, along with my own struggle to find full employment. I experienced the fear in the dream of no one trusting me just because I was what I am, an unemployed white woman.

Black in America

This is sad:

By Elizabeth Mehren
July 23, 2009

Reporting from Boston — In a region where summer preoccupations normally revolve around baseball and the weather, blogs exploded Wednesday with people eager to weigh in on issues of race, class and police harassment.

Talk radio made room for little else. And coffee counters in beach communities from South Boston to Martha’s Vineyard buzzed with discussions about Harvard’s prominent African American studies professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was arrested after attempting to enter his home.

• 

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Although Cambridge police had already dropped the charges against Gates, labeling the incident “regrettable and unfortunate,” the case continued to reverberate through an area that prides itself on a spirit of open-mindedness — despite its history of racial strife.

“This is not dying down, and it’s not going to,” said Callie Crossley, a Boston TV and radio commentator.

It all started last Thursday when Gates, returning after a 20-hour flight from China, was unable to open the front door to his house a block from Harvard Square. While his limo driver tried to help him, a woman called police to say that “two black males with backpacks” were trying to break into a home. A confrontation ensued. Gates, 58, was led away in handcuffs. A police mug shot of one of the country’s leading black intellectuals soon surfaced on the Internet.

Gates is the director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and edits an online magazine on black news and culture. He has written numerous books, produced documentaries for PBS and BBC, won a MacArthur “genius” grant and in 1997 was one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans.” According to Harvard’s website, he holds 49 honorary degrees.

Gates’ arrest has resonated “with persons of color, in particular,” Crossley said, because “if it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us.”

Prom Night in Mississippi

Last night we watched on HBO the outstanding documentary, Prom Night in Mississippi. Both my husband and I were in tears during this film.

I cringe when I see CNN promoting another Black in America documentary. Prom Night in Mississippi is black in America. Prom Night in Mississippi is white in America. Apparently Latinos have not migrated to Clarksdale, Miss., yet. No other demographic lives there.

The movie is shocking to me, as it reflected life in my small home town forty years ago. The high school prom was canceled. Reasons were never given, but it was because the school board feared blacks and whites partying together. I cannot believe that in some parts of America, things have not changed since the 60s and early 70s when forced integration occurred. In 2008 Mississippi, separate proms were planned for white kids and black kids. Morgan Freeman and the students changed all that.

I have admired Morgan Freeman as an actor. I could listen him to read the phone book (if it still exists). I knew that he was a humanitarian in his small community where he once lived. Now he is my hero. He changed the community by having one senior prom.

Totally Embarrassed

I’m embarrassed about the racist photo of the presidents that has been circulated by a member of the Tennessee Republican party. This horrible photo does not represent the views of all of Tennesseans.