We all have seen the tellie with the hatred, violence, deaths and the political situations…..

It seems to be getting worse with each passing week…..but can we point a finger at a point in our history where this was made possible?

Yes we can.

And yes the old professor will give you a history lesson to help explain the situations making the news these days.

Republican attempts to gain political support by promoting racist fear and hatred, reflexively siding with police in confrontations with African Americans and denouncing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are a prominent feature of our political landscape. But they’re also nothing new. In many ways, the battle lines of 2022 can be seen forming in 1964. A letter published 58 years ago this week in the New York Times can help explain the underlying issues, both then and now.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, 1964, he called upon Americans to “close the springs of racial poison.” Two weeks later, on the same night that Sen. Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination with an explicit endorsement of extremism, a 15-year-old African American was shot and killed in Harlem by a New York City police officer. The incident began after the white superintendent of a group of apartments turned a hose on a group of Black kids who often sat on the steps to the buildings. According to them, the superintendent shouted at them, “Dirty n***ers, I’ll wash you clean.” They responded by throwing bottles and garbage-can lids at the super, who retreated inside one of the buildings. A boy not involved in the original incident, James Powell, pursued him, and when Powell exited the building he was shot and killed by an off-duty policeman. 

That led to an almost immediate confrontation between neighborhood young people and police. Over the following days, these clashes escalated into the first major urban “riot,” or “uprising,” of the 1960s. (Those two nouns were used by different sides to describe the same phenomena, the former by most white people, the latter by Black people and, as the decade went on, a growing number of whites on the left.)

https://www.salon.com/2022/07/21/racism-policing-and-violence-how-america-in-2022-was-shaped-by-1964/

Our troubles these days are a direct link to the 1964 Act signed by Pres. Johnson…..and the beat goes on.

Can this country recover from 1964 or will this finally drive a nail in the coffin of the republic?

You can make a difference…..or will you continue to be a by-stander and watch this country destroy itself?

It is your choice….choose wisely!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”