You have heard the term ‘New South’, right?
That was a PR attempt to try and paint the South in a different light from the days of segregation and bigotry.
It is possible that there had been some movement into the 21st century but it has been slow and small.
Take my state of Mississippi….we are infamous for our lynchings of blacks, murders of civil rights workers and leaders and since the 1950s not much has changed in the attitudes of most Mississippians.
We all have read or heard of the bad behavior of law enforcement around the country….but a group in Mississippi illustrates just how deep bigotry is even in the police organizations.
Six former Mississippi sheriff’s deputies from a self-described “Goon Squad” pleaded guilty Thursday to subjecting two Black men to racialized torture and shooting one of the victims in the mouth after a neighbor called in a complaint about the men staying in the home of a white woman.
Former Rankin County Sheriff’s Office (RCSO) Deputies Brett Morris McAlpin, Jeffrey Arwood Middleton, Christian Lee Dedmon, Hunter Thomas Elward, Daniel Ready Opdyke, and Joshua Allen Hartfield pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with the January 24 torture of 32-year-old Michael Corey Jenkins and 35-year-old Eddie Terrell Parker.
On January 24, the white deputies—who had no warrant—broke down the door of the Braxton home where Parker was living, handcuffing and repeatedly tasing the victims before sexually assaulting them, calling them racist names while threatening to kill them, and shooting Jenkins in the mouth, shattering his jaw and causing permanent injuries to his tongue and neck.
“These guilty pleas are historic for justice against rogue police torture in Rankin County and all over America,” Malik Shabazz, an attorney representing Jenkins and Parker, said in a statement. “Today is truly historic for Mississippi and for civil and human rights in America.”
“There were a lot of naysayers,” Walker added. “This proves there is justice in Mississippi, even in Rankin County with its long history of police violence.”
Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey—who in June said the six deputies had resigned or been terminated—called the case “the most horrible incident of police brutality I’ve learned of over my whole career, and I’m ashamed it happened at this department.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/rankin-county-goon-squad
But I ask will there truly be justice for what these animals did?
Will this change anything in the state?
Mississippi will remain the backwards state it has been for the last 100 years….no change will come (at least for now).
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
They ‘sexually assaulted’ them too? How sick is that? I fear that sort of thing will continue to happen, and will often be unreported.
Best wishes, Pete.
It is getting reported more now than before….but yes a bunch of sick racist cops which describes a good percentage of all cops. chuq
Good old boys resist change because they like things just the way they have always been…. and in some cases, I have to agree with them .. I hated it when the foreigners from a big nearby city moved into our small agricultural village and started demanding new streets and parks and all that other stuff– and now that the city has capitulated, it has gone from a peaceful rural community with lots of quiet and green spaces into a concrete jungle sub-division of that city that invaded …tragic! Mississippi does have a point…to a degree.
Nowhere should this be acceptable to any human. Nothing in that case is acceptable. Sick humans are sick humans….no amount of understanding can change that. chuq
Traditionalism is probably the healthy state; modernism is probably the diseased state .. so I am on the side of the good old boys.
In what ‘ism’ is that barbaric treatment a good thing….except for rednecks and those that sympathize with their racist bullshit. chuq
Thanx Ned I appreciate your help. chuq
Howdy Chuq!
One of the interesting things to note is that culture has a geographical component. Many of the descendants of slave owners left the state after the War and during Reconstruction, mostly for the West. Many people moved to those counties who were not descendants of slave owners, yet, when you measure prejudice by any metric you want, you find higher rates of racism and bigotry in those counties with the highest rates of slave ownership. The culture gets passed down through the institutions of the place, assimilating those who move into it.
Or, does it? When you study the counties in the West where many of those ex-slave owners migrated, you find higher rates of racism and bigotry than in the counties where they didn’t. Those slave owners tended to take institutional and government jobs in those counties. They refused assimilation into whatever culture may have been there, granted these were newly settled places so they formed part of the bedrock of the culture of the county and passed their racial animus on to those who succeeded them.
Racism. The gift that keeps on giving.
Huzzah!
Jack
Racism in Mississippi is till as bad as it was in the 1950s….and becoming more so almost daily. Have a great Sunday Jack chuq