Montgomery, AL police chief apologizes for his department’s appalling civil rights history

Raw Story:

Rep. John Lewis (R-GA) was moved to tears on Saturday by an apology from a police chief in Montgomery, Alabama, who said his department utterly failed to protect civil rights marchers as they disembarked from a Grayhound bus into a segregated terminal in 1961.

Lewis was one of 21 protesters who stepped off that bus and into an angry melee as more than 300 white southerners attacked the group with baseball bats and other blunt objects. Despite an order by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to protect these so-called “Freedom Riders,” police backed off in Montgomery and let the mob have its way.

Appearing with Lewis on Saturday after a symbolic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama — where 600 civil rights marchers were brutally attacked by police in 1965 — Montgomery Chief of Police Kevin Murphy formally apologized for the bus terminal incident and presented Lewis with his badge.

“It means a great deal,” Lewis said, according to MSNBC. “I teared up. I tried to keep from crying.”

it pays to point out that Chief Murphy was in no way responsible for what his predecessors did in ‘65. Yet he apologized anyway. And there’s a lesson here for anyone who’s ever argued “I didn’t do ____, that happened a long time ago. Why should I be held responsible for ____?”

They’re not being held responsible for the act, they’re being held responsible for the consequence. America’s history of slavery, segregation, and racism has left this a profoundly unequal society and that inequality benefits whites. You may not be responsible for the crimes of the past, but you benefit from them — whether those crimes are slavery or Native American genocide or the conquest of Mexican lands or any of a raft of other crimes. No one’s asking anyone to give anything back. No one’s asking anyone to be punished for anything. All that’s being asked is that people acknowledge a simple fact — that they would not be where you are today if it weren’t for the crimes of their forebears and that many of the privileges they take for granted come at the expense others who were less fortunate in the parentage sweepstakes.

It’s about looking at the world with a measure of realism and recognizing that history influences all of our lives, for good or for bad,

History hates Republicans — or what wingnuts are freaking out about today

Raw Story:

Actor Danny Glover said that the Second Amendment was written to strengthen the institution of slavery and help take Native American land, in a discussion with Texas A&M students on Jan. 17, according to video of the talk posted by a conservative student group.

The event was honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. as the national holiday in his honor takes place on Monday.

“I don’t know if people know the genesis of the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect, to protect themselves from slave revolts and from uprisings from Native Americans. A revolt from people who were stolen from their land or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is,” Glover said.

The conservative student organization that took the video of Glover speaking wrote an online petition criticizing the university, and the group’s president called the statement a “far left message.”

One thing I’m sure you’ve all noticed by now is that conservatives talk about the founders as if they were all in complete agreement about everything. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were plenty of contentious issues they were forced to deal with through compromise and the most contentious was slavery.

There’s a good piece on the historical argument that the 2nd Amendment protects slavery here, but the short and skinny is that Patrick Henry wanted the Constitution to abolish slavery outright. That didn’t fly, so he crafted a Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights with entirely different language than we have now. It spoke of the need for militias to protect against invasion, but the pro-slavery legislators noticed it said nothing about a slave revolt. So they asked Henry about that: He answered:

Not domestic insurrections, but war. If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress insurrections. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress… Congress, and Congress only, can call forth the militia.

In other words, if a majority of congress felt the slave insurrection was just, a slave state facing revolt would be on their own. Needless to say, this didn’t fly either. So the current language — which protects slave states against slave rebellion — was adopted as one of those messy and awful compromises we still see in congress today.

But actual history doesn’t help the conservative cause of selling buttloads and buttloads of guns. So an alternate history is declared sacrosanct and anything that disagrees with it becomes heresy. It’s not history the right loves, it’s a sort of revised American scripture, where Madison came down from the mountaintop with two tablets of the Ten Articles of the Bill of Rights, inscribed by the very hand of God Himself, Praise Jesus. Amen..

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FDR stumps for Obama

Franklin D Roosevelt, 1936:

Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them- we will do more of them we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

It’s amazing how little Republicans have changed. Still selling math-challenged fantasies where every gets what they want for nothing.

How Mitt compares

Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer.

In memory of Neil Armstrong, video of the first moon landing