American Civil War

The 14^th Amendment to the United States Constitution, Section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been evaluating the Huntsville, AL school system’s racial integration, and earlier this month released a report that “wasn’t promising.” The DOJ listed “several outstanding desegregation issues that the school district must address,” including “that predominantly black schools have too few advanced courses” and “that black children at predominantly white schools are punished and suspended at alarming rates.”

But Hugh McInnish, a member of the Madison County Republican Executive Committee who also sits on the state Republican Executive Committee, set out to school the DOJ on the real reason racial disparities exist in Hunstville: “Life is unfair.” In a press conference at his gated community and a letter responding to the DOJ last week, McInnish offered a litany of bizarre “proof” that racial disparity isn’t “manmade,” claiming “blacks misbehave on average more frequently than whites do,” and that black students are unable to perform as well as white students. To McInnish, the only “manmade unfairness here” is that the DOJ wants to “correct a problem that is not of their making”:

McInnish went so far as to include in his letter a chart that purports to show the “black crime rate as (a) multiple of (the) white crime rate.” The chart indicates that black people commit more than six times the violent crime of white people overall; it has them committing about eight times as many murders as white people and more than 14 times as many robberies.[...]

McInnish also argued Tuesday that the gap between white and black students’ participation in advanced courses is not because black students are not afforded the chance, as alleged in the Justice Department letter.

Instead, he said, the gap exists because black students are not able to perform as well in advanced classes.

If the DOJ actually decides to peruse his letter, it will find that most of McInnish’s data is cribbed from the right-wing New Century Foundation (NCF), which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a “self-styled think tank” that propagates “academic racism.” Dedicated “to the ideal of the United States as a white European nation,” NCF also publishes the American Renaissance — a magazine that “publishes frequent articles on the discredited field of eugenics” which is “selective breeding to improve human genetic stock.” Incidentally, the foundation’s “most important publication” is The Color Of Crime (which, to NCF, is black.)

http://thinkprogress.org/

So he issued his statement from his GATED COMMUNITY.

I mean these guys are not even trying anymore.

There were two cases entitled Brown v. Board of Education.

Lets take a look at the first:

347 U.S. 483

Argued December 9, 1952

Reargued December 8, 1953

Decided May 17, 1954

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS*

I reproduce the first heading to underline what a long and tedious journey this case took after it reached the Supremes.

Earl Warren was not even Chief Justice until it was finally decided  eighteen months after it was first argued.

There is a story about CJ Warren you know related to his Nomination by Ike and his actual appointment in October of 1953.

He had been governor of California and he was summoned to D.C. by Ike.

He took his favorite Chauffer and while riding in a hired car from the D.C. airport the driver noted that the two could not stay in the same hotel.

Warren was astounded and angry at the same time. He could not believe that in these modern times, a Negro could not stay at certain hotels simply because of his race.

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.

These cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. They are premised on different facts and different local conditions, but a common legal question justifies their consideration together in this consolidated opinion.

In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. In each instance, they had been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race. This segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. In each of the cases other than the Delaware case, a three-judge federal district court denied relief to the plaintiffs on the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine announced by this Court in Plessy v. Fergson, 163 U.S. 537. Under that doctrine, equality of treatment is accorded when the races are provided substantially equal facilities, even though these facilities be separate. In the Delaware case, the Supreme Court of Delaware adhered to that doctrine, but ordered that the plaintiffs be admitted to the white schools because of their superiority to the Negro schools. (read this decision in its entirety at http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html

Plessy examined the portion of the 14^th Amendment that relates to Equal Protection way back in 1896. There is no space to reexamine Plessy here but it really was the logical conclusion of a series of cases going back to the 1880’s following the demise of Reconstruction in this country.

And it had already been decided discrimination by private concerns was just fine and dandy because the 14^th Amendment Provisions only applied to ‘State Action’.

Plessy actually dealt with Louisiana rules relating to separation of the races in Railroad cars, but the idea was that segregation of the races as imposed by state law was just fine and dandy as long as it was shown that the train cars provided service that was separate but equal.

You will note that the Supreme Court of Delaware desegregated its schools because the panel had decided to be pragmatic and truthful in its deliberations.

There was no frickin way that an unbiased person would not see that the schools provided for Negroes did not even resemble the schools provided for whites.

The Warren Court took the extra step and overruled Plessy.

The greatest Supreme Court in the history of this nation simply found that it was theoretically impossible for there to be separate but equal accommodations for the races.

And the Court found this conclusion through inductive reasoning.

Seeing made an honest man an unbeliever!!

And here we are in a new millennia, 143 years following the adoption of the 14^th Amendment to the United State Constitution and this no so great ape from Huntsville, Alabama has the temerity to stand erect in a gated community and declare that Blacks represent a substandard race and that they are not entitled to a decent education because they do not measure up.

As this Hugh McInnish would have us believe that

LIFE IS UNFAIR!!!

I was twenty-one years of age when I first read the Brown decisions.

They are a work of art. They represent truth, justice and the American Way.

They are pure prose; nay poetry.

But even using the standard applied by the Delaware Court in those days, any idiot can tell that life in Alabama aint fair.

It is just that Hugh Mcinnish would like to keep it that way as he sips brandy and pontificates in his gated community!