The Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and Rosa Parks!

Rosa Parks now has a full bodied statue of herself on permanent display in Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.. It was unveiled there this week. She is the first African American to have this honor bestowed on her and is also the first African American woman to be seated there. For those who do not know who Rosa Parks is, we have to go all the way back to 1955 to find this diminutive little woman being forced to take a back seat on a southern bus which was the common practice for blacks at this time in our southern history. Rosa decided that day that she had had enough and refused to take that seat in the back of the bus.

She has been an icon of the civil rights movement almost ever since that time!

We lived as a child in a southern town even though we were in industrialized Illinois typified by Chicago and the northern, more populated end of the state. But we were only thirty miles from the Mason-Dixon line and we lived in a segregated area even though, in 1954 at five years old, we didn’t understand it yet. My mother and my father came from lower middle class shop keeper and dirt farmer origins and had married in 1935. By 1954, just a year before Rosa Parks made her famous move on that bus, my father was paroling black convicts from the region’s state penitentiary and giving them a second chance at life in his business there in rural Vienna, Illinois. It worked out alright until one summer evening when a couple of them got drunk and ended up raping the town flirt, a white lady, and killing her grandmother in the process. When it was all over, some of the veterans from the second great war got liquored up down at the local V.F.W. and crossed the bridge separating white Vienna from what was commonly known as Nigger Hill, south of town. They carried gas cans and torches and they burned the long residing black population off of the hill and ran them out of the county. Although I didn’t know it at the age of five, they had also considered coming to our house and burning us out as well for what my white father had done. I remember the unspoken fear in my mother better now than I have ever remembered it before! And we have a special regard for children in horrific circumstances because there were small black children who saw their little world destroyed that summer night in 1954. They were my age then as well as now and I wonder what became of them and how that experience affected their lives.

Rosa Parks would have been one hundred years old this week and my dad would have been one hundred last year about this time. They were of a generation who knew about sacrifice because they had made so many of them. They were of the depression, the dust bowl and the war and all of the change that came about that they supported during those years when the struggle was about all that most black people had. They were led by Martin Luther King who took the Gandhi model of non violence even though so many of them died such violent deaths because of it. And they were, in their way, supported by ordinary people like my parents who simply held the Christian belief that all of us were created equal children under the eyes of a very loving and non discriminating God who saw that there would be new bodies for all in the kingdom that his son paid the highest of prices for all of us to be able to anticipate.

Jesus Christ was illegitimate and so many other bad things in the eyes of the Jews, and black people in Vienna and other places followed his lead because they could so easily identify with the things that their Christ had faced. They could take everything from a black person but they could never touch their religion and their very abundant and evocative faith!

Another interesting thing happened this week. The Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments on a case involving the Voting Rights Act of the United States. And, just as in the Citizen’s United Case which invalidated all federal campaign finance laws, it would appear that the conservative justices on the court might decide to end the stipulations that prevent nine southern states from doing anything to prevent minorities from getting that precious right to vote without first going through the United States Justice Department. It has been a hard won law that has been in force since the 1960’s.

It has already been well documented in the last election in places like the state of Florida that is not covered by this federal voting rights act that minorities are being physically disenfranchised by long voting lines or simply finding out when they arrive to vote that they have simply been stripped of that right for reasons that are not always known. We do not have the poll tax or literacy tests any longer but some states are considering reinstituting things like ID cards that are hard for some minorities to secure. They want to make minorities jump through hoops like the guns they used to fire at their feet in the south to watch them jump or the jumping and jerking that they watched at the lynching’s that they used to perform under the watchful eyes of those burning crosses that always seemed to be around.

We would like to think that this supreme court is simply interpreting the law, however, we know that for justices like Anton Scalia and Clarence Thomas who have known ties to neoconservatives, it is far more than that. What they are contemplating is the facilitation of a simple disenfranchisement and little more can be said about it but that. They are turning the highest court in the land into nothing more than an extension of the Klu Klux Klan! To say that these justices are not in tune with the national news is also a step too far. They know exactly what is going on and they represent, this quartet of aging old white men and one uncle tom, another rung in the ladder back toward a past where white people were in charge and people like those who once worked for my father would not accept an invitation in to eat at our table out of fear of what might, and eventually did, finally happen to them.

We are entering a new century now and all that was old and once banished and forgotten might just as well be considered new and very possible again! We would not want to be old, poor, black, Mexican, disabled, simple minded, gay, non Christian, or any of those other things that the neoconservative Republican party and its supreme court allies consider to be undesirable in this new age that they are trying to create out of the fading lessons of a disgraceful past for all of us to contemplate. There are those who do not like to be reminded of Adolf Hitler and all that he stood for, but, in the sounds of many of those who walk the halls of Congress and sit on the benches of the Supreme Court of this nation we hear Hitler’s echoes and the march of his potential brown shirts and their jack boots in many places we look! And, it will be one hundred years ago next year that the first great war that spawned him got under way! We are further arming a nation with guns of war in the wake of the shooting of twenty innocent souls and there are no guarantees that those who say that they bear arms to keep the government from taking theirs will not form the basis of an organized, armed mob who will not only carry out the wishes of those like Scalia and his ilk, but, also, proceed to destroy a nation in the process of doing so.

All they await is the proper leadership!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.