Dorothy Counts (born 1942) was one of the first black students admitted to the Harry Harding High School, in Charlotte, North Carolina. After four days of harassment that threatened her safety, her parents forced her to withdraw from the school.
.. In 1956, forty black students applied for transfers at a white school.[1] This was after the passing of the Pearsall Plan in North Carolina. At 15 years of age, on 4 September 1957, Dorothy Counts was one of the four black students enrolled at various all-white schools in the district; She was at Harry Harding High School, Charlotte, North Carolina.[2] Three students were enrolled at other schools, including Central High School. The harassment started when the wife of John Z. Warlick, the leader of the White Citizens Council, urged the boys to “keep her out” and at the same time, implored the girls to spit on her, saying, “spit on her, girls, spit on her.”[1] Dorothy walked by without reacting, but told the press that many people threw rocks at her—most of which landed in front of her feet—and that many spat on her back. Photographer Douglas Martin won the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year with an image of Counts being mocked by a crowd on her first day of school.[3]
More abuse followed that day. She had trash thrown at her while eating her dinner and the teachers ignored her.[1] The following day, she befriended two white girls, but they soon drew back because of harassment from other classmates.
Trump Appoints Social Conservative To HHS Civil Rights Office And Heads Explode
He is a defender of religious liberty. He believes there are only two sexes. Both of which make him anathema to “public health” professionals who generally believe religion is fine as long as you don’t practice it and that any sexual perversion should be honored. Of particular concern is the effort by HHS to impose upon the US healthcare system the same view of this “transgender” nonsense that Department of Education tried to impose upon our education system.
.. HHS has focused on bullying all doctors and hospitals into treating transgender individuals as sane and requiring those institutions to do whatever surgical mutilation is necessary to help them live out their delusions. One such case is in the courts right now that would force a Catholic hospital to perform “gender reassignment surgery.”
.. Transgender fanatics are terrified that Severino will pull the plug on this fraud:.. This is a situation where conservatives, regardless of their feelings about Trump, should be cheering. I can’t imagine a President Rubio making an in-your-face appointment like this. I can barely imagine a President Cruz making it. But these sub-cabinet appointments are critical to stopping the progressive agenda before it becomes embedded in the law. But, unfortunately, hate for Trump takes priority over everything else. Because to admit Severino is an excellent choice requires one to admit that Tom Price is an excellent choice. And that requires one to admit that Donald Trump is not a one-dimensional buffoon surrounded by Russian agents, which is something a lot of self-described conservatives cannot do without destroying their own worldview.
Gorsuch’s big fat lie
With a shrewdly calculated innocence, Judge Neil Gorsuch told a big fat lie at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Because it was a lie everyone expected, nobody called it that.
“There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” Gorsuch said.
.. We now have an ideological judiciary. To pretend otherwise is naive and also recklessly irresponsible because it tries to wish away the real stakes in confirmation battles.
.. party polarization now affects the behavior of judges, “reducing the likelihood that they will stray from the ideological positions that brought them to the Court in the first place.
.. If partisanship and ideology were not central to Supreme Court nominations, Gorsuch would be looking at more years in his beloved Colorado.
.. conservatives who regularly denounce “liberal judicial activism” now count on control of the Supreme Court to get results they could never achieve through the democratically elected branches of government.
.. They could not gut the Voting Rights Act in Congress. So Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s court did it for them. They could never have undone a century’s worth of legislation limiting big money’s influence on politics. So the Citizens United decision did it for them.
.. Gorsuch has done what economic conservatives count on the judges they push onto the courts to do: He regularly sides with corporations over workers and consumers. We can’t know exactly where the millions of dollars of dark money fueling pro-Gorsuch ad campaigns come from, but we have a right to guess.
.. it appears that the prior relatively pro-business conservative trajectory of the Supreme Court will now be restored.”
.. The nominee himself flicked away White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s declaration to the Conservative Political Action Conference that Gorsuch “represents the type of judge that has the vision of Donald Trump and it fulfills the promise that he made to all of you.”
.. conservatives, including Trump, want the court to sweep aside decades of jurisprudence that gave Congress broad authority to legislate civil rights and social reform, along with environmental, worker and consumer protections. Gorsuch good-naturedly evaded nearly every substantive question he was asked because he could not acknowledge that this is why he was there.
A Third Way in the ‘Respectability Politics’ Debate
Opponents of President Trump can achieve a lot through empathy and loving engagement.
.. And protests at airports around the United States may have caused the Trump administration to reverse its decision to bar entry to green-card holders from the seven countries covered in its travel ban.
.. “For the average white citizen (read: voter), segregation was justified on the basis that Blacks were inherently ignorant, violent, hypersexual, and a whole other litany of adjectives that became increasingly difficult to apply to the people on the television peacefully protesting in the face of water hoses and attack dogs,”
.. he worried that he did not see “anything that would challenge the image of the leftist voter that Trump and his supporters used to their advantage,” and that “between the rise of the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter and a long list of college protests, marching has gone from a radical expression of protest to our shared dialogue. It’s basically mass texting at this point.”
As petty and vindictive as Trump can be, I do not imagine him or his supporters deploying the apparatus of the state to disrupt protests such as this one, mainly because they do not represent a challenge to him on any fundamental level. Where I do anticipate resistance going forward is against any attempt by the left or Trump supporters to relate to one another or build a coalition.
Trump won because he was able to convince all of us, left and right, that the chasm between us and our ideological opponents was far too wide to support a bridge. The work of the next four years will be proving him wrong.
Trump’s political adviser, Steve Bannon, depends on those deep divisions.
.. Neither the notion of most Trump voters as “deplorables” nor the caricatures many Trump voters have of feminists, coastal-dwelling liberals, or immigrants can remain as strong after effective, “in real life” engagement with individuals from the stereotyped groups—engagement rooted in love that transcends the conclusion that the Trump opponent in question is unusual, or “one of the good ones,” by addressing and respectfully challenging relevant prejudices.
.. It is one thing to be dismayed by the results of a Presidential election; it is entirely another to be utterly shocked by them. The latter signals that you do not know a significant portion of this nation as well as as you thought. We cannot afford to be alien to one another. Our unity is not guaranteed; it is a thing which we must guard jealously against all threats. In a nation as diverse as ours, unity is a prize we fight for daily. Sometimes that fight has been with bullets, other times with painted signs and shoe leather. This time, more than anything, we need open eyes and open hearts.
.. Mansoor Shams is a Muslim Marine Corps veteran dismayed to live in an era “where people would be questioning my loyalty to my country,” which led him to travel around America with a sign that says “I’m a Muslim, ask me anything.” He told NPR that the one-on-one conversations he’s having are breaking through prejudices.
.. This sort of thing does not work if attempted on social media. Even in person there would be a lot of failure.
.. But “large rallies can give a distorted sense of how much progress is being made in the fight against the Trump agenda,”