For years, Republicans in the Senate have been using every low, dirty "Parliamentary" trick in the book to prevent funding of payment of a court judgment for $1.2 billion to Black farmers denied services by the Agriculture Department over decades. Shirley Sherrod, famously smeared as a racist for her explanation of getting over racist feelings, played a part in the original legal case, Pigford v. Glickman.
Here on dKos, sprednxtnd asked recently,
Has Congress forgotten about the black farmers?
and mentions the most recent dirty tricks.
No, they haven't forgotten. This is just the GOP Southern Strategy working as designed.
Republican strategist Lee Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
Denying cash money to N—to Black folk, however, is not in the least abstract.
Here is how the thinking goes. I am not making this up, and I am not exaggerating it in the least.
If we start paying legal judgments to N*****s, we open up the possibility of getting sued for Reparations for slavery, and having unelected activist Yankee tyrant judges rule against us. That means Blacks get everything, our wealth, our political power, even our women, who only stick with us because we have the wealth and power now. So we must protect ourselves from this ultimate disaster: that our Pure Southern Womanhood would betray us and itself, would prefer strong, healthy, newly rich young N***** men to Good Old White Boys who won't even own the clothes they stand up in. After all, we White boys prefer N***** women, just like Strom Thurmond and possibly even Thomas Jefferson did.
We have chapter and verse on all the elements of this, and much more, such as Native American rights, and all other oppressed groups. Here is a sampling.
Reparations
Unelected Activist Judges
- A debate worth having
Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families. A well-known grass-roots leader, Bauer has been active in a number of Supreme Court nominations and was chairman of Citizens to Confirm Clarence Thomas.
- The Campaign You're Not Watching—But Anti-Gay Groups Are
Last year, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously to allow same sex marriage in Iowa. This year, Iowans will vote on whether to keep or boot three of the seven justices who decided that case -- and the campaign has attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars from national anti-gay groups.
The AFA—one of whose executives, Bryan Fischer, has said it was homosexual soldiers who committed the worst Nazi atrocities—is the most involved on the ground, spearheading the movement through a group called Iowa For Freedom. The group is lead by three-time gubernational candidate Bob Vander Plaats. [Actually, Hitler had Ernst Röhm and his homosexual pals in the Brownshirts murdered in The Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934 and days following]
- Terri Schiavo and the Battered Judiciary
- Barack Obama Names Pro-Abortion Activist Elena Kagan to Supreme Court
- Bauer Says ‘Activist Judges Beware’
“Judges do not have the right to legislate from the bench. Nor are they the supreme authority of the land. The voters of Iowa made that clear last night. Campaign for Working Families was proud to join the National Organization for Marriage, the American Family Association and Iowa for Freedom in an extensive media campaign exposing the radical record of these robed political activists. I am proud that Iowa voters stood up and said ‘Enough!’”
- LITTLE ROCK ON TRIAL: COOPER v. AARON AND SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, by Tony A. Freyer.
Certainly the religious right has used judicial activism as a rallying cry in the last three decades, with varying degrees of success. Yet, the “movement” against judicial activism is older than ROE v. WADE, and predates the ascendancy of social conservatism in America. As Tony Freyer’s LITTLE ROCK ON TRIAL implies, its roots can actually be traced to the backlash against BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION and subsequent civil rights cases.
- "Impeach Earl Warren"
Yankee Tyrants
Southern Aristocracy
- California Standards History Test Review
After the Civil War, the South was physically, economically, and spiritually devastated. The war left hatred between the North and the South that lasted for decades. The southern aristocracy was stripped of its wealth and power.
- The Southern Aristocrats Values
South Carolina had its own unique social structure that was even more aristocratic than their immediate northern neighbors. The economic basis for their claims were established in an even a higher dependence on slavery. A typical New England citizen might see freedom and equality as having a voice in their own destiny. In contrast, many large plantation owners in South Carolinian thought of freedom as the liberty to preserve and maintain their social and economic power base.
Purity of Southern Womanhood
- Away down South: a history of Southern identity, by James Charles Cobb
…the downright "gyneolatry" expressed in the antebellum gentry's rhetorical flourishes about the purity of southern womanhood was in fact emblematic of the impurity of southern manhood because it amounted to psychic compensation for the plantation mistress whose husband's sexual transgressions down in the slave quarters were not as discreet as they might have been.
Strom Thurmond
- Mixing races, distilling hypocrisy, by Robert Fulford
…a schoolteacher who wins his first election in 1924 and becomes, at age 21, the youngest school trustee in state history. That same year he celebrates a famous ritual of his race. He impregnates the maid [Carrie Butler], who is 15 years old.
- Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, by Essie Mae Washington-Williams