MIZZOU ain't FERGUSON
A close examination of the differences between the events at the University of Missouri and earlier events in Ferguson, Mo can be summed up, perhaps by a comparison of Prosecutor McCollough, to University President Wolfe, and Chancellor Bowen. Under pressure to resign to lessen racial tensions, the President and the Chancellor complied. The Prosecutor did NOT!
Comments from students on campus at M.U. are much the same as those of Black Students from the Deep South, in 1957, who attended Lincoln University at Jefferson City, the state capital, 30 miles from the campus of Mizzou, They found Missouri racism much more severe than any they experienced at home! http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/university-of-missouri-system-president-resigns.html
Over many years, and many travels since 1957, I have found that Missouri Racism is unique in several respects. It appears to lack the "human" element that Faulkner relays in his tales of the Old South, and its racial relations. I remember white discrimination against Jews in my home-town during the 1940s, as even more "cold" than their treatment of Blacks.
In a discussion of this topic, in class, with Peter Drucker, he explained, that "Missouri, as a Border State, was neither trusted by the North, nor the South". As I studied that line, I found that the Border Wars with "Bleeding Kansas" and John Brown, left its strains in Missouri Culture. Missouri Racism is an especially "RAW" racism; that is firmly rooted in a state dominated by rural farms. It has only two cities that could keep social behavior "Up to Date"! What little Enlightenment can be found, lies' along a Rail-Road Right-of-Way, between Kansas City and St. Louis. They are beacons for the great "un-washed" who range down through the Ozarks and into Oklahoma and Arkansas! St Louis, today, is a "rotted-out-hulk", compared to what it grew to be between 1900 and W.W-II! "Missou" lies in a "rough patch"!
Ironically, it was the Black Culture of Missouri that produced and influenced, both, Mark Twain, and Walt Disney! The KKK burned George R. Smith College to the ground , in 1925. It was one of the early Colleges, built for Blacks, in Missouri, before 1900, It was where Scott Joplin invented "Ragtime" Music.
Missouri will have to come to grips with this problem; in its State Legislature! The Blacks in that Legislature will have to "man-up"! The old "go-along, to get-along" tactics, of Booker T. Washington, have to be abandoned, if true Progress is to be found. Because of "Integrated Education", too many of our young students, of all colors, know little or nothing of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, or, even, Thurgood Marshall!
Stay Vigilant! Maybe our Electorate will learn the value of Intellect", and "Enlightenment" and abandon its preference for the kind of "ignorance" that is "trumpeted" by TRUMP, and "implanted" by Carson!
Copyright © 2015: Williams LLC
All rights Reserved: Williams LLC
No comments:
Post a Comment