This day in history - May 18, 1896: the Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that the "separate but equal" doctrine is constitutional

By Richard K. Barry

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law mandating separate but equal accommodations for blacks and whites on intrastate railroads was constitutional. This provided the legal framework to justify many other actions by state and local governments to socially separate blacks and whites. Aside from the obvious affront of mandating separate facilities, the suggestion that these would in fact be equal was, of course, absurd.

This case was overturned by Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared that separate public schools for black and white students was unconstitutional, stating that "separate but equal educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Pictured above is Homer Plessy, plaintiff in Plessy v. Ferguson.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

Nothing too shameful

By Capt. Fogg

There are a lot of Facebook and web pages and blogs from all kinds of people and organizations and it's nothing all that unusual to find something racist, something disturbing something shameful in all the vastness: the enormity amongst the enormousness, for those of you who still make the distinction. I'm quite old enough to remember segregation, Jim Crow, miscegenation laws and even the outrageous Coon Chicken Inn, something that would shock most of us today, and I remember who supported the civil rights we now take for granted and who opposed it.

We have come a long way, or at least most of us have, otherwise there would be more widespread laughter at the audacity of the RNC Facebook page now showing off Susan B. Anthony and Abe Lincoln as GOP heroes. A few years back they were trying to sell Martin Luther King as a Republican hero and some continue to portray Jesus as a Conservative.

Neither audacious or shameful adequately covers posting racist pictures a short time ago, including this one of the President of the United States eating fried chicken and demanding repeal of Love Vs. Virginia that in 1967 locked the intrusive government and its God fearing Southern Conservative bigots out of deciding which races could marry which. It was only a few years after they were forced to stop telling us where we could eat or sleep or live or ride or swim or picnic or find a bathroom or go to school, based on our race. Obviously some Republicans haven't forgiven us for it. Evidently the GOP has done little to excommunicate or even to censure such people. Indeed many of the Republicans I know think such things are funny.

It remained up on the RNC site until those pesky and humorless liberals complained. Disgusting, but typical, and all the sniping from the snarky, snickering anonymous trolls won't change that fact.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Dear Leader Rush calls for segregated buses

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For Rush Limbaugh, it probably would be for the best if the whole civil rights movement had never happened, let alone been successful. Then America would still be able enjoy those halcyon days of segregation and lynching.

I kid you not.

As The Raw Story is reporting, Rush went on an especially noxious diatribe on Wednesday, blaming the school bus attack directly on Obama -- and on "Obama's America."

He even added this: "We need segregated buses."

Now, of course, what he means is that segregated buses are needed in Obama's America, not Bush's America, or Reagan's America, or whatever. It is his incredibly distorted view that the very election of Obama has turned America into a racial/racist bloodbath.

Apparently, it would seem, no one should talk about race at all. What's funny, though, is that Obama doesn't -- aside from that brilliant speech last year, he tends to be rather post-racial in his politics. So it's not at all clear to me how Obama has ushered in this new America, an America that requires segregation to keep white kids safe from black kids.

Oh... there is it, isn't it? What concerns Rush, and others like him, is that the attack was black-on-white. Surely he wouldn't have hyperventilated so much had the attack been white-on-black.

Indeed, what so clearly bothers conservatives like Rush is that a black man has been elected president. What he would prefer, I can only presume, is that blacks, and every other Other, should be kept down in their place... on a sugar plantation, for example.

The white-first universe that makes Rush feel so special, and that he so wanted to preserve, has been upended. And all he can do, now, is spew the same old racism, if not quite from the same position of privilege.

The world has changed, America has changed, for the better -- even if an isolated incident that, we now know, may not even have been racially motivated, enrages the right.

Obama is not the cause of change for the worse, he is proof of change for the better. And the last thing we need now is a return to the dark ages of segregation.