Otto Kerner Jr. Quotes

Lincoln had instituted the first draft in American History and it was terribly resented by many Americans. The draft laws allowed the wealthy and upper middle class to avoid service by paying a $300 fee of hiring a substitute just like in the Vietnam War the upper classes could get College Draft deferments. The mob led mostly by poor Irish, began by protesting the draft; then they attacked the mansions and houses of the wealthy; and then they went after Blacks. The Irish poor feared large numbers of Negroes coming out of slavery and competing for their jobs and lowering the prevailing wages. Blacks were beaten and lynched and 5,000 almost half of the then Negro population were driven to Brooklyn, New Jersey and the New York suburbs. It was the worst riot in United States History.

Booth was the younger son of a very prominent Northern family of actors. His older brother was considered the greatest American actor, and the rest of the family were abolitionists and vehement Union supporters. They found young John’s views reprehensible.

Instead of standing and saluting as professional athletes have done for decades before games, he kneeled and refused to stand. This caused great public criticism but also some initial support. He was potentially risking his multimillion dollar salary as this technically violated his contract to avoid anything embarrassing to the team. He also donated $1 million to programs in the area that were working to enhance Black/white understanding. Even those who disagreed with his choice of protest defended his right to do so, and after the initial furor, public opinion, while not in agreement about his method, tended to support him for having the courage of his convictions and using his celebrity for a worthy cause. After sensing the public opinion, his team matches his $1 donation. Professional athletes both in the NFL and in other sports then began to do the same as a form of protest for the large, disproportionate, number of black men who were killed, mostly when unarmed, by police. The reference to the “paid leave” was the practice followed by most police departments—usually required by collective bargaining agreements with police unions—of placing police officers accused of committing violations of laws or regulations on paid administrative leave while all the investigations, hearings, and other processes . While this practice protected the rights of those police officers who were not guilty, it ended up paying brutal murders for a some time entire their case was decided or acted upon be the district attorney.

Like so many of his other predictions about America, he saw that the evil of racism and slavery was bound to cause the nation to implode. And this was decades before the Civil War, but the problem was inescapable to a critical observer like de Tocqueville.

Johnson was the first Black man who won the heavyweight championship at a time when racism in America was rampant. Many whites referred to Jeffries as “The Great White Hope” who would take the champion back for the whites. He didn’t and was beaten badly.

Surprising to most people who know of President Theodore Roosevelt’s general liberals, his 4th son was an ultraconservative who founded and joined racist, anti-Semitic, right wing organizations, and to the distress of many in the family and without lent his name to many of the most extreme right wing causes and organizations.

This became one of the most widely quoted statements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Black protests and demonstrations were emerging throughout the country after a white police officer shot to death an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, MO. This argument was made by a number of police apologist whites who could not understand the ferocity and passion of the demonstrations, but Giuliani was the most prominent politician taking that viewpoint. See {642521} for the refutation and response.

Grady, a Georgian, prompted himself as a spokesman for the “New South” and while he did no advocate slavery and the brutality that had been inflicted on Southern Negroes, he was a strong white supremacist as this quotation demonstrates. He was only “liberal” compared with the total revanchist racists. However, when in the North he spoke kindly about the Negro. See Quotation 643652.

This was a quotation from Roof's twisted confession of the fact that he walked into a black church that was holding a Bible Study Class, and gunned down 9 religious people studing the Bible. His "justification" was based on totally false "facts" but at the time many people--especially those and the extremes of political ideology simply chose the fact that supported their narrative and world vie without regard to veracity. The overwhelming majority of whites who are murdered in America are murdered by other whites and usually by people whey knew. Most rapes in the United States are committed by Whites, not Blacks, Of the Black committed rapes, most of the victims were also Black. Large proportions of the American populace believe that the Black cntribution to crime against whites is very much larger than it reall is. Of the whites who believe this, a tiny few become white supremicists and only some of those act out and commit any physical violance. However the few succetable people like Roof have heard these falsehoods so ofteh that tney not only beleive it si try but they believe taht they must do something lest the problem get worse. Of course, even if Blacks were committing all these crimes against whites, it takes a spcially sociopahic mind to believe that by killing Bible-studying, deeply religious, Christian Blacks, they will somehow stop violent Black crime.