Today at the Editor’s glance: Remember the Palmer Raids? A. Mitchell Palmer was Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, one of the most brutal men to occupy the office. By method, he was a descendant of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s police chief. By temperament, he was Herbert Hoover’s godfather, seeing foreign-born subversives and agitators behind every un-Waspish face. He unleashed raids that came to bear his name, rounding up “subversives” and deporting them–6,000 in all. McCarthyism and the police-state permissiveness of the USA Patriot Act have a long history. Palmer’s second major raid took place on this date in 1920. Somewhere in Mar-a-Lago today there’ll be a party in his honor. John Hope Franklin, who died at age 94 in early 2009, would have been 106 today. At least he lived to see the election of the first Black President. “My mother and I used to have a game we’d play on our public,” Dr. Franklin told Peter Applebome, the New York Times reporter of the South, in 2009. “She would say if anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro president of the United States. And just the words were so far-fetched, so incredible that we used to really have fun, just saying it.” Franklin is the author of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (1947), a book that sold more than 3 million copies. He’d worked with Thurgood Marshall, before Marshall was a justice of the Supreme Court, on the Brown v. Board of Education case, and received 105 honorary degrees. “He began his career,” Applebome wrote a year later, “in the depths of segregation when German prisoners of war could travel through the South with more dignity than a distinguished black historian, helped create the great civil rights revolution of the 1960’s that swept away Jim Crow and now ponders the murky soup of immense progress and staggering despair that exists 30 years later. And if his own life is in many ways a monument to change, he finds himself these days pondering a landscape so familiar as to make history look like an endless tape loop, repeating and recycling ad infinitum the same rude hisses and squeaks.” Watch a three-hour C-Span special with John Hope Franklin here.
Now this:
And we almost forgot: today is Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly’s birthday. Wish him well:
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Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences-deep, corrosive, obstinate differences–radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and they must be dealt with and they must be overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin. Nor can we find a complete answer in the experience of other American minorities. They made a valiant and a largely successful effort to emerge from poverty and prejudice. The Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly upon his own efforts. But he just can not do it alone. For they did not have the heritage of centuries to overcome, and they did not have a cultural tradition which had been twisted and battered by endless years of hatred and hopelessness, nor were they excluded–these others–because of race or color–a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.”
–President Lyndon Johnson, from a June 4, 1965 Commencement Address at Howard University. Watch it below.
