This was the other tooth-grating one. On the walk in, at least.
CW Walk Back In Time Sidewalk Plaque: 1954: From This Date You Tolerate Segregated Schools.
Me: No, no, no. This is precisely the kind of dumbsh*t superficial reading of history that tries to boil down everything into a single court case – and it’s one of the primary reasons why everybody who isn’t an activist liberal doesn’t quite trust the judiciary branch to be sensible (or, indeed, sane) anymore. Yes, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka did (properly) revoke Plessy v. Ferguson; but obviously we were not collectively tolerating school segregation before then. If we had been collectively tolerating school (or any other kind of) segregation then neither case would have been on the docket. We would have simply let the original segregation laws go unchallenged – and never fought to repeal them. In other words, this was not a case where the heavens opened up and beams of racial tolerance shone down upon a darkened land, suddenly making us amenable to a 9-0 US Supreme Court decision: it was a case that was the then-culmination of almost a hundred years of grappling with the concepts embodied in the 13th through 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Said grappling was not always won by the good guys, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you pretend that the struggle never took place at all, CW Walk Back In Time Sidewalk Plaque.
Fortunately, there was rum later.
Moe Lane
PS: The Republican party says “You’re welcome” for the civil rights movement, too. The GOP: we may not have always been for conservatism, but – damn your eyes – we’ve always been for liberty.
Sounds like you needed it. The rum that is.
I have an odd wondering as to when those plaques were installed.
Well, you have that wrong, at least as far as Virginia is concerned. I’m an Air Force brat, so I don’t actually have a dog in the fight, but it’s a matter of historical record that an overwhelming majority of white folks down here were not all that interested in integration and in fact were dead set against the notion, so much so that “Massive Resistance” was SERIOUS BUSINESS, supported by everyone from Sen. Harry Byrd down to the lowest levels of the Democratic Party here. Amusing side note: the high school here in Alexandria, T.C. Williams, about whose integration REMEMBER THE TITANS was made? It’s named for the longtime superintendent of city schools, who closed them completely in 1954 rather than submit to a judge’s order. Its student body is now, and has been for some years, mostly non-white. 🙂