BEYOND I HAVE A DREAM
People who cannot attend, start the discussion here. Tell us your favorite quote from Martin King (besides “I have a dream”) so your neighbors can discuss it Wednesday the 11th., 6:30 at the Brooks Library in Brattleboro
Four special guests will make remarks at the beginning of the event. Most of the allotted time, from 6:30 to 8:30, and maybe later, will be devoted to free discussion about the Martin Luther King who has never been celebrated in popular culture. Who gradually became influenced by Malcohm X.
BCS is planning this event to be a public discussion with the descriptive title “Beyond I Have A Dream” and with short presentations by Ethan Nasreddin-Longo, Reverend Arnold Thomas, Rv. Lise Sparrow, and Mary Gannon, honoring King and Black History Month and featuring Q&A and public discussion more than presentations. The purpose will be to raise awareness of King’s radical evolution and of other militant anti-racist thought.
A commentary by Rev. Thomas’ published in Jun 1, 2020, was the inspiration for this event. He lamented the outcry about the killing of George Floyd.
“The increasing numbers of black and brown people across the nation and in Vermont have also increased in their intolerance of noisy-gong-and-clashing-cymbal-like rhetoric of whites who momentarily raise their voices against what they see as a momentary crisis and then resume their lives supporting and sustaining the systems of their own privilege.”
Mary Gannon is a training consultant with the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, a prominent activist around Brattleboro, and honored for Lifetime Achievement by the Windham County NAACP.
Lise Sparrow and Ms. Gannon founded the the Community Equity Foundation. As a leader of Vermont Interfaith Action pastor she made the Guilford Church a well known resource for social justice events and organizing. She received special commendation for her work by the Vermont Legislature.
Professor Longo has served as director of the Vermont Legislative Panel on Racial Disparities in Montpelier and as counsel to the Vermont State Police on officer training. Locally he has been a visiting professor at Marlboro College. In 2022 he gave a public introductory lesson on critical race theory for BCS.
The Reverend Arnold Thomas
The reverend’s awards in the ministry and civil rights advocacy are really too many to mention. He is:
> Cofounder, Vermont Social Equity Caucus of the State House and Senate
> President & Founder, Northern Berkshire Human Rights & Relations Task Force
> Board Member, Vermont Racial Justice Alliance
> Board Member, Vermont ACLU
and these are only four positions he holds in community leadership in social justice only around Vermont. His scholarship and leadership positions outside Vermont and in the ministry are too many to mention here.
Brattleboro.CommonSense@gmail.com
One of my favorites
Saying this sort of thing gets you called a “racist” and a “class reductionist” today.
“Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.
Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.
To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.
If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”