Tea Party = Racism and Xenophobia

More evidence that the "Tea Party Movement" is racist to the core, from the first so-called Tea Party national convention in Nashville last week:

Opening speaker, former GOP primary presidential candidate Tom Tancredo said Obama won because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country." Yeah, and we don't have poll taxes and near as many lynchings as we used to, either. Oh, those glory days of Jim Crow...

He went on to say that "people who could not spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House — name is Barack Hussein Obama” and blamed our nation's problems on the "cult of multiculturalism." Hmm.

Celebrate aTriumph of Justice!

20 years ago today, one of the great moments in international racial justice happened, as Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years as a political prisoner.

Beginning of the End of Jim Crow

Fifty years ago today, a few brave young souls from an historically black college in Greensboro, NC decided to lay their bodies on the line to express their conviction that they had as much right as white customers did to sit at the Woolworth's lunch counter. It wasn't the first such sit-in. It isn't commonly seen as the spark of the civil rights movement (Emmett Till's murder, or Brown v. Board, or the Montgomery bus boycott get credit for that). But the Greensboro sit-in movement, begun Feb. 1, 1960, sparked something. Within weeks, similar sit-ins had broken out in dozens of other towns. Within months, it was going on in 100s of places with novel variations. Jails started filling up as the common masses and college students took over what had been a somewhat elite-led movement. Three years later, the 1964 Civil Rights Law outlawed Jim Crow segregation in privately owned businesses that served the general public.