Coushatta, Louisiana (reported August 25):
Nine black children attending schools in northwestern Louisiana's Red River Parish were directed last week to the back of a school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children, the mother of one of the children said.
"All nine children were assigned to two seats in the back of the bus and the older ones had to hold the smaller ones in their laps," Iva Richmond, mother of two of the children, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Red River Parish Schools Superintendent Kay Easley, did not return a call for comment Thursday. The (Shreveport) Times newspaper said Easley acknowledged that she has investigated the claim and confirmed that the bus driver did not run her route Wednesday. She would not comment further, the newspaper said.
Richmond said her children, ages 14 and 15, had long had a black bus driver, but their bus assignment was changed this year. When they started school earlier this month, a white driver was at the wheel. The driver told the children that she had assigned seats to the white students on the bus and ordered the black children to sit in the back.
And now this, from Saltillo, Mississippi:
A pastor who says his congregation voted not to accept black membership has resigned. The church says it never made such a decision.
The Rev. John Stevens says Fellowship Baptist Church in Saltillo voted not to approve blacks as members during a scheduled Sunday night business meeting Aug. 6. Because of the decision, Stevens stepped down from the Baptist Missionary Alliance congregation that has an average Sunday morning attendance of 30 people.
According to Stevens, the church made race an issue after a biracial 12-year-old boy, Joe, began attending Fellowship Baptist with his temporary guardians.
The church was "afraid Joe might come with his people and have blacks in the church," Stevens said. "I could not go along with that. There would always be a wall between us, so I resigned that night."
[snip]
In July Joe moved in with his uncle and aunt, Saltillo residents Jason and Melinda Kirk. The Kirks, who had been attending Fellowship Baptist for almost five months, were Joe's temporary guardians until recently, when his stepmother moved here from Ohio.
During the week of July 23-26, Fellowship Baptist held revival services, and on July 26, Joe became a Christian.
The following Sunday, people at the church asked the Kirks if they would become members, and the family started praying about it.
The next Sunday morning, Aug. 6, the Kirks went to Fellowship Baptist. When company arrived at their house that afternoon, they decided not to go to the church that night.
Later that evening, the Kirks received a phone call from their pastor, Stevens, who said the church had voted not to accept black membership. The minister, 72, who has now retired, said he had resigned from the church over the decision.
Joe overheard the telephone conversation.
"We explained to him that everybody didn't feel like that," Melinda Kirk said. "But it really bothered him. He felt like our pastor had to quit his job because of him."
The Kirks reassured their nephew that Stevens was just standing up for what is right.
"People have got to realize we're all God's children," Jason Kirk said. "It's not God so loved the white people; it's God so loved the world."
Since Stevens' resignation, one church member who was not at the Aug. 6 meeting has called the former pastor and told him he was in favor of what he did. Stevens estimates 80 percent of the church is against having blacks as members of the congregation.
As we head into a week which marks the one-year anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, leaving tens of thousands of black New Orleans residents stranded or dying, while the President of the United States was yukking it up with 2008 Presidential hopeful John McCain over birthday cake:
...one has to wonder what has created a climate in which once again, people in the United States believe it acceptable to push black schoolchildren to the back of a school bus and ban them from church.
I believe it's a by-produce of the same anti-immigrant fervor that has gripped the Republican party for the last six months, evern since Republicans realized that the Iraq war issue is no longer working for them.
The anti-immigration rhetoric isn't about all immigrants, it's specifically about dark-skinned immigrants. Leave it to old reliable Pat Buchanan to blow the cover off what's really driving the immigration issue:
In his new book, State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan argues for “an immediate moratorium on all immigration.” Why? To preserve the dominance of the white race in America. Buchanan explains on pg. 11:America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.
Indeed, Buchanan argues quite explicitly that only whites have the appropriate “genetic endowments” to keep America from collapsing. From pg. 164:In 1994, Sam Francis, the syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times…volunteered this thought:
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted by a different people.”
Had Francis said this of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people, it would have gone unnoted. But he was suggesting Western civilization was superior and that only Europeans could have created it. If Western peoples perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us. No one would deny that when the Carthaginians perished, Carthaginian civilization and culture perished. But by claiming the achievements of the West for Europeans, Francis had passed beyond the bounds of tolerance. He was summarily fired.
Buchanan goes on to praise those who, implicitly or explicitly, talk about the genetic superiority of the white race, including John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves, Bell Curve authors Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, and Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers. (Campanis said that blacks “may not have the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or, perhaps, a general manager.” He added that blacks were often poor swimmers “because they don’t have the buoyancy.”)
When George Allen called a dark-skinned worker for Jim Webb's campaign "macaca", he waasn't talking about his hairstyle, or creating a term for someone he regards as a shithead with a mohawk. He was using a word he knew damn well was a racial slur. What would make a potential presidential hopeful do such a thing? Because he knew that HIS crowd, HIS party, HIS constituents, the people who would vote for HIM, would not object.
You can trot Condoleeza Rice out there till the cows come home, it doesn't change the fact that when it comes to black Americans who do not serve the Republican party, as far as that party is concerned, they might as well drown.
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