Martin Luther King’s Ultimate Victory

As we remember the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. today, we can celebrate the vast changes that our country has undergone in the years since his murder in Memphis in 1968. Despite racial incidents in recent years, such as the 2017 Charlottesville riots and the several race riots under President Obama, many of us who are under the age of 50 really have very little concept of just how far America has come in just a few short decades.

I realize that many Americans still feel that the United States is filled with racism and bigotry but that it has merely been driven underground. I don’t mean to disregard their experience and concerns, but driving racism underground is progress in a country where racism used to not only be above ground but institutionalized as both African slavery and later as Jim Crow laws.

On the other hand, many white Americans, myself included, not only are not aware of what many minority members go through on a daily basis, we cannot fully comprehend how they feel when racism rears its ugly head. Many conservatives scoff at the idea of modern racism, but when Republican stalwarts like Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) say that racism still exists, it is harder to ignore.

As a child of the early 70s, I just missed the civil rights era. As a native Georgian, I was closer to the struggle for racial equality in terms of geography than in time. I grew up about 20 miles from the bridge on Ga. Hwy. 172 that crosses over the Broad River near Athens where one of the most infamous incidents of the civil rights struggle occurred. Later, as a college student at the University of Georgia, I would drive across the bridge and past the historical marker that memorialized the murder of Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a decorated black veteran of WWII who made the mistake of driving past a trio of Klansmen in Athens.

Seven years before I was born, the racists followed the car driven by Penn and two other army officers, catching up to them about 20 miles outside of Athens. The Klansmen fired shotguns into Penn’s car and it careened into a bridge abutment. One of the blasts killed Lt. Col. Penn. After the colonel’s murderers were arrested, an all-white jury in Madison County found them not guilty. In the first case of its kind, Penn’s murderers were retried under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on federal charges of violating Penn’s civil rights by murdering him. Two were found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

What a difference a decade makes. When I started elementary school, I went to a rural school where over the half the class was black. I didn’t know until a long time afterward that if I had been a few years older I would have been in a segregated classroom of white kids. I remember my black schoolmates from those days fondly. Black and white got along well. We didn’t know that we shouldn’t.

But things weren’t totally colorblind. The races usually remained separate outside of school. I remember being taught that we should be friendly and respectful to people of other races, but that we shouldn’t date or marry them because of cultural differences.

In my job as a pilot, I’ve had the opportunity to travel the country and visit many other places where the struggle for civil rights took place. I’ve sat at a replica of the whites-only lunch counter in Wichita where activists staged a sit-in in 1958. I’ve visited the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where KKK terrorists planted a bomb in 1963 that killed four young black girls who were going to Sunday School. I’ve stood on the National Mall where Rev. King delivered his “I Have A Dream Speech,” telling America that he foresaw a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Fast forward 40 years to when I had my own children. I am proud to say that the new generation has fulfilled Rev. King’s dream. I thought of King’s words when my daughter’s best friend was a little black girl who came to play at our house. My daughter went to visit her friend’s home as well. Likewise, one of my son’s good friends was a boy of Mexican descent whose parents barely spoke English. I think that my children are almost literally colorblind when it comes to race because when I ask them to describe their friends, they seldom mention skin color.

My children are probably less prejudiced than I was at their ages, but I’ve changed as well. I realized years ago that racism was inconsistent with my Bible which teaches me that all are equal in Christ. If people can’t stand to be around people of other races on earth, what will they do in Heaven where believers all colors and creeds will spend eternity together? It is sadly ironic that the most segregated time in America is Sunday morning.

When it comes to love and marriage, I teach my children, as Rev. King said, to prioritize the content of the character over the color of skin. I would prefer that my children marry good, respectable, loving people of other races than “white trash.” As U2 sang, “I believe in the kingdom come when all the colors will bleed into one.”

It is disturbing that a number of Republicans seem to be turning their backs on the “proposition that all men are created equal.” Most recently the ironically-named Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) defended white nationalism and white supremacy and was rightfully censured by his colleagues. President Trump called the participants in the Charlottesville riots “very fine people” even though they were alt-right white nationalists. The discussion of race riots, police killings of black men, and illegal immigration often has racial overtones, such as the fake pictures of Trayvon Martin that circulated on the internet and the false claims about an illegal immigrant crime wave. I recently had a conversation on Twitter with a conservative Christian Trump supporter who denied that the Bible condemned white supremacy. [DT1] [DT2] 

One of the most disturbing racial problems in recent years is the conservative response to the killing of Philando Castile, a concealed carry permit holder who was shot and killed by a police officer in Minnesota in 2016. Gun activists and the NRA were largely silent despite the disturbing nature of Castile’s death. At the time, many were quick to dismiss Castile, a school cafeteria manager, as a drug dealer or gang member. I have to ask myself if the reaction would have been the same if Castile had been white. If I’m honest, I have to say “no.”

Things aren’t perfect in America, but they have improved by an astronomical degree since Martin Luther King’s time. Whatever you think of King, a flawed man with human failings (but not a communist), the bottom line is that King was responsible for the largely peaceful transition from an American racial caste system to one of the most racially equal societies on the planet, at least in terms of the law.

But two centuries of racial oppression are not easily undone. While my generation did not see segregation ourselves, I have no doubt that black kids grew up hearing stories from their parents and grandparents about the bad old days of segregation just like I grew up hearing about my ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. It should be understandable that some blacks are still sensitive about slavery and segregation.  

It isn’t necessary to be politically correct to be respectful of other races. Being politically incorrect does not mean being impolite or bigoted. The condemnation of Steve King is a step in the right direction for a party that is hemorrhaging minority voters, but ultimately the Republicans should condemn the bigots in their midst because it is the right thing to do, not because it will help them at the polls.

Republicans will claim King as one of their own today, but the modern GOP shouldn’t defend itself by pointing to the actions of past Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln or the 1960s Republicans who helped to pass the Voting Rights Act. Instead, they should recall the words of President Reagan who addressed those “who still adhere to senseless racism and religious prejudice” in 1981.

“To those individuals who persist in such hateful behavior,” Reagan said, “if I were speaking to them instead of to you, I would say to them, 'You are the ones who are out of step with our society. You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America. And this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct.’”

Racism today is so socially unacceptable that even most racists won’t admit that they are racists. That is Martin Luther King’s ultimate victory.

Originally published on The Resurgent

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 [DT1]https://twitter.com/captainkudzu/status/1083916475306409985

 [DT2]

The Entire Civil Rights Struggle Just Slipped Mike Ditka’s Mind

For those of us outside of Chicago, Mike Ditka is remembered as the former coach of certain team known as “Da Bears.” Ditka jumped into NFL controversy today with a historically inaccurate observation that there was no oppression in the United States in the past century.

 “All of a sudden, it’s become a big deal now, about oppression,” Ditka told Jim Gray on Westwood One’s pregame show, quoted by the Chicago Tribune. “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of. Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.”

Ditka, who was born in 1939, should know better.

Growing up in the North, Ditka may not have witnessed much of the segregation that was present in Southern cities of the time, but integration was a major story of his lifetime. He would have been eight-years-old when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. A year earlier, Kenny Washington had become the first black player in the NFL.

Ditka was in his 20s during the civil struggles of the 1960s. The Freedom Riders hopped aboard Greyhound buses in 1961 when Ditka was 22. Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963 when Ditka was 24.

In 1961, Mike Ditka was drafted by the Chicago Bears and played for the team until 1967, when he was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles. In 1966, shortly before he left the Windy City, Martin Luther King led the Chicago Campaign, a series of marches and demonstrations aimed at achieving fair housing practices.

During one march through Chicago’s West Side in July 1966, violence erupted as white counterprotesters attacked the marchers with bottles, bricks and rocks. King, who was struck by a rock, said, “I have seen many demonstrations in the south but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

Two years later, King was murdered in Memphis. The story generated headlines as far away as Philadelphia.

In 1969, Ditka went to the Dallas Cowboys. Although racial segregation has been outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Ditka must have seen some vestiges of the racist attitudes that had been prevalent only a few years before. In Texas, integration of both blacks and Hispanics was still ongoing at the time.

The Chicago Tribune notes with some irony that the Chicago Bears, a team that Ditka coached as well as played for, was the subject of the movie, “Brian’s Song.” The 1971 film is the story of the first interracial teammates to room together on Bears road trips.

Oppression in 20^th century America was all around Mike Ditka. He can probably remember many of these events if he tries. Civil rights history was happening all around him.   

America is a great country, but not all of our past is great. Although tempting, we shouldn’t blot out the bad parts. We need to remember them so that we can learn from them. Studying America’s dark racial past also serves to show us how far we have come. 

Originally Published On The Resurgent

On Race And Growing Up Southern

The controversy over Confederate statues is something I have thought a lot about. Perhaps unlike many, my experience has allowed my position to change over the years.

I grew up in small town Georgia. I attended an elementary school that was predominantly black. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were growing up in the shadow of the Jim Crow South. I was in elementary school in the 1970s, less than a decade after the full integration of Georgia public schools.  Lester Maddox (D-Ga.), the avowed segregationist governor, was not even a distant memory.

What’s more, my classmates and I were scarcely a decade and 20 miles away from the murder of Col. Lemuel Penn, a decorated hero of WWII who happened to be black. Penn was murdered by a trio of Ku Klux Klansmen for the crime of driving through Athens, Georgia in 1964. The murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury prompting the FBI to charge the men with civil rights violations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I can only remember two brushes with the Klan. As a high school student, a classmate showed me a Ku Klux Klan ring one day. It was like a class ring, but instead of the school name, it was engraved with the words “Ku Klux Klan.”

In the other instance, I was a college student working part-time at a local pharmacy when Klan members appeared on the town square one day. The Klansmen, dressed in white robes with no hoods, tried to hand out leaflets to anyone who would take them. Even at that point, they were such an anachronism that everyone in the store took turns driving by to gawk at them. No one seemed to be taking leaflets.

The world had changed a lot in a short time. My classmates and I scarcely thought about race. We got along fine as kids generally do. In my youth, we were aware of race, but pushed it to the background. I remember my parents telling me that I should treat everyone with respect, but that the races should not mix sexually.

I would be willing to bet that they have evolved past the intermarriage taboo now. I know I have. I care more about the content of the character of my children’s future spouses than skin color. I would prefer they have an honorable and decent mate who is black, Hispanic or Asian than what is referred to as “white trash” in the South.

My experience taught me that children have to learn hatred. They don’t come to it naturally. A proud moment for me as a father was when my own children failed to even comprehend race as a descriptive characteristic. “Why does anybody care about skin color?” they asked.

For years, I subscribed to the notion that race relations were nothing to be concerned about. No living blacks were slaves and no living whites were slave owners. If that was the case, what was there to argue about?

As I learned about civil rights history and talked to my black friends, my opinion slowly changed.

My family has been in Georgia since the early 1800s. In an undated photo, my ancestors are standing outside their cabin with a black man who is almost certainly their slave.

Several of my ancestors were Confederate soldiers. My great-grandfather was captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania and spent the rest of the war in a (damn)Yankee prison camp in Elmira, N.Y. Today, Elmira is forgotten by history, but it was a brutal place in 1864.

The mortality rate among the prisoners was 25 percent, rivalling the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Ga. But Georgia was subject to a federal naval blockade that meant that even Confederate soldiers didn’t have enough to eat. Supplies were plentiful in New York, but overcrowding, disease, inadequate protection from the New York winter and lack of food still killed thousands of prisoners. Many of those who survived were emaciated and unrecognizable when they returned home.  

If I feel bitter about the treatment of my grandfather and his brothers-in-arms, none of which I never met, how much more bitter do blacks feel about slavery and Jim Crow? I can scarcely imagine.

While there are no living slaves today, Jim Crow is a recent memory. Older blacks experienced it personally. Younger blacks have heard first-hand accounts of whites-only water fountains and lunch counters, of the Freedom Riders, of lynchings, of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in which Klansmen killed four little girls, of the murders of Medgar Evers, Lemuel Penn, Martin Luther King and more.

While slavery and Jim Crow are distant history in my experience, they aren’t so far in the past for my black friends. Even black conservatives like Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have stories of prejudice and “driving while black” to tell. Racism is in retreat, Charlottesville notwithstanding, but it isn’t dead and never will be. Vestiges of racism will probably be around forever.

The world is full of longstanding ethnic problems. There is the black-white divide in America. We also have tension between Native Americans and European newcomers. In Texas, there are still hard feelings on both sides over the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto and the border clashes that occurred after Texas independence. In other countries, there are ethnic conflicts that have lasted for centuries between Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Turks, ethnic Russians and their subjugated countries, the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans…. The list goes on and on.

In most cases, people have dealt with these conflicts by dredging up old hurts and killing people because of it. Then the children of these victims take vengeance on the next generation of the other group in an endless cycle.

One way to avoid this vicious cycle is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Would most whites hold a grudge if their parents and grandparents had been treated as second-class citizens and had to fear for their lives if they acted as normal human beings, as Emmett Till did? You bet they would.

Would blacks and non-Southerners feel protective about Confederate memorials if their ancestors had fought and died under the Confederate banner?  Many Confederates who did not own slaves simply fought to protect their homes from the federal invaders. Sherman burned everything in his path on his march to the sea and Union soldiers committed numerous atrocities on Southerners. In 1864, for example, Union forces forcibly deported 400 civilian women from Roswell, Ga. to the North. Most of these women never returned home.

The point is that both sides have legitimate grievances. If we persist in fighting over the status of biggest victim and inflicting revenge on the other side, then the dispute will continue to fester and grow.

The ultimate answer is forgiveness. The Bible that most of us, black and white, purport to believe teaches that forgiveness heals the victim as well as the perpetrator. The Bible also teaches that race is unimportant, that we are all equal – and equally sinful – at the foot of the cross.

As to Confederate statues, I prefer to keep them, but I understand the point of view of those who oppose them. To me, the issue of statues is unimportant compared to other issues we face such as the national debt, Islamic terror, and the fundamental decay of American society. To me, the disposition of statues of should be a local issue decided by the people of the community, not outsiders with an axe to grind.

Who was more right and who was more wrong is less important than that we now live together as Americans. That’s why it distresses me when my conservative friends take the bait so easily and quickly find themselves in the moral equivalence game between leftists and neo-Nazis who claim to be working toward the president’s agenda.

Solutions to many of the world’s problems would be possible if more people would attempt to understand the point of view of the opposing side. Before making up your mind on an issue, walk a mile in their shoes. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

Federal court extends civil rights protections to gays

In an unprecedented ruling, the full 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees from discrimination. Sexual orientation is not mentioned in the text of the Civil Rights Act and the law has never been interpreted to include sexual orientation.

The Associated Press notes that the 8-3 ruling is unusual for several reasons. The court is considered to be somewhat conservative even though it is in Chicago. Five of the eight judges were appointed by Republican presidents who typically value a literal interpretation of the law as opposed to Democrats who tend to stray from the written text.

The case centers on Kimberly Hively, a former teacher at Ivy Tech Community College in South Bend, Indiana. Hively says that after an administrator saw her kissing her girlfriend in 2009, the school refused to promote her, harassed her and eventually fired her four years later.

The case hinged on the meaning of the word “sex” in the Civil Rights Act, which bans workplace discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. Hively’s lawyer argued that discrimination due to sexual orientation is illegal under the law’s prohibition of sexual discrimination. This interpretation is based on the Supreme Court ruling in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989) which held that gender stereotyping was a banned form of sex discrimination. Congress has repeatedly failed to add sexual orientation to the list of protected classes under the law.

Judge Diane Wood, a Clinton appointee, said in the majority opinion, “Any discomfort, disapproval, or job decision based on the fact that the complainant — woman or man — dresses differently, speaks differently, or dates or marries a same-sex partner, is a reaction purely and simply based on sex. That means that it falls within Title VII's prohibition against sex discrimination ....”

“I don't see why firing a lesbian because she is in the subset of women who are lesbian should be thought any less a form of sex discrimination than firing a woman because she's a woman,” wrote Judge Richard Posner in his opinion that concurred with the majority ruling. Posner was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

“Who will be hurt if gays and lesbians have a little more job protection?” Judge Posner reportedly asked during arguments on the case per New York Magazine. “So, what’s the big deal?” he continued when the attorney did not give an answer, “Are we bound by what people thought in 1964?”

“(Lawmakers in the 1960s) shouldn't be blamed for that failure of foresight,” Posner wrote in his opinion. “We understand the words of Title VII differently not because we're smarter than the statute's framers and ratifiers but because we live in a different era, a different culture.”

“We are not authorized to infuse the text with a new or unconventional meaning or to update it to respond to changed social, economic, or political conditions,” Judge Diane Sykes, who was considered by President Trump for the Supreme Court, wrote in her dissent. “It's understandable that the court is impatient to protect lesbians and gay men from workplace discrimination without waiting for Congress to act. Legislative change is arduous and can be slow to come. But we're not authorized to amend Title VII by interpretation.”

Ivy Tech said in a statement that its policies already prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and denies that it discriminated against Lively at all. The factual question of whether discrimination occurred was separate from whether the discrimination was illegal under the Civil Rights Act.

The 7^th Circuit ruling contradicts a ruling by a three-judge panel in Atlanta three weeks ago. Because of the controversial interpretation of the law and the fact that different courts are issuing opposite rulings, the case is likely to come before the Supreme Court. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

It's time to lower Confederate flag

In the wake of last week’s mass murder in Charleston, SC, amid the usual calls for gun control has come a secondary demand that South Carolina remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia. For perhaps the first time, conservative Republicans such as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Senator Lindsey Graham have joined the calls to remove the flag. As a lifelong Southerner and staunch conservative, I agree that the time has come to lower the Confederate flag.

I grew up respecting the heroes of the Confederacy. As a native Georgian, I learned family lore about my ancestors who had fought for the South, including one great-great-grandfather who was captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864 and then interned at the notorious federal prison camp in Elmira, NY. I still hold a great deal of respect for Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.  

There is disagreement even on the nature of the flag in question. Some defenders of the South Carolina flag point out that it was not the national flag of the Confederacy. In reality, the rectangular “Southern Cross” was the Confederate navy jack and was similar to the Confederate battle flag. The flags of the Confederacy can be seen on USflag.org. Both the battle flag and the navy jack were a Confederate flags and, in the minds of most Americans have come to be the Confederate flag.  Photos of the South Carolina flag appear to be the Confederate battle flag, a square version of the Southern Cross carried by the Confederate army. In the end, the exact version of the flag is irrelevant.

Confederate apologists have long made the claim that the Civil War (which should more properly be called the War of Secession) was about state’s rights, not slavery. There is some truth to this argument. The rub is that the state right in question was the right to keep slavery, the South’s “peculiar institution,” legal. This is made abundantly clear in the declarations of causes passed by the seceding states. These declarations are available for review on CivilWar.org.

South Carolina, the first state to secede, cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as their reason for leaving the Union. More specifically, the Carolinians charged that “non-slaveholding States… assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.”

In Georgia’s declaration, its delegates cite slavery as the reason for secession in the document’s second sentence: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”

One must conclude not only that secessionists were leaving the Union to protect slavery, but that they were proud of their pro-slavery stance. Given that the Confederacy was born to protect slavery, it is also a given that the Confederacy was a racist institution. Therefore, the Confederate flag must be a racist symbol.

Proponents of the flag also argue that the United States flag must also be a racist symbol because Old Glory flew over legal slavery for longer than the Southern Cross. This statement is in error for several important reasons. First, slavery was never a federal matter. It was always subject to the individual states. A timeline of slavery by Mount Holyoke College shows that Vermont banned slavery with a constitutional amendment in 1777, one year after the Declaration of Independence. Other northern states had banned the practice by 1804.

Additionally, the Constitution itself reflects American uneasiness about slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise is often incorrectly interpreted to mean that the Constitution considered slaves to be three-fifths of a man. In reality, the Three-Fifths Compromise laid the foundation for the eventual abolition of slavery by providing a check to the power of the Southern slave states.

Likewise, the Constitution granted Congress the power to prohibit the importation of slaves after 20 years, an action that Congress took in 1807 when it passed the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves. In the South, even though slaves were no longer imported, the slave trade persisted as children of domestic slaves were separated from their families and sold to new owners. After the slave trade was declared to be piracy by Congress in 1819, the US Navy took an active role alongside the Royal Navy in bringing slave smugglers to justice and ending the slave trade in the Atlantic Ocean.

In contrast with the Confederacy, the United States took strong action to hasten the end of slavery. Even though the American flag flew over slavery for almost 100 years, slavery was never the official policy of the United States. In the end, secession hastened the end of American slavery. The 13^th amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified on December 6, 1865, much earlier than it is likely to have been passed without the war.  

The racist association of the Confederate flag did not end with the war. The flag was raised above the South Carolina statehouse in 1961 to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Civil War according to Daniel Hollis, the last surviving member of the centennial commission. Hollis doesn’t recall a racial motive behind the raising of the flag, but South Carolina politicians, mostly Democrats, were fighting against desegregation at the time. In fact, South Carolina’s delegates seceded from the national Centennial Commission to protest President Kennedy’s decision to move the ceremonies to Charleston’s navy base rather than exclude black delegates who had been refused entrance to the segregated Francis Marion Hotel. The brouhaha was referred to as the Second Battle of Fort Sumter.

The South Carolina statehouse flag may not have been explicitly associated with segregation, but elsewhere the Confederate flag was adopted by anti-civil rights activists. The Georgia Encyclopedia notes that the inclusion of the Southern Cross on the Georgia state flag in 1956 was prompted by the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decisions in 1954 and 1955. Rep. Denmark Groover said, after the new Georgia flag was adopted, that it “will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for,” a reference to preserving segregation.

The South Carolina flag was moved from the top of the statehouse to a different site on the statehouse grounds as part of a compromise in 2000. The Georgia flag was changed in 2001.

The best argument for keeping the Confederate flag is as a memorial for Confederate soldiers. An estimated 260,000 Confederate soldiers died in the war. This was almost five percent of the total non-slave population of the Confederacy. Another 194,000 were wounded and 31,000 taken prisoner. It is appropriate to fly Confederate flags at war memorials. It is not appropriate to give the flag a place of prominence on the state capitol grounds or on a state flag.

The bitter truth is that Confederate soldiers, even the majority who did not own slaves, fought to preserve a racist system, even as they were protecting their homes. After the fall of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, the flag became the symbol of racial segregation in the form of “Jim Crow” laws and “separate-but-equal” treatment of blacks. As such a racist symbol, the Confederate flag has no place in a modern American government.

This is not to say that the Confederate flag should be banned. Freedom of speech dictates that people should have the right to fly the flag on private property, wear it on their clothes or paint it on their cars a la “Dukes of Hazzard.” It would also be improper to attempt to erase all vestiges of the South’s Confederate history from society. Slavery, the Confederacy and the Civil War happened and that history should be openly acknowledged and discussed.

There is a vast difference, however, between a state government endorsing the Confederate ideals by prominent placement of the flag and flying the flag at a memorial or displaying it at a museum. By keeping such a divisive symbol, states marginalize 30-40 percent of their populations. If the flag keeps alive the memory of Confederate soldiers, it is fair to say that it also keeps alive the memory of slavery and Jim Crow for black Southerners. It hearkens back to the 1960s when Klansmen could murder a black army officer, as they did not far from where I grew up, and all-white juries would unanimously acquit the killers. Bringing down the Confederate flag would be an important step in putting this racist part of our past behind us.

An addition to being good for country, lowering the Confederate flag would be a good thing for conservatives. Democrats never miss a chance to imply (or state outright) that Republicans are racist. Quite often, conservatives step right into these liberal traps.

To many minority voters, defending the flag of a 150-year-old failed racist nation makes conservatives seem like racists themselves. Conversely, hauling down the flag would remove a roadblock to increased minority participation in the GOP. If Republicans want to win future elections, they must find ways to reach out to minority voters rather than alienating them over trivial issues. In 2015, the Republican Party can either spend political capital trying to rehabilitate the Confederate flag, a lost cause in itself, or wooing minority voters. It cannot do both effectively.

Opposition to the Confederate flag spreads across racial lines. Rasmussen found that by a three to one margin, voters oppose having the Confederate flag continue to fly in front of the South Carolina statehouse. Outside of white Southerners, themselves a minority, support for the Confederate flag is thin.

South Carolina’s Confederate flag will come down, whether now or in the not-too-distant future. If the flag, hoisted by Democrats in both 1861 and 1961, is taken down now, under the effort led by Governor Nikki Haley, a woman who is herself a member of an ethnic minority, today’s Republicans will be completing the job that was started by Republican Abraham Lincoln more than 150 years ago. The irony will be delicious. 

Read the full article on Examiner.com

Photo credit: eyeliam/flickr

Two robberies show need for gun rights

Citizens of the small Georgia town of Villa Rica got a lesson in gun control last week. On two consecutive days last week, armed robbers attacked local businesses in the normally quiet suburb of Atlanta. In each incident, a man was killed by a gun. Ostensibly both were victims of “gun violence,” but for circumstances were very different. After a weeklong manhunt, the final suspect was arrested this morning in Atlanta.

According to the Villa Rican, the first incident occurred on Tuesday, June 25, when a 19-year-old man wearing a hoodie and ski mask entered Junior’s Food Store, a local convenience store and gas station, around 9:45 p.m. The man, Durante Octavious Ashley, 19, was a part-time employee of the store, but that night he pulled a gun on the clerk who was on duty and demanded money. The clerk opened the cash register and, when Ashley turned his attention to the money inside, pulled his own gun and shot the robber, killing him.

Store owner Rosh Patel confirmed to Examiner on July 2 that because the shooting was in self-defense, no charges are expected against the clerk, whose name was not released. Mr. Patel said that the clerk was very shaken by the incident and was taking some time off from work.

Less than 24 hours later, four men entered a jewelry store on the other side of town. Inside the store, they took out hammers and began smashing jewelry cases to steal the contents. Before the incident ended, one of the men shot and killed store owner Mitch Mobley. Although other people were in the store at the time of the robbery, no one else was injured according to the Villa Rican, although others, including one of Mobley’s sons, were also in the store.

WSB reported that Urarahy Rodrigues, the 34-year-old owner of Defkon One Fighting and Fitness, saw the four killers run past his gym in the same shopping center as the Mobley Company. Rodrigues took a cell phone video of the fleeing suspects and then chased after them. He caught up to 16-year-old Eric Billings, the alleged trigger man, and held him in a choke hold until police arrived.

The four robbers fled after the murder. As of this writing, three of the four men have been arrested. According to WTOC, the sixteen-year-old, Eric Billings, and Raphael Rucker, 23, were arrested on June 27, the day after the murder. On Saturday, June 29, WSB reported that 20-year-old Gregory Clifton was captured by police. The fourth suspect, 21-year-old Cranford Phelps, was arrested in Atlanta in the early hours of July 2. The three adults all had prior criminal records. Since Eric Billings is a juvenile, his record could not be verified.

The two incidents illustrate the difference between armed and unarmed victims. At Junior’s, because the clerk was armed with a legal gun, he was able to act to save his own life. Mitch Mobley, who was apparently unarmed, was at the mercy of the four robbers who burst into his store. In both cases, the police were unavailable to protect the victims during the robberies. All too often the role of the police is to arrest murderers in the days after the crime. This is a necessary and important role, but arresting his murderers won’t bring Mitch Mobley back to life. In fact, if it weren’t for Urarahy Rodrigues, who says “I am not a hero,” the perpetrators might have escaped.

Mobley was mourned by the community. Villa Rica had lost more than a business leader and a family man. He was also a philanthropist who organized charity golf tournaments to benefit causes such as cancer research. His store may have been targeted by the men from Atlanta simply because it was near Interstate 20.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that the number of gun homicides has declined 39 percent from 1993 through 2011 (the most recent year for which statistics are available). There were 11,101 fatal firearm homicides that year. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 31,672 gun deaths in 2010 (compared to 33,687 motor vehicle deaths).

The decline in gun homicides comes at a time when the total number of guns in the U.S. has increased sharply. There was a surge in gun sales after the election of Barack Obama and in 2011 Gallup found gun ownership at a 20 year high. Gun violence also declined amidst the Great Recession even though crime is traditionally assumed to spike in times of economic distress. The data calls into question the effectiveness of traditional gun control methods and seems to confirm economist John Lott’s groundbreaking 1998 study, “More Guns, Less Crime.”

Another gun control issue brought into question by the report is the effort to impose background checks and waiting periods at gun shows. According to the BJS report, less than two percent of criminals bought weapons at a flea market or gun show. The vast majority obtained their gun from family or friends (37 percent) or an illegal source (40 percent).

The BJS report notes that in about one percent of nonfatal violent crimes (about 4,600 incidents), a victim reported using a gun to defend themselves. About 0.1 percent of victims of property crime also used guns in self-defense. Without guns for self-defense, the number of gun homicides might rise by almost 5,000.

No one can know for sure whether Mitch Mobley would be alive today if he had kept a gun in his jewelry store. What can be said for certain is that when the gang of criminals burst into his store, he, his staff and his customers were at their mercy. They gave him none.

Originally published as Atlanta Conservative Examiner

Verizon phone records are different from IRS scandal

This week’s revelations of widespread data gathering by the federal government have shocked many Americans.  Coming on the heels of the recent scandals about Justice Department spying on reporters and IRS agents harassing political opponents, the new information about America’s intelligence gathering activities have drawn widespread opposition and indignation.  There are important differences between the activities of the National Security Agency and the other scandals, however.

On Wednesday, leaked court documents demanding that Verizon turn over phone records to the federal government sparked an uproar over the NSA’s phone surveillance program.  On Friday, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, released more details about the program.  Reported by the Associated Press, Clapper noted the program, which presumably includes other companies as well as Verizon, is reviewed every 90 days and the government is prohibited from indiscriminately examining the records of Americans.  The information obtained by the NSA does not contain the content of the calls, but only “metadata” such as the phone numbers involved, time, location, and duration of the call.

On Friday, the Washington Post also published leaked reports of PRISM, a secret program that analyzes internet traffic in a manner similar to the NSA’s examination of phone records.  According to the leaked documents, “e-mail, chat, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity...log-ins, etc., online social networking details” were available from major internet companies.  A CNET analysis of the PRISM documents indicates that it is theoretically possible that the government has been reading private emails of American citizens.

Even though the amount of information collected by the NSA and PRISM is staggering, there is so far no evidence that it has been used to spy on Americans or intrude on their privacy.  Instead, it seems that the federal government has been engaged in a process called “data mining.”  Data mining is the use of computer programs to discover hidden patterns in data.  Private companies frequently use data mining to target advertisements to likely customers.  Cookies on websites and tracking software collect information about internet users, which is then sold to internet advertisers.  Computer programs can even “read” your emails to target ads to your screen.  Similar programs might be used to block suspicious credit card transactions based on the user’s past history. 

While the NSA is not interested in selling anything to Americans, it is presumably interested in suspicious contacts between the United States and known terrorists in other countries.  On Thursday, Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Politico that “Within the last few years, this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States.”  Rogers added, “It is a very valuable thing. It is legal.”

Rogers appears to be correct.  Both programs appear to be legal if they were implemented properly.  In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Maryland that telephone users have no expectation of privacy with regard to telephone numbers dialed because telephone companies regularly track such information.  Likewise, CNET points out that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 and the Protect America Act of 2007 permit intelligence gathering of internet data.  The Protect America Act is limited to people “reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States” (Section 105A) and the Section 702 of the FISA Act clarifies that U.S. citizens or people within the United States cannot be targeted. 

On Friday, President Obama defended the NSA programs, saying, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” In a PBS transcript, Obama continued, “By sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. Now, with respect to the Internet and e-mails, this doesn't apply to U.S. citizens, and it doesn't apply to people living in the United States.” 

In a separate speech on Friday, transcribed by NBC Bay Area, Obama noted that “ if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

The other scandals of the Obama Administration have worked to diminish public trust in government, however.  Even before the recent scandals, Pew showed public trust in government at all-time low levels.  The reports of systematic abuses of power against the president’s political opponents (summary on Examiner.com) and spying on reporters have only heightened the crisis of confidence in the federal government.   A June 5 Rasmussen poll showed that an unprecedented 56 percent of Americans view the federal government as a threat to individual rights.  Even normally trusted agencies such as the FBI have been implicated in the Obama Administration’s apparent suppression of conservative groups.   Even the New York Times said Thursday that “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.”

Unlike the data mining by the NSA, the allegations against Obama Administration in the IRS and DOJ media spying scandals include the specific targeting of American citizens.  The IRS has admitted that it specifically targeted conservative groups and an investigation by McClatchy News confirmed that no liberal or nonpartisan groups received unfair treatment.  Several IRS employees have said that their scrutiny and harassment of conservative groups was directed by IRS officials in Washington according to the Associated Press.  Likewise, Attorney General Holder personally approved the warrant for surveillance of Fox News reporter James Rosen according to MSNBC.  Unlike the NSA surveillance, which was apparently a legitimate program directed at foreign terrorists, the IRS and Justice Department programs were specifically directed at Americans and apparently had political motives.

The NSA’s surveillance programs are not new.  They have been public knowledge since 2005 when the New York Times published an account of the program.  However, the programs are likely viewed with more concern by many Americans due to the recent reports of spying and abuses of power against American citizens.  If the IRS and DOJ could illegally target Americans for political purposes, many are concerned that NSA data might be used for the same reason.  

Originally published on Examiner.com

Nine myths about same-sex marriage

Same-sex marriage is once again in the news. Three weeks ago, North Carolina voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. The next day, President Obama reversed his support for traditional marriage and returned to a previously stated position that same-sex couples should be granted the right to marry. Now a decision by a federal appeals court in Boston has thrust the issue into the headlines once again.

The ruling by the First Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals found Section Three of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage in federal law as between a man and a woman, to be unconstitutional. The Court did not address Section Two, which stipulates that states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. The Court stayed its own ruling pending appeal which will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court.

There are many myths and much misinformation surrounding the same-sex marriage issue:

Myth #1: Defense of marriage laws are “gay marriage bans.”

While the media and homosexual activists often refer to these laws as “gay marriage bans,” in reality they do often do not ban anything. The laws simply create a definition of marriage according to the government. The heart of the federal DOMA simply states, “… the word `marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word `spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.''

Similarly, the North Carolina amendment reads, “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.”

In other words, most state laws do not prevent same-sex couples from entering into private contracts or holding private religious marriage ceremonies. Likewise, nothing prohibits private companies from offering benefits to same-sex partners of their employees. Definition of marriage laws only mean that the government will not recognize, sponsor or encourage the union of same-sex couples.

The marriage amendment to the Georgia Constitution is more ambiguous on the issue of private ceremonies. Article I Section IV Paragraph I (a) reads, “This state shall recognize as marriage only the union of man and woman. Marriages between persons of the same sex are prohibited in this state.” In reality, however, Georgia does not persecute same-sex couples. Georgia would not be likely to object to a private religious ceremony and does not penalize companies who choose to offer benefits to same-sex partners.

Myth #2: Marriage laws violate the Equal Protection Clause.

In reality, rights are held by individuals, not by couples. This means that people of homosexual orientation have exactly the same marriage rights as heterosexuals. No one, not even a heterosexual, has the right to marry anyone they choose or whoever (or whatever) they happen to love.

According to USmarriagelaws.com, all 50 states have laws against bigamy, marrying more than one person at a time. All 50 states also have laws establishing a minimum age of consent to marry. In Georgia, the minimum age is 18, but 16-year-olds can marry with the consent of their parents or a judge according to Findlaw.com. Some states recognize common law marriages. Georgia is among the states that do not. Some states don’t allow cousins to marry. Georgia is among the 26 that do.

Definition of marriage laws are simply one more example of states legislating how their citizens want marriage to be treated. The laws apply equally to everyone regardless of sexual orientation.

Myth #3: The ruling will require states to recognize same-sex marriage under the Full Faith and Credit Clause.

Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that the Constitution requires traditional marriage states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in same-sex marriage states because the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution requires that states recognize “the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State….” In their view, this means that if a state like Massachusetts issues a marriage certificate to a same-sex couple, every other state is constitutionally required to recognize it. Section Two of the DOMA specifically states that federal law should not be interpreted this way.

In this case, the ruling by the First Circuit does not address Section Two. Subsequent lawsuits probably will. The Supreme Court could also choose to invalidate the entire DOMA when it hears this or other cases on the issue, but the question of the Full Faith and Credit Clause has not yet been addressed by the courts. In the future, Georgia might be forced by the courts to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states even though Georgia law prohibits such marriages.

Myth #4: The DOMA is inconsistent with state’s rights and federalism.

Proponents present the DOMA as a case of the federal government usurping the state power to define marriage. In reality, the DOMA defines marriage only for the federal government. Section Two of the DOMA protects state rights by stipulating that traditional marriage states cannot be forced to recognize a same-sex marriage from states that have chosen to recognize same-sex marriages. Lawsuits to mandate same-sex marriages and invalidate state definition of marriage laws usurp the will of the people and their elected representatives.

Myth #5: Only religious nuts oppose same-sex marriage.

Proponents of same-sex marriage portray supporters of traditional marriage as bigots and religious fanatics, while arguing that the U.S. is not a theocracy and that the separation of church and state prohibits the government from taking a religious view of marriage. In reality, much of the support for traditional marriage can be traced to secular arguments.

It is in the vital national interest of the state to ensure that children, the next generation of taxpayers, have a stable family unit. There is strong evidence that children need both a mother and a father. It seems that the absence of fathers is particularly damaging to children. In the book “Life Without Father,” David Popenoe noted that the absence of fathers was strongly linked to many societal ills. Sixty percent of rapists come from fatherless homes, as do 72 percent of young murderers and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates. When viewed in these terms, there is a compelling government interest to encourage marriage relationships between men and women as a stable unit for childrearing. The burden of proof should be on those who seek to overturn thousands of years of history, tradition, and law that point to both a mother and a father as the best unit for raising children.

Even though not all heterosexual couples bear children, the potential is always there. Even couples who cannot have or do not want to have children have the biological possibility of procreating, whether purposely or by accident. Additionally, the same need for a stable, nurturing family unit with parents of both genders applies to adopted children as well.

Further, there is the argument that recognizing same-sex marriages would be expensive for cash-strapped governments. The First Circuit ruling estimates that more than 100,000 couples are affected by the federal DOMA. Recognizing these marriages would generate untold billions of dollars of costs that were not planned for by government actuaries. Likewise, extending marriage tax credits to same-sex couples would mean millions or billions in lost tax revenues. With governments already paying out more in benefits than they take in, they simply cannot afford to pay out more in benefits.

Other rights that are specifically enumerated in the Constitution have limitations as well. The First Amendment does not permit a person to yell “fire” in a crowded theater or protect a slanderer. The Second Amendment does not mean that a person can manufacture pipe bombs in their home and permits states and cities to enact reasonable regulations on guns.

If marriage is merely a statement of love without a societal consequence, then why limit it to only two people? Why not allow polygamy as well? Why limit it to people at all? Recent news stories have detailed how different women have shown their love by marrying the Eiffel Tower, the Berlin Wall, a dog, and a dolphin, One woman even married herself.

Myth #6: Definition of marriage laws are similar to interracial marriage bans.

Same-sex marriage proponents point to older state laws against interracial marriage as a similarly unjust regulation. In reality, interracial marriage was very different from same-sex marriage. Where same-sex couples are biologically incompatible and infertile, interracial couples were of the male and female genders and created a fertile couple.

Bans on interracial marriage did violate the Equal Protection Clause because they treated people differently based on race. Under these laws, two men, one black and the other white, did not have an equal chance to marry a given woman. Definition of marriage laws are different in that they hold that the state will not recognize the marriage of any person to any other person of the same gender, treating everyone equally.

Myth #7: Same-sex couples need marriage so they can visit in the hospital.

The need to be able to visit partners in the hospital has long been a justification for same-sex marriage, but Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor and gay rights activist, wrote as far back as 2008 that, “Hospital accreditation standards include those who play a significant role in a patient's life, even if not legally related, within the definition of family. Neither gay nor straight couples should have to marry to visit each other in the hospital.”

Myth #8: Same-sex marriage is growing in acceptance.

There is some polling support for this idea, but it is far from proven. For example, polls in North Carolina seemed to indicate that the marriage amendment there might be defeated or that the vote would be close. In reality, the amendment passed by a margin of more than 20 percent.

One theory is that people are not being honest with pollsters because of the heavy-handed rhetoric used by the media and the left on the issue. For whatever reason, a majority of voters has never endorsed same-sex marriage, even in blue states like California and Oregon. In most cases, when the issue went to the voters it wasn’t even close. Georgia’s marriage amendment passed with 76 percent in favor according to CNN. To date, 38 states do not recognize same-sex marriage. Only 12 do.

Myth #9: Conservatives are using same-sex marriage as a wedge issue and attempting to force their morality on others.

The reality is that no conservative wants to spend this election season talking about same-sex marriage. The central issue to the 2012 election is the economy and whether President Obama’s handling of it merits extending his contract for another four years.

When same-sex marriage is in the news, most often it is because the left has made it an issue. As the ruling itself notes, the federal DOMA was a response to a 1993 Hawaii Supreme Court decision in a lawsuit filed by homosexual activists. Hawaii’s legislature then defined marriage in 1994 and Congress passed the DOMA, introduced by Georgia congressman Bob Barr, with broad bipartisan support in 1996. President Bill Clinton signed the DOMA into law. When judges in Massachusetts ruled in 2003 that the state could not deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, other states started enacting defense of marriage laws to prevent judicial activists from issuing edicts redefining their own marriage laws.

In reality, as Ryan Anderson wrote in National Review, the question is not whether same-sex couples will be allowed to express their love for each other; “the question is whether the rest of society will have the freedom to choose which type of relationship to honor as marriage” and whether a minority can force their view of morality on the nation at large.

 

Read this article on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/article/nine-myths-about-the-same-sex-marriage-debate

A Klan killing in Georgia

In the early morning of July 11, 1964, three U.S. Army officers passed through Athens to their homes in Washington, D.C. from Ft. Benning where they had been training. At the wheel was Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a veteran of WWII who had earned the Bronze Star for his service in the New Guinea and Philippines campaigns against the Japanese. All three officers were black.

Nine days before the men started their drive home from Ft. Benning, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. This landmark legislation banned racial discrimination in hiring and ended segregation in public places and many businesses. Local members of the Ku Klux Klan in Athens had heard rumors that Georgia might become a “testing ground” for the new law according a 2004 article from Online Athens.

Lemuel Penn and his two brothers-in-arms, Major Charles Brown and Lt. Col. John Howard, stopped to change drivers in Athens in the early morning hours of July 11. After Penn took the wheel, they resumed their journey, but caught the attention of a trio of Klansmen before they left town.

James Lackey, Cecil Myers, and Howard Sims were blue collar workers in their mid-twenties who were conducting a KKK security patrol in Athens with the intention of “scaring off any out-of-town colored people before they could give us any trouble.” They noticed the Washington, D.C license plate on Penn’s car and decided to follow it. Sims reportedly said, “I’m gonna [sic] kill me a nigger [sic]” as they began the chase.

It was about twenty miles before the Klansmen caught up with the army officers. They had driven through Colbert and then followed Ga. Hwy. 172 north toward Bowman. As they reached the Broad River, which serves as the line between Madison and Elbert Counties, the Klansmen pulled alongside Penn’s car. As Lackey drove, Sims and Myers both fired shotguns into the side of driver’s side of the car.

One blast hit clothes and luggage in the backseat, waking Brown and Howard. The other hit Penn in the jaw and neck. Brown later said, “I believe that Penn died before we managed to stop the car.”

Penn’s car ran against the concrete side of the bridge, helping Brown and Howard stop it. As they did, they saw headlights and thought the Klansmen were returning. Brown took the wheel and tried to turn around, but missed the road in the fog, causing the car to roll over.

The men got out and attempted to flag down another passing car. The driver did not stop, but apparently notified the Madison County sheriff who soon arrived with the coroner.

Almost immediately, the case received a high priority from the Johnson Administration. J. Edgar Hoover sent scores of FBI agents to crack the case. Georgia governor Carl Sanders told the public that he was “ashamed for myself and the responsible citizens of Georgia that this occurrence took place in our state” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Suspicion quickly fell upon Lackey, Sims, Myers, Herbert Guest, the owner of Guest’s Garage, a Klan hangout, and Denver Phillips, a mechanic employed by Guest. Over the next few weeks, the FBI agents watched and followed their quarry in a friendly game of cat-and-mouse. At one point, the agents sent a birthday cake to Guest and the Klansmen invited their FBI tails to a meeting, offering to provide them with robes.

Finally, Lackey came in to talk to the FBI agents. When he complained of stomach problems, one of the agents said, “I know something's eating you, and your stomach is not going to get better until you tell me about it.” At that point, Lackey told the story of the murder.

What happened next is as shocking to a modern American as the murder itself.

Lackey agreed to testify for the prosecution and was not charged in the murder. Both Sims and Myers were brought to trial in Madison County on charges of first degree murder. At the trial in Danielsville, the men were found not guilty by jury composed solely of older white men.

The story did not end there, however. In the first case of its kind, based on the pattern of intimidation and violence by the Klan uncovered in their investigation of Penn’s murder, the FBI filed a federal case against Sims, Myers, Lackey, Guest, Phillips, and another local Klansman, George Hampton Turner. The charge was conspiring or threatening to abridge another person’s civil rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sims and Myers were convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The other defendants were acquitted.

Lemuel Penn left behind a wife and three children. His wife, Georgia, died from lupus less than a year after her husband’s murder. Her daughter has little doubt that she actually grieved herself to death.

Lt. Col. Penn’s body was flown home to Dover Air Force Base, the same base where fallen soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan often return to American soil. He was honored with a twenty-one gun salute. Penn is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia with more than 285,000 other American heroes of all races.

Epilogue

I grew up about 20 miles by road from the murder site. I have driven hundreds of times across the Broad River bridge on Hwy. 172 where Lt. Col. Penn died as I commuted to the University of Georgia and then to a job in Athens.

I was born a little more than seven years after the murder. In that time, Georgia changed dramatically and for the better. By the time I went to elementary school, my class included both black and white children and teachers. For the most part, race wasn’t something that we thought about much, if at all. For most of my life, I really had no idea how much the world had changed a few short years prior to my entering it.

After the murder of Lt. Col. Penn, the House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation of the Klan. As the Bible says, evil loves darkness. When the government shed light on the actions of the Klan, the domestic terror group entered a steep decline from which it has never recovered.

I can only remember seeing Klansmen once in my life. While I was in college, working part-time at a local drugstore, a small group of Klansmen, complete with white robes but without masks, got a permit to hand out literature on the town square in Hartwell, Ga. They were neither vilified nor ignored. Instead, people drove by to see the oddities, treating them with the curiosity that such moral relics are due in the modern world.

To learn more about the murder of Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, refer to the following sources:

“Murder at Broad River Bridge: A True Story of Murder and the Ku Klux Klan,” by Bill Shipp (1981), available on Amazon.com

Time magazine subscribers can view the link the trial coverage from Sept. 11, 1964: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,830636,00.html

Online Athens article from 2004 gives a detailed account of the killing and investigation: http://onlineathens.com/stories/071104/new_20040711120.shtml

New Georgia Encyclopedia: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/ArticlePrintable.jsp?id=h-3611

Findagrave.com has photos of Lt. Col. Penn’s grave at Arlington and allows users to add flowers in his memory: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2117

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

This article was originally published on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/a-klan-killing-georgia