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The Washington I Once Knew
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In an excerpt from his memoir, Loyalties, Carl Bernstein reflects on the Jim Crow town he grew up in—an era in which a black president taking the oath of office was unimaginable.
In his Inaugural Address today, President Obama noted with awe that "a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."
In 1989, Carl Bernstein published a memoir about that earlier period--growing up in a segregated, McCarthy-era Washington. Part of the book, titled Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, focuses on Washingtonians—including Bernstein’s parents and their black and white friends—who worked to desegregate lunch counters and other public places in the nation’s capital. The capital of the United States was a Jim Crow town, including its restaurants, hotels, and the segregated schools that Bernstein attended until he was in the sixth grade, when the Supreme Court struck down segregation of public education—in the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
It is a little-remembered fact that the companion case to Brown was Bolling v. Sharpe, in which the justices held unanimously that “Racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia is a denial to black children of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.” The following excerpt from Loyalties describes the demonstrations Bernstein participated in—as a child–in 1951 and 1952.
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My most pervasive memory of those two summers is of the heat. That oppressive Washington heat. This was before air-conditioning, or at least before anyone I knew had air-conditioning at home, 1951, ’52. In her history of black Washington, The Secret City, Constance McLaughlin Green devotes a few lines to what happened those summers, but she doesn’t mention the heat. She wrote:
…The campaign [to desegregate] downtown restaurants began after the report of the National Committee on Segregation drew attention to the lost anti-discrimination laws of 1872 and 1873…Members of the Citizens Committee for Enforcement assembled statistics on how many out of 99 restaurants in downtown Washington denied service to well-behaved colored or racially mixed groups, how many accepted them, and in either case what the proprietors’ reasons were and how white patrons reacted. Under the guidance of Annie Stein, an energetic young white woman, and further inspired by the nonagenarian Mary Church Terrell, the surveying groups, each composed of three or four people, were at pains never to argue with waitresses or managers and left quietly if they were rebuffed.
Actually it was only at the beginning of the campaign that we left quietly when we were rebuffed. “Negotiate, boycott, picket.” That was the strategy Annie Stein had devised. I hated the whole enterprise. I was seven years old. Thursdays and Saturdays I’d be ripped from the neighborhood, torn from the day’s game of stepball or running bases, and placed on a streetcar that took me and my mother to the little law office that Joe Forer and Dave Rein shared downtown across from the Trans-Lux Theatre on Fourteenth Street. There, Annie Stein would tap me on the head and say, “Now, honey, this is so-and-so,” and pair me with a black child. The black children usually wore church clothes, little girls in pink and white and lace and patent leather, boys with too-long clip-on neckties hanging from starched collars, jackets neatly buttoned.
Today, it is difficult to convey—much less comprehend—that slow, drawled, hazy small-town atmosphere of mid-century Washington. I went to a segregated public school; all the city’s playgrounds and swimming pools were segregated; the hotels were for whites only, except for the Dunbar, way up on Fifteenth Street across the city’s old Boundary Avenue; the wards of the municipal hospitals were segregated; the only integrated theater in town was the Gayety Burlesque house on Ninth Street.
How Rich People Smoke Pot
Paul Schrodt is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to New York magazine, Radar, and Esquire.com.
Justice Clinton?
As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono. McKinnon is co-chair of Arts & Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers.
A Legendary Reporter Exposes His Favorite Reads
Carl Bernstein shared a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward for his coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post. His most recent book is the acclaimed biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is the author, with Woodward, of All the President’s Men and The Final Days, and, with Marco Politi, of His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time. He is also the author of Loyalties, a memoir about his parents during McCarthy–era Washington.
Holy Moly, He's Done It Again
Carl Bernstein shared a Pulitzer Prize with Bob Woodward for his coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post. His most recent book is the acclaimed biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is the author, with Woodward, of All the President’s Men and The Final Days, and, with Marco Politi, of His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time. He is also the author of Loyalties, a memoir about his parents during McCarthy–era Washington.
PunkRockRepublican
The heroic desegregationist vision of Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s and Eisenhower and Nixon in the 1950s is upheld and the racial electoral deal making of Thomas Woodrow Wilson is struck down. How ironic that the election of Democrat President Barack Obama is a legacy of the Republican Party that Mr. Bernstein's ideology still drives him to destroy.
Czarkazem13
"Ironic?"
I find it interesting the info that PunkRockRepublican leaves out.
While Grant (and Lincoln) were Republicans, the Party was not what it is today. This is the Republican Party that has adopted the Dixiecrats that left the Democrats due to their opposition Civil Rights and desegregation.
You also neglect to mention how the Republicans used race (and fear) after the 1964 election to get whites in the South to vote for them ("silent majority") and how Republicans have tried to - over and over - supress the black vote (amongst others).
You also seem to leave out what Democrats such as Johnson and Roosevelt (either) had done (or the fact that Johnson and Nixon both incorporated RFK's ideas).
It's not such a black/white (Democrat/Republican) issue.
Opsimath44
PRR needs to look up the word "ironic." Common mistake, so don't stay up all night worrying about it.
When it comes to civil relations in this country, neither party has a leg to stand on. The few lame attempts at doing the right thing have sprung from a desire to increase party roles and not from any sense of duty or altruism.
stevenearlsalmony
Leadership of a generation passes into history on this day, 1/20/09.
It appears that a single generation, my not-so-great greed-mongering generation, will be remembered for having first recklessly plundered and then ravenously consumed the lion's share of all Earth's limited resources. No generation before mine, and certainly no generation to follow, will behave so arrogantly and avariciously because the resources to do what my generation has done will have already been devoured and, therefore, unavailable to future generations. In the pernicious process of global plundering and conspicuous per capita over-consumption, many too many leaders of my generation will also have allowed the unhealthy pollution of the environment, the unrestrained depletion of natural resources and the unconscionable mortgaging of our children's future. My generation's leaders will have lead us to threaten the children and coming generations with the likelihood of dangerous ecological conditions...a situation for which my generation is responsible but for which my generation refuses to take responsibility. Many leaders in my generation have determined to "pass the buck" to the children, come what may. So grave and unfortunate a situation cannot longer be ignored just because the leading perpetrators of this ominously looming ecological wreckage choose to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute when called upon to account for their (and our) behavior.
If I had to put this colossal tragedy in a single set of sentences I would speak out in this way,
"Never in the course of human events has so much been given to so few consolidators of great wealth and power, who then did so poorly by everyone else and everything else but themselves. A tiny minority of supremely greedy, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe in my generation have directed the human community toward the extirpation of biodiversity, degradation of the environment and the depletion of natural resources. The fitness of Earth as a place for habitation by our own children has been put at risk. The abject failure of so many of my generation's leaders to assume responsibility for such incredible arrogance, poor judgement and stupendous wrongdoing is somehow not quite right and, at least to me, difficult to tolerate in silence."
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org
exploora
But together we can still turn it around. Only if we give up, due to the enormity of the task we face, we will not be able to turn it around.
Change in the direction, from downturn to upturn, can happen, cause it is we the people, who are the market force, in many ways.
exploora
I think a big point is being missed, when people are conditioned to live separately from each other, in all aspects of life, including potty training, it is a big step to do something together. And working together, possibly is the path, we must take, which will lead to the solution.
PunkRockRepublican
O44
Dramatic Irony: 'an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been expected, the incongruity of this."
A writer who is famous for bringing down a Republican president celebrates a desegregation ruling that is made possible by a Supreme Court who's Chief Justice is appointed by the Republican president whose Vice President is the president who will later be brought down, using a Republican law.
Too wordy.
Also there are plenty of legs to stand on in 'Battle Cry of Freedom' and 'Reconstruction.'
Abraxas
ONLY OUTLAWS ARE FREE!
Eye shall have my vengeance one way or the other, come hell or high water. Why not support it?... Remember it's the Age of Horus... the Crowned and Conquering Son. The longer this world waits, the more blood EYE shall take.
Time for a real Holy War. Apocalypse Now. All missions are being executed according to plan, without warning or provacation. Every person of every nation and faith, shall be brought to justice... it has everything to do with hate and evil. Skull an Bones Freemason kill committee mothafucka! Kali Ma!
God damn the America that tells me I cann't smoke my marijuana! God damn Islam for the execution of Mansoor al-Hillaj, God damn the pope that does not apologize for 10.13.1307 God damn this broken world of empty shells. God damn the idolitor of ikons. God damn your lie of Law Enforcement. Might shall make right out of spite. Ignorance is not bliss, nor is knowing. I see beyond your common sense and good advice. God damn America, it's not free. God damn the fundie concept of heaven. By the Left Hand of Lucifer and the right of Christ, I rule you thule. Heaven's Gate, Hell's Decree. Thank God for 9.11, Katrina, and Ike. The whirlwind is in the thorn tree. This land ain't free! Gabriel screams, Satan sits... for this spell or knows they'll be hell... wirlwind's in the thorn tree.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
An'al Haq
Abraxas
JOIN US OR DIE!
Eye shall have my vengeance one way or the other, come hell or high water. Why not support it?... Remember it's the Age of Horus... the Crowned and Conquering Son. The longer this world waits, the more blood EYE shall take.
Time for a real Holy War. Apocalypse Now. All missions are being executed according to plan, without warning or provacation. Every person of every nation and faith, shall be brought to justice... it has everything to do with hate and evil. Skull an Bones Freemason kill committee mothafucka! Kali Ma!
God damn the America that tells me I cann't smoke my marijuana! God damn Islam for the execution of Mansoor al-Hillaj, God damn the pope that does not apologize for 10.13.1307 God damn this broken world of empty shells. God damn the idolitor of ikons. God damn your lie of Law Enforcement. Might shall make right out of spite. Ignorance is not bliss, nor is knowing. I see beyond your common sense and good advice. God damn America, it's not free. God damn the fundie concept of heaven. By the Left Hand of Lucifer and the right of Christ, I rule you thule. Heaven's Gate, Hell's Decree. Thank God for 9.11, Katrina, and Ike. The whirlwind is in the thorn tree. This land ain't free! Gabriel screams, Satan sits... for this spell or knows they'll be hell... wirlwind's in the thorn tree.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
An'al Haq
Thank you.
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