The US government refuses to employ blacks who took part in civil disobedience against racist laws in the 1960s. Banks would often refuse them mortgages. They couldn’t even vote until recently.
These people should be hailed as heroes, not punished for fighting injustice!
It is nearly 55 years since Lillie Mae Bradford was charged with “disorderly conduct” for sitting in the whites-only seats on an Alabama bus, and she is still waiting for a pardon.
A lot has changed in Alabama since that day in May 1951. The civil rights movement took off and when another black woman from Montgomery, Rosa Parks, followed Ms Bradford’s example more than four years later, her arrest provoked a bus boycott that marked the beginning of the end for segregation in the South. By that quirk of history, Rosa Parks is the name everyone knows. She became a civil rights icon, and when she died last October her body lay in state in Congress in Washington, a tribute normally reserved for presidents.
Only afterwards was it widely reported that Parks had died with a police record - and that thousands of other black southerners had similar records - for disobeying racist laws.
So while the South abolished Jim Crow (the epithet, derived from a minstrel show character, given to the segregation laws) and claimed to move on, a large number of African Americans were left carrying its burden decades later. Ms Bradford felt it every time she applied for a government job.
“There was always a box that said: Do you have a criminal record?” she recalled. “I went for federal clerk positions, and I would pass the tests, but I wouldn’t get the job. That’s when I came to the conclusion that it was because I had a police record.”
Many others with criminal records for resisting Jim Crow laws later had difficulty in getting a mortgage and throughout their lives were never quite treated as full citizens. Until three years ago, anyone with a felony on their records was unable to vote.
Re: Blacks made to suffer for having opposed segregation in USA
Isnt there a similar sort of law in the UK? i.e. if you are a known "protestor" and identified at various marches, your name is added on a "black list" of sorts?
Re: Blacks made to suffer for having opposed segregation in USA
Not really. Depending on what you’re protesting, MI5 might start keeping a file on you, that’s all. It doesn’t interfere too much with your life. I remember when the current Labour Government came to power, there was a bit of a scandal because they discovered that MI5 had been keeping records on a couple of the new government ministers when they were younger.
If your break the law at a protest, for example by vandalising property, however, of course you’ll get a criminal record.
Field Marshal Omar Al-Bashir is black and is African. He no mere secretary of state or General either. Being a Field Marshal, he outranks any general, and is even the President of his country.