Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

For several decades after the Civil War, the Confederate battle emblem was rarely displayed — typically only during tributes to actual Confederate veterans. It was not part of state flags or other official symbols or displays. In fact, the Confederate battle flag was so uncommon that in 1930, Sen. Coleman Livingston Blease had to have one specially made by the Daughters of South Carolina for him to display in his office.

It wasn’t until 1948 that the Confederate flag re-emerged as a potent political symbol. The reason was the Dixiecrat revolt — when Strom Thurmond led a walkout of white Southerners from the Democratic National Convention to protest President Harry S. Truman’s push for civil rights. The Dixiecrats began to use the Confederate flag, which sparked further public interest in it.

Consequently, the flag became strongly linked to white supremacy and opposition to civil rights for African Americans. In 1951, Rep. John Rankin (D-Miss.), a very outspoken segregationist, proudly announced that he had “never seen as many Confederate flags in all my life as I have observed floating here in Washington during the last few months.” Rankin himself wore a Confederate flag necktie to serve as a constant reminder of his opposition to “beastly” integration policies.

In 1954, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of public primary schools, focused the energies and ire of hardcore segregationists throughout the South. Efforts to resist school integration and other civil rights protections for African Americans included the display of Confederate symbols and especially the Confederate battle flag.

For example, within a year of Brown, there was a push to redesign Georgia’s state flag to incorporate the Confederate battle emblem. The flag containing the emblem was designed by John Sammons Bell, chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party and leader of the powerful Association of County Commissioners (ACC).

...

Today, many proponents of Confederate symbols do not appeal directly to racial animus. Still, the politics of Confederate symbols have not changed completely: In surveys of whites, racial animus correlates strongly with support for Confederate symbols. Opponents of these symbols continue to make the connection to race. Alabama state Sen. Hank Sanders, an African American, spoke against his state’s bill by saying: These bills “are protecting monuments that represent oppression to a large part of the people in the state of Alabama.”

As the first meeting since Donald Trump’s inauguration, this year’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention — especially with the presence of controversial SBC figurehead and sometime Trump opponent Russell Moore (more on him below) — was always going to be politically tricky to navigate. But a non-binding resolution proposed by Texas pastor William Dwight Mc Kissic thrust the SBC’s divisions into the spotlight.

Mc Kissic asked the SBC to affirm as a body that “there has arisen in the United States a growing menace to political order and justice that seeks to reignite social animosities, reverse improvements in race relations, divide our people, and foment hatred, classism, and ethnic cleansing … toxic menace, self-identified among some of its chief proponents as ‘white nationalism’ and the ‘alt-right,’ must be opposed for the totalitarian impulses, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies that infect the minds and actions of its violent disciples.”

On Tuesday, the resolution — which had been sent to the resolutions committee months prior — died in committee before being put to a public vote, on the formal grounds that the wording used was unclear and could lead to confusion. (In a later interview with the Atlantic’s Emma Green, the committee’s chair, Barrett Duke, said “We just weren’t certain we could craft a resolution that would enable us to measure our strong convictions with the grace of love.”)

Attendee David Gass, pastor at the Grace Family Fellowship in Pleasant Hill, Missouri, and a supporter of Mc Kissic’s resolution, said that supporters of the resolution found such an explanation inadequate; in the past, he said, it wasn’t unusual for the resolution committee to work closely with members on ambiguous or unclear messaging before making the decision to throw it out. A floor vote to bring the resolution to the floor anyway, which would have required a two-thirds majority, failed.

Messengers’ reactions to the committee’s decision, both on Twitter and in person, was swift, immediate, and strong. Almost immediately, “messengers” (church representatives present at the conference), began lobbying for the chance for SBC messengers to weigh in publicly: Gass and others immediately convened to start working on an amended form of the resolution, while, according to Gass, “big names” worked in parallel behind the scenes (Gass declined to name them publicly, saying only that it was “big names ... who you’d see onstage”).

Moore himself took a strong position, with his public stance indicating that he may well have been one of those “big names” in question. He tweeted last night, “Racial unity and justice is a hill on which to die. If you're at #SBC 17, get in the convention hall and stay till last gavel” and calling racial injustice “satanism.” (Earlier today, he condemned the alt-right even more directly, tweeting: “The so-called Alt-Right white supremacist ideologies are anti-Christ and satanic to the core. We should say so..”)

After hours of debate and discussion, as well as varied floor votes on the issue, Dr. Steve Gaines, the SBC president, took the stage with strong words. The resolutions committee had unanimously decided to revisit the matter and hold a vote, subject to a floor affirmation by the messengers, which passed.

Yet no less significant than the vote itself was the language Gaines used to frame it. He referred to the alt-right using even stronger language than the original resolution had used, terming them the “anti-gospel alt-right white supremacists.”

That language, however, was mild compared to the blistering tone of Tuesday afternoon. Barrett Duke, chair of the 2017 resolutions committee, apologized unreservedly on behalf of the committee — both to the SBC messengers and “the watching world” for throwing out the original motion, referring to racism as “abhorrent” and to the alt-right in particular as “particularly vicious.”

A proposed amendment from the floor — from Georgia messenger David Mills — motioning for a report on the alt-left in addition to the alt-right for the 2018 meeting was met with stony silence, and immediately rejected on procedural grounds. Meanwhile, Russell Moore, speaking not from the stage but from the floor like other messengers, excoriated the alt-right in his strongest rhetoric yet: the resolution’s formal number in the docket was #10, he said, “but white supremacy also has a number on it: 666”: the number associated in Christian tradition with the devil.

According to Missouri pastor James K. Forbis, who attended the meeting, the vote, taken by a show of ballots, was unanimous. "I am once again proud to be a Southern Baptist because we have put one more nail now in the coffin of racism,” Forbis told Vox. “We have condemned the satanic cult of the alt-right and have told the world how Christians do act, not just Southern Baptist, but all true Christians denounce all forms of racism, white supremacy, and every kind of form of ethnic hatred. This is a historic moment and I am proud to have voted on this resolution."

A civil rights historical marker in Mississippi has been vandalized, obliterating information about black teenager Emmett Till, who was kidnapped and lynched in 1955.

The slaying galvanized the civil rights movement when Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, had an open-casket funeral in Chicago to show how her 14-year-old son had been brutalized while he was visiting the Mississippi Delta.

Allan Hammons, whose public relations firm made the marker, said Monday that someone scratched the marker with a blunt tool in May. During the past week, a tour group discovered vinyl panels had been peeled off the back of the metal marker in Money, Mississippi. The panels contained photos and words about Till.

“Who knows what motivates people to do this?” Hammons said, noting that traffic signs are common targets for vandals and shooters in rural areas. “Vandals have been around since the beginning of time.”

The sign was erected in 2011 for the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a series of state-funded markers at significant civil rights sites.

If all the dominoes fall in place as planned, including an expansion of MARTA rail up the Clifton Road corridor to Emory and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we may look back at this as the capstone of Reed’s eight years as mayor. It would be the first great expansion of Atlanta’s borders in a generation and more, not unlike the absorption of Buckhead in the early 1950s.

...The university’s annexation petition has been plopped down in the middle of a hot mayoral contest.

The African-American presence within the city limits has been trending downward for some time.

Currently, the electorate is split 50-50, black and white. Only 27 years ago, African-Americans comprised two-thirds of the vote. When discussion of Emory’s absorption into the city first jumped up, political theorists eyed a southward expansion of Atlanta’s city limits to offset an eastward thrust, in order to achieve a sort of racial parity.

But the creation of a city of South Fulton has slapped a hard limit on Atlanta’s southward expansion. The Emory campus, some 630 acres, has plenty of students, but few permanent residents. However, the prospect that other residential areas — and their majorities of white voters – might eventually follow Emory’s example could become a sore topic among many black political leaders this fall.

So far, only a few mayoral candidates have weighed in.

“As an Emory graduate, I would be delighted if the annexation process is completed and they are a part of Atlanta,” said Mary Norwood, an at-large member of city council, on Tuesday. Norwood is white and a resident of Buckhead.

On Wednesday, state Sen. Vincent Fort, another mayoral candidate, talked to my AJC colleague Mark Niesse.

Fort is African-American. His district includes much of southwest Atlanta. “I’m very concerned about this Emory annexation, and I’ve called both [MARTA General Manager] Keith Parker and the president of Emory to have meetings with them,” Fort said. ““I’m very concerned that Emory is getting a quick entree into the system, and southwest Atlanta is not getting the full attention it deserves. We need to slow down this process and see what the implications are.”

And that’s why big news arrived in such a small package on Tuesday.

An Airbnb host who canceled a woman’s reservation using a racist remark has been ordered to pay $5,000 in damages for racial discrimination and take a course in Asian American studies.

Dyne Suh, a 26-year-old law clerk, had booked Tami Barker’s mountain cabin in Big Bear, California, for a skiing weekend with friends in February, but Barker canceled the reservation by text message minutes before they arrived,stating: “I wouldn’t rent it to u if u were the last person on earth” and “One word says it all. Asian”.

This is the first time an Airbnb host has been penalized for racial discrimination under a landmark agreement between the San Francisco-headquartered accommodation marketplace and the California department of fair employment and housing (DFEH), announced earlier this year. The agreement allows the regulator to test and penalize Airbnb hosts for racial bias.

In addition to paying monetary damages and taking a college-level course in Asian American studies, Barker must agree to comply with anti-discrimination laws, make a personal apology to Suh, participate in a community education panel and volunteer with a civil rights organization.

In an emotional video immediately after the incident, Suh said: “I just feel so hurt. People thought: ‘Oh, with the election of President Obama racism is over in this country.’ No, it’s very much alive, it exists and it could happen to anyone.”

“It stings that after living in the US for over 23 years this is what happens. No matter if I follow the law ... no matter how well I treat others, it doesn’t matter. If you’re Asian, you’re less than human and people can treat you like trash.”