President Obama's been extremely gracious.
42 - The Jackie Robinson Story
Rent that one out if you can. You'll kinda get what I am talking about.
Different era.
Social change comes in pendulumic waves; two steps forward, one step back, but sometimes it's the reverse.
For example -- Major League Baseball likes to make a big deal out of the idea that Jackie Robinson was the first black baseball player in the major leagues.
Except he wasn't (that would be Moses Walker, 1884).
Black ballplayers were not uncommon when pro baseball was organized in the 19th century. What Jackie Robinson represents is the first
re-occurence of a black ballplayer after the unspeakable racist times around the early 20th century -- a time of despicable regression the history books don't like to talk about -- times that brought the genocide of the Tulsa riots, the Duluth lynching that became a linchpin of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" (and a ton of other lynchings), D.W. Griffith's racist film "Birth of a Nation" and the rebirth of a short-lived Civil War vigilante group called the Ku Klux Klan (both of the latter 1915). We don't like to talk about that period because it's so ******* nasty. So we pretend that Jackie Robinson is the 'first'. It obscures a major gap in time, and what happened during that gap.
Reform... backlash.... reform again... backlash again.
So gradually through the 1940s, '50s, '60s, strides toward the vision of equality we're supposedly built on are achieved; yet you still have racists sending hate letters to Hank Aaron threatening his life (1974) if he dares to break the record of the white Babe Ruth. Always the undercurrent.
Then a black man is elected President, and we get posts like this:
Campaigning Obama said, "There's not a black America, a White America, there's only one America." then as soon as he moved in the White House he started pounding the wedge of racism between blacks and whites.
Obama is EVIL Incarnate, the same EVIL ONE who tempted Jesus during his 40 day fast.
It's what Hank Aaron was talking about recently.
