Chuck In your last paragraph you touch on one reason why I'm offended by Imus' remarks, especially the "jigaboo" part of that exchange. I think that the older white men of Imus' generation should be held to a tighter standard on these issues. These guys are mostly arrogant privileged pricks who have lived lives where everything revolved around them. If any group of people have held back progress on racial and gender issues, it's Imus' generation and folks older then him. These are the people, after all, who constitute the core of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News' core fanbase. This is the generation that has benefited from entrenched racial and gender policies and institutions. Remember that the women of Imus' generation where the ones who fought in that wave of feminism that developed in the late 1960s. The men of Imus' generation where the pricks who supported the Vietnam War and made jokes about hippies. The motherfuckers still make jokes about hippies.
^^^^^ CB: I wouldn't characterize Imus' _generation_ this way. In the struggle against racism, it sort of took one step forward and then one step backward, but the first step forward was more than the generations before and after did or have done. And it took perhaps one or two steps forward against male supremacy.
There were several major advances for women in the law in the period of Imus' generation: Right to an abortion, readily available (no fault) divorce, stronger child support , custody and alimony laws favoring women, and more enforcement of domestic violence laws are some of it. Also, affirmative action for women in higher ed and elsewhere, many more women elected and other officials, explosion in the proportion of women lawyers. Women working in the social work place. The greatest progressive political victories in this period, not of Imus, but his generation, are for feminism. What has the current generation accomplished like this ?
Afterall, the opponents of the Viet Nam war and hippies referred to were part of his generation. The following gives a glimpse of his generation's leading anti-racist fighters who, along with the Parkses, Kings and others did accomplish the abolition of Jim Crow, quite a giant step, that neither the generation before or the current generation have matched. The current generation has a lot to do to get anywhere near doing something like abolishing Jim Crow, though the "Second Act" of Imus' generation, Reaganism , reversed these gains significantly.
Imus's generation started out like gangbusters, and then went bad.
^^^^^^
AmeriKKKa
Thomas Sugrue London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 19 dated 5 October 2006
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Raymond Arsenault · Oxford, 690 pp, £19.99
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On 4 May, a group of 18 activists, black and white, men and women, all members of CORE, ventured south from Washington, heading to New Orleans. Their journey, dubbed the ?Freedom Ride?, took them through the upper South, where their affront to Jim Crow was mostly greeted with harsh stares, to the Carolinas, where some were arrested, through Georgia, and into Alabama ? the heart of the Deep South. On 14 May, just outside Anniston, Alabama, a group of white supremacists forced the bus off the road, set it on fire, and brutally beat the Freedom Riders. The photograph of the burning bus ? on the front pages of newspapers worldwide ? became an icon of Southern intransigence.
Regrouping, the Riders proceeded under police escort to Alabama?s largest city, Birmingham. As the bus arrived at the city?s main terminal, the police disappeared. Hundreds of whites ambushed the Riders, beating them with bats, fists and lead pipes. The mob violence had been encouraged by some of Alabama?s leading public officials, including the Birmingham public safety commissioner, Eugene ?Bull? Connor, who ordered the police to withdraw from the station minutes before the Riders arrived. A few days later, when the Riders, bandaged and nervous, moved on to Montgomery, Alabama?s capitol, they once again faced violence. At the Montgomery bus terminal, white vigilantes pummelled them, beat several reporters, and left John Seigenthaler, a high-ranking Kennedy administration official sent to monitor the protests, unconscious. The Alabama State Police stood inert just blocks from the depot while the mob rampaged.
The whites who defended Jim Crow in Alabama were not social outsiders. Their actions had the approval of law enforcement officials. Few faced arrest or prosecution for their role. All-white juries regularly acquitted those who used violence in defence of segregation. By contrast, the Freedom Riders were arrested, convicted and harshly punished, usually on grounds of incitement to riot or disturbing the peace. Throughout the spring and summer of 1961, hundreds of them ? ranging from prominent white ministers from the North to black high-school students from Nashville, Tennessee ? descended on North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas. But they directed most of their energies towards Mississippi, the Deep South bastion of white supremacy. Local police and judges denounced them as un-American agitators and sent most of them to the gulag of the South, the infamous Parchman State Penitentiary, where inmates were subject to torture and relentless harassment by sadistic guards. The protesters pledged to fill the jails as part of their strategy to disrupt segregationism, but the horrific conditions in Mississippi jails tested the resolve of both the Freedom Riders and their supporters. Many bailed out, but had to return to Mississippi for what were uniformly unfair trials. The cost of posting bail, transporting Riders to court, and paying fines and legal fees nearly drove CORE ? never a well-financed organisation ? into insolvency.
The spectacle of the brutality directed towards nonviolent protesters did not, however, have the effects that the protesters had intended. Arsenault argues that the Freedom Riders sought to melt the hardened hearts of America?s whites through their courageous, nonviolent tactics, but with the exception of ?a few maverick politicians and left-leaning commentators?, the Riders gained little outside support. Southern editorialists denounced them as ?crackpots?, ?juvenile delinquents?, ?mixers? or miscegenationists, and ?beatniks?. That some Riders were members of left-leaning political organisations led the press and leading Southern politicians to assert that they were ?pawns in the hands of Communist powers that be?. It was a charge that carried real punch in the atmosphere of the Cold War.
The deprecation of the Riders? motives and efficacy was not just a Southern conceit. New York-based Westbrook Pegler, the country?s leading conservative columnist, denounced them as ?bands of insipid futilities of the type called bleeding hearts? and ?negative weaklings?. Even mainstream liberal opinion aligned against the Rides. The respected TV journalist David Brinkley commented on the NBC evening news that the Freedom Riders ?are accomplishing nothing whatsoever and, on the contrary, doing positive harm?. Public opinion surveys showed that most whites ? North and South ? viewed them negatively. In a Gallup poll taken in June 1961, 64 per cent of white respondents nationwide disapproved, a sharp contrast to the 96 per cent of blacks surveyed by Jet magazine (a popular African-American periodical) who approved of them.
Enter the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He may have been hailed as a forward-looking liberal in the 1960s, but Kennedy?s reputation has since been shattered by a generation of historians who have chronicled his administration?s reluctance to confront the problem of civil rights. Arsenault shares their scepticism. After a breathtakingly close election, Kennedy was beholden to the Democratic Party?s Southern wing. The region was still dominated by one party, and he could not afford to alienate Southern voters. A gradualist with little interest in civil rights, Kennedy feared that the protests would taint America?s carefully manufactured international image in the midst of the Cold War. (His fears were not unfounded ? in the struggle to win the allegiance of the Third World, the Soviets used images of beaten protesters and burning buses to bolster their claim that America was a sham democracy.) Administration officials tried to persuade the Freedom Riders to call off their journey and worked behind the scenes to pressure Southern officials to curb the violent counterprotests. Both efforts were in vain. Still, the negative publicity softened the Kennedy administration. Preoccupied with the crisis in Berlin ? which happened simultaneously ? Kennedy saw the protests as a harmful diversion. By late 1961, Cold War pressures led the administration to capitulate to the Freedom Riders? demands. The White House supported federal regulations that would, for the first time, enforce laws forbidding segregation on interstate transport. Over the next few years, Jim Crow on buses and in terminals throughout the South gradually fell ? largely as the result of the coercive power of the federal government.