In their general evaluation of the year 1946, the NAACP reported on this day in 1947 that “…1946 was one of the grimmest years in the history of the NAACP”. That report “… deplored "reports of blow torch killing, and eye-gouging of Negro veterans freshly returned from a war to end torture and racial extermination" and said, "Negroes in America have been disillusioned over the wave of lynching, brutality and official recession from all of the flamboyant promises of post-war democracy and decency.”
The Arsenio Hall Show premiered on this day in 1989 as the first late-night talk show hosted by an African American. The show’s signature moment was when Bill Clinton, then running for the presidency, appeared on the show, and played “Heartbreak Hotel” on his saxophone. As we know, Bill Clinton went on to win the 1992 presidential election.
On this day in 1867 in Washington, DC, during a debate on Reconstruction, Thaddeus Stevens, the Congressman from Pennsylvania, gave a speech advocating full voting rights to newly freed Africans. He also made a case for land redistribution for economic freedom.
“that is that racism is still alive in American society. And much more widespread than we realized. And we must see racism for what it is. It is a myth of the superior and the inferior race. It is the false and tragic notion that one particular group, one particular race is responsible for all of the progress, all of the insights in the total flow of history. And the theory that another group or another race is totally depraved, innately impure, and innately inferior.
In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide. Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion. He ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about 6 million Jews. This is the tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist."
Martin Luther King, Jr, ‘The Other America’, 1967.
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