Western Tribune Column February 10, 2010: Literacy tests

In my never ending mission, the calling out of those who want to damage our country, I wrote this for the Western Tribune column this week. Teabaggers, you are not going to get away with it. American's are smarter, and fairer, than you think.

I have inserted links of interest.

Western Tribune Column

The Tea Party may have lost any chance of becoming more than a flash in the pan when they allowed Tom Tancredo, a former Republican candidate for president, to address their first convention on their opening night.

Tancredo ran for the 2008 Republican nomination for president with anti-immigration as his number one issue.

At the Tea Party convention on Friday he brought back memories of the “Jim Crow” era as he said that President Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

Lest there be any doubt what he meant, he followed with, "People who could not spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House -- name is Barack Hussein Obama."

During the Jim Crow era laws reduced the political power as well as the social standing of black citizens.

Literacy tests were used during that era to disenfranchise blacks and poor whites by denying them the right to vote in order to continue wealthy white control. The results are lasting, most notably in that we still live under the 1901 Alabama constitution, put in place by wealthy whites in order to control blacks.

(a 1950's Alabama voter registration application , an actual literacy test used in Alabama)

The last time a political party with similar ideals about race gained such national attention was when the States Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats, formed in the south in 1948. At that time disgruntled Democrats were fighting to uphold segregation. Now former Republicans (many of whom are former Democrats) are promoting this new class warfare with one aim, stated by Tancredo: stop the black president.

A recent documentary by Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen titled White Power USA, examined the connection between the Tea Party and the white power movement. The connection is there, and it is solid.

It makes one wonder if the decision to locate the Tea Party convention so close to the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan was a coincidence. The KKK was founded in Pulsaski, Tennessee, just after the Civil War ended in an effort to preserve white control in the rapidly changing social environment. Pulaski is about 75 miles south of Nashville.

The American majority of 2010 will turn from this racially charged movement. Remember, the real majority voted for the type of change Obama is pushing, in spite of what the vocal minority is saying. Congress should respond.