Civil Rights

Should You Leave Your MAGA Church? Or Should You Choose To Stay?
Current Events and History

Should You Leave Your MAGA Church? Or Should You Stay?

12/09/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Rev Trevors does not address the common situation where the pastor or priest is setting the MAGA tone when he is leading the congregation, which is so often true in congregations in America. This generates another concern: Should you stay in a church where you will be challenging the teaching authority of the pastor or priest?
Is this a special case for this more basic question: Does the Decalogue exhort us that respect precedes love? Is love impossible when we disrespect either God or those in authority?
There is no verse in Scripture that directly commands the believer to attend weekly services. Several verses in the Psalms sing on how the believer should joyfully be drawn to the house of God, but in the New Testament we only have the verse in Hebrews that simply exhorts:
“Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” […]

Why Did Trump Win? What Should Democrats Do Now?
Current Events and History

Why Did Trump Win? What Should Democrats Do Now?

11/26/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Trump’s only path to victory in 2024 was to continue stirring up the hate and prejudice that won him the election in 2016. Simply put, more Americans approved of Trump’s divisive message than disapproved. Trump’s question to black journalists: When did Kamala Harris turn black? may have been more calculating than it seemed. Since Kamala Harris could pass for white, Trump wanted to hammer home the message to his base that Harris was as black as a burnt black kettle.
In this past election, we learned that many older white voters who will vote for an old boring white guy will never vote for a younger black woman, whether she could pass for white or not. Joe Biden won in 2020 because he was an old boring white guy with significant support from black voters. Unfortunately, in 2024 black and liberal voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers to tip the balance. My gut feeling is that a Tim Waltz-Kamala Harris ticket would have won, but that was a political impossibility given the short time frame needed to swap the candidates. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, he was not seen as a winner.
Again, do not forget that half the country lives in the news bubble dominated by right-wingnut media, including Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s podcast, and Alex Jones, that lie with abandon. […]

Redemption Era of Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election
Civil War and Reconstruction

After Grant: Southern Redemption and Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election

11/09/2024 Bruce Strom 0

What were his greatest accomplishments? Chernow states that “Grant showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.”
Chernow rues: “Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.” […]

Moral Lessons Learned From Historical Black Leaders, Guest on BMK Podcast
Civil Rights

What Moral Lessons Can We Learn From Black Civil Rights Leaders? From the Brahim Kellon Podcast

10/30/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Will the Civil Rights movement ever be fulfilled? It has not yet been fulfilled. But I can tell you when it’ll be fulfilled. It will be fulfilled when you make that last trip across the river, and you go to that place where everybody’s kind to you, and everybody’s nice to you, and where there is no discrimination. But once you go to that place, you’re not coming back. It’s a one-way trip, because when you are singing with Elvis, you know, you can’t come back.
Civil Rights is just an eternal struggle, the struggle for encouraging everyone to love their neighbor, and to be kind to their neighbor, which is really what the Civil Rights movement is all about. From the minute that President Nixon got elected, the Republicans have been trying to rollback civil rights, and the Republican Supreme Court justices have been pushing back against civil rights ever since. So, it is a never-ending, eternal struggle. It just never ends. […]

President Ulysses S Grant, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses S Grant, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term

10/27/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Why was President Grant easily reelected to second term, when there were so many problems faced in his first term? Why did the Liberal Republican Party become a third party? Was it truly liberal? Why did the Union Army fight several battles in Louisiana after the Civil War? How did […]

President Ulysses S Grant, First Term, Battling the KKK, Fighting for Civil Rights
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses S Grant, First Term, Defeating the KKK, Fighting for Civil Rights

10/26/2024 Bruce Strom 1

Ulysses S Grant won the presidential race handily. Although he won only 53% of the popular vote, he won the electoral college vote by a landslide, 214-80. “Bolstered by black and white carpetbagger votes, all southern states, with the notable exception of Georgia and Louisiana, where Klan violence was rife, tumbled into the Republican column. White violence had also diminished Republican turnout in Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina.”
Grant’s acceptance speech was curt, as usual. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear, if I can have the same support which has been given to me thus far.”
Former General Grant too often made decisions without asking for advice from more politically astute advisors, behaving like a general fearful of leaks tipping off enemy forces. His success as a general made him too complacent. Many years later, in hindsight, Grant expressed his regrets. “I entered the White House as President without any previous experience either in civil or political life. I thought I could run the government of the United States as I did the staff of my army. It was my mistake, and it led me into other mistakes.” […]

Atlantic Magazine Endorses Kamala Harris: Are Migrants To Blame? When Did Kamala Turn Black?
Current Events and History

Atlantic Magazine Endorses Kamala Harris: Are Migrants To Blame? When Did Kamala Turn Black?

10/11/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Compare what he said when he announced his candidacy when going down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to his infamous quote in the Presidential Debate:
Trump, 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump, 2024: “In Springfield, (the Haitians) are eating the DAWGS. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
The Atlantic Magazine confirms this in another recent column, on how “The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race. The former president and his advisers’ strategy is to make white voters afraid, and they don’t care if they have to lie to do it.” […]

Carter on the Virtues of Aging and Retirement
Current Events and History

Jimmy Carter on the Virtues of Aging and Retirement

10/01/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Who do we consider to be old? Jimmy Carter recollects: “In general, our own age determines who we consider to be an old person. When I was in the navy and serving on my first ships, I assumed that officers and men who were retiring after twenty years of service were old, and that those who held on for a maximum of thirty years were almost too set in their ways to deal with the changing realities of modern navy life.” […]

General Grant Post-Civil War and Reconstruction
Civil War and Reconstruction

General Grant Supporting Civil Rights and Reconstruction After the Civil War, and His Conflicts with Andrew Johnson

08/30/2024 Bruce Strom 1

When the new Congress convened, the House Judiciary Committee voted by a 5 to 4 vote to impeach President Johnson. When the Senate overwhelmingly voted to restore Stanton as Secretary of War, Grant vacated his interim position. In the upcoming political struggle, as Chernow relates, “The worse things looked for Andrew Johnson, the brighter was the political future for Grant. In early February, the New York Republican Convention endorsed Grant for President.”
During the Senate trial, Grant argued privately with Congressmen on the need to convict Johnson, but he thought it would be inappropriate for him to appear during the Senate trial. Chernow puts it best: “During the war, Grant had learned that it was better to let power seek him rather than to pursue it; a good general waited to be summoned by his superiors.”
In the end, Johnson was acquitted by one vote. Seven Republicans in total voted to acquit, as they did not think that Johnson’s actions were not the high crimes and misdemeanors that the Constitution declared were needed for impeachment. Ulysses S Grant would handily win the 1868 Presidential election, and Grant’s Presidency will be featured in a future reflection. […]

How a Student's C-Paper Led to the Ratification of the Bill of Rights 27th Amendment After 200 Years
Current Events and History

How a Student’s C-Graded Paper Led to the Ratification of the Bill of Rights 27th Amendment After Two Hundred Years

08/24/2024 Bruce Strom 0

This original Bill of Rights amendment was mostly forgotten until nineteen-year-old Gregory Watson submitted a paper in a government class at the University of Texas suggesting that this amendment could still be successfully ratified. Although subsequent amendments usually included a deadline for ratification, the original Bill of Rights amendments had no deadline. The teacher’s assistant grading his paper ridiculed his research, saying that ratification would be totally implausible, giving the paper a C grade. He appealed the grade to the course instructor, Sharon Waite, who sided with the hapless teacher’s assistant. […]