Will the current outrage in Montgomery provoke a modern civil rights movement against eminent domain through the back door? It certainly should.
On Wednesday in Montgomery, developer Jim Peera displayed this map as part of his testimony at a public forum of the State Advisory Committee (which I chair) of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The pins show buildings demolished by the city of Montgomery in 2008. As you can see, the vast majority are concentrated in one area which just so happens to be heavily black and low-income. Ironically, the area included the apartment of Rosa Parks.
Typically, the city will designate a building as"blighted" or a"nuisance," sometimes using a subjective and arbitrary standard, as in the Jimmy McCalll case. It then bills the owner for the demolition costs. Because many of these owners are poor, they will either have to abandon their land or sell it at a high discount to either a private developer or the city. Even when they can afford demolition, taxes, and other costs, the city has repeatedly destroyed the current or best use of the land by changing the zoning designation to single-family housing. The result is the same: abandonment of the land or sale at bargain-basement prices.
Unlike conventional eminent domain, the owner under eminent domain through the back door has no right to compensation from the city, even in theory.
‘While historians have properly acknowledged the contributions of clergymen and grassroots activists” to the civil-rights movement, write David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “they have too often neglected those made by entrepreneurs and black professionals.” The Beitos’ new book — Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power — begins to set the record straight.For the rest, see here .
Howard drove Cadillacs and Buicks, wore fancy clothes, and loved guns and big-game hunting. He praised free enterprise with a Booker T. Washington fervor, believing entrepreneurs to be better agents of change than activists. He once sighed for “one bomb that could be fashioned that would blow every Communist in America right back to Russia where they belong.” A flamboyant Second Amendment, anti-communist capitalist doesn’t please journalists and historians searching for civil-rights martyrs.“Black Maverick,” though, makes room for exactly such a figure, and rightly so. That Howard made an important contribution is unquestionable.
It is not yet entirely clear whether there was a racial element to the initial decision by a woman on the street—working for Harvard Magazine, no less!—to call the police, although that is looking unlikely. It remains disputed whether Sergeant Crowley treated Professor Gates any differently than he would treat a white citizen in the same position. (In fact, if one accepts Crowley’s claim that he dished out to Gates equal treatment under the law, this case stands as a dire warning to all citizens as to the dangers inherent in exercising one’s constitutional right to free speech when in an exchange with a police officer—but more on that below.)Hat tip, Anthony Gregory.
In their conversation, Sgt. Crowley complained to Obama that the press have been coming onto his lawn. Yes, isn’t it annoying when people come uninvited onto your property?
Of course, had Obama done this, it might also interfere with the discretion of federal law enforcement officers under his authority to do the same thing.
“While I in fact sponsored the initial appropriations limitation in 1998, the years since then have witnessed such a dramatic increase in federal government power and an unprecedented decrease in individual liberty, especially since 2001, that I have come to realize that such limitations as the so-called “Barr Amendment” are not and cannot be justified. It has become necessary to reevaluate the power of the federal government that I and others once were able or willing to justify, and do what we can to roll back the tide of government control."
Had Lincoln let a weak Gulf Coast CSA secede in 1861, sans Virginia, North Carolina, Tennesse, and Arkansas, it would have been extremely vulnerable to internal rebellions of this type both by dissident whites and slaves.
"No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top."
This is the second in a series of photos relating to my book (co-authored by Linda Royster Beito), Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
The book is about the civil rights leader, self-help champion, entrepreneur, and surgeon, T.R.M. Howard.
In addition to being one of the wealthiest blacks in Mississippi, and a mentor to the likes of Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer, Howard had a reputation of as America's"greatest black big gamehunter" and led safaris to Africa, India, and Alaska. In this picture, taken in his Chicago office about a year before his death, some of his trophies are prominently displayed.
For the other photos (some of which do not appear in the book), see here.
This is the first in a series of photos relating to my book (co-authored by Linda Royster Beito), Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
The book is about the civil rights leader, self-help champion, entrepreneur, and surgeon, T.R.M. Howard.
Pictured above is Howard, then a Republican candidate for Congress in Chicago, as he meets with Eisenhower on the eve of the 1958 election.
For the other photos (some of which do not appear in the book, see here.
Delivered beautifully by actress Jo Van Fleet, the speech blasts FDR's New Deal, governmental relief, and power-hungry politicians. Most of all, it eloquently defends property rights.
Van Fleet is so effective in the role that she largely undermines the pro-New Deal message in the rest of the film.
Churchill writes that New Deal progressives, offended and frightened by vitriolic far-right opposition to the New Deal, launched"a systematic campaign of public condemnation and state repression." Private liberal organizations"initiated the collection of dossiers on leading figures of the Far Right," while the FDR administration and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI undertook an effort that led to the conviction of dozens of right-wing figures on sedition charges. (Hoover even maintained a" custodial detention index" of right-wing figures.)
Hat tip Jonathan Dresner.
In the wake of the Tiller and Johns murders, such sloppiness and worse is seeping into the mainstream media. For some pundits, the very basics of critical thought seem to have gone out the window, as they treat a handful of distinct crimes as sign of a rising menace without so much as bothering to check if there's been more small-scale rightist terror this year than in previous years.
