"Mr. Cub" and "Mr. Sunshine"

Ernest "Ernie" Banks (January 31, 1931 – January 23, 2015), nicknamed "Mr. Cub" and "Mr. Sunshine", was an American professional baseball player. He was a Major League Baseball (MLB) shortstop and first baseman for 19 seasons, 1953 through 1971. He spent his entire MLB career with the Chicago Cubs. He was a National League (NL) All-Star for 11 seasons, playing in 14 All-Star Games.^[1] Banks is regarded by some as one of the greatest players of all time.^[2][3][4]
Banks, born and raised in Dallas, entered Negro league baseball in 1950, playing for the Kansas City Monarchs. He served in the US military for two years and returned to the Monarchs before beginning his major league career in September 1953. Banks made his first MLB All-Star Game appearance in 1955. He received two consecutive National League Most Valuable Player awards in 1958 and 1959, and received his first and only Gold Glove award for shortstop in 1960.
He was transferred to the left field position during the 1961 season followed by a final change to first base that year. Cubs manager Leo Durocher became frustrated with Banks in the mid-1960s, saying that the slugger's performance was faltering, but he felt that he was unable to remove Banks from the lineup due to the star's popularity among Cubs fans. Banks was a player-coach from 1967 through 1971. In 1970, Banks hit his 500th career home run. In 1972, he joined the Cubs coaching staff after his retirement as a player.
Banks was active in the Chicago community during and after his tenure with the Cubs. He founded a charitable organization, became the first black Ford Motor Company dealer in the United States, and made an unsuccessful bid for a local political office. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977. In 1999, he was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In 2013, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to sports. Banks lived in the Los Angeles area.

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.
In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met.
The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it — least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning.
In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made.
There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest.
The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in these terms the circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better.
Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening.
The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.
The thesis of this blog is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.
This would be a new departure for Federal policy. And a difficult one. But it almost certainly offers the only possibility of resolving in our time what is, after all, the nation's oldest, and most intransigent, and now its most dangerous social problem. What Gunnar Myrdal said in An American Dilemma remains true today: "America is free to chose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity."

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy ?

There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of white Americans desire that there be as few Negroes as possible in America. If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites' approval-provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved. Correspondingly, an increase of the proportion of Negroes in the American population is commonly looked upon as undesirable.
White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually 'cause' each other.
On page 167 of the book, under the sub-heading 'Ends and Means of Population Policy,' appears the following analysis (emphasis in original):
[T]here is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of white Americans desire that there be as few Negroes as possible in America. If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites' approval -- provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved. Correspondingly, an increase of the proportion of Negroes in the American population is commonly looked upon as undesirable. On page 168, Myrdal further remarks that these ideas are 'not necessarily hostile' in all situations. He comments that the very same opinion...
... is shared even by enlightened white Americans who do not hold the common belief that Negroes are inferior as a race. Usually it is pointed out that Negroes fare better and meet less prejudice when they are few in number. Toward the bottom of the same page (168), the following appears:
...as we shall presently see, all white Americans agree that, if the Negro is to be eliminated, he must be eliminated slowly so as not to hurt any living individual Negroes. Therefore, the dominant American valuation is that 'the Negro should be eliminated from the American scene, but slowly.' Regarding the difficulties posed by the 'problem' of Negro population, Myrdal states on page 170 that....
In our further discussion of the means in Negro population policy we ought start out from the desire of the politically dominant white population to get rid of the Negroes. This is a goal difficult to reach by approved means, and the desire has never been translated into action directly, and probably never will be. All the most obvious means go strongly against the American Creed. The Negroes cannot be killed off. Compulsory deportation would infringe upon personal liberty in such a radical fashion that it is excluded. Voluntary exportation of Negroes could not be carried on extensively because of unwillingness on the part of recipient nations as well as on the part of the American Negroes themselves, who usually do not want to leave the country but prefer to stay and fight it out here. Neither is it possible to effectuate the goal by keeping up the Negro death rate. A high death rate is an unhumanitarian and undemocratic way to restrict the Negro population and, in addition, expensive to society and dangerous to the white population. The only possible way of decreasing Negro population is by means of controlling 'fertility.' But as we shall find, even birth control -- for Negroes as well as for whites -- will, in practice, have to be considered primarily as a means to other ends than that of decreasing the Negro population. After a lengthy discussion of the reasons for promoting birth control among people of African descent (and to a lesser extent among poor people generally), Myrdal then endorses, on page 178 of the book, 'extreme' measures in this direction:
If caste with all its consequences were to disappear, there would, from these viewpoints, be no more need for birth control among Negroes than among whites. But the general reasons for family limitation would remain, and they would have a strength depending upon the extent to which society was reformed to become a more favorable environment for families with children. Until these reforms are carried out, and as long as the burden of caste is laid upon American Negroes, even an extreme birth control program is warranted by reasons of individual and social welfare.
Finally, Myrdal acknowledges the opposition to such a program that is virtually certain to arise from the black community, and he infers that a certain amount of deception will be needed -- primarily the use of 'negro doctors and nurses' to conceal the real goals of white society. Note especially the change in language by which a serious attempt to 'get rid of the Negroes' suddenly is transformed into a campaign of birth planning meant to 'benefit' them (page 180):
The activity of the birth control movement's workers, the Southern whites, and the Negro leaders -- all with the same aim of spreading birth control among Negroes -- promises a great development of the movement in the future.....
A ... serious difficulty is that of educating Southern Negroes to the advantages of birth control. Negroes, on the whole, have all the prejudices against it that other poor, ignorant, superstitious people have. More serious is the fact that even when they do accept it, they are not very efficient in obeying instructions and sometimes they come to feel that it is a fake. An intensive educational campaign is needed, giving special recognition to the prejudices and ignorance of the people whom the campaign is to benefit. The use of Negro doctors and nurses is essential.


The chapter on 'population' begins by advising that, until about the 1930s, the growth of the black population lagged far behind the increase in white population. Not only fertility, but immigration as well, tended to support a phenomenal rise in the numbers of white U.S. residents between the end of the 18th century and the early 20th. However, birth rates among both black and white people had fallen in the years prior to Myrdal's research, to the point that black fertility had for the first time become measurably higher than white. This information on demographic trends begins on the first page of the population chapter, page 157 (citations omitted):
There were about 17 times as many Negroes in the United States in 1940 as there were in 1790, when the first census was taken, but in the same period the white population increased 37 times... Negroes were 19.3 per cent of the American population in 1790, but only 9.8 per cent in 1940.... [The relative change in proportion] has been governed by the national increase of the two population stocks, by expansion of the territorial limits of the United States and by immigration. At page 160 (re census figures):
Despite the errors in the data, it is possible to derive the following tentative conclusions: (1) that Negroes, like whites, are not reproducing themselves so rapidly as they used to, (2) that probably their rate is now higher than that of the whites, and (3) that this differential is a new phenomenon, at least in so far as it is significant. If such a differential continues into the future and if it is not fully compensated for by immigration of whites, the proportion of Negroes in the American population may be expected to rise, though slowly. Half way down the next page (page 161), Myrdal observes:
...Negroes are no longer reproducing themselves at a lower rate than whites. In fact, the figures suggest that they are reproducing themselves more -- thus reversing the position they held in 1930 and before. As to future trends, the author includes a veiled hint about the potential for intervention on page 163:
It must be remembered, however, that future change in fertility and mortality will change the entire pattern. At page 165, Myrdal points out the inconsistencies in various popular beliefs about the black population:
Popular theories on the growth of the Negro population in America have been diverse. At times it has been claimed that Negroes 'breed like rabbits,' and that they will ultimately crowd out the whites if they are not deported or their procreation restricted. At other times it has been pronounced that they are a 'dying race,' bound to lose out in the 'struggle for survival.' Myrdal writes that it is common among 'liberal' white Americans to rationalize the depopulation of persons of African descent on the grounds that there will be less prejudice as the size of the black population diminishes But this is clearly not the perception of the black community. Writes Myrdal (at the bottom of page 168), 'I have never met a Negro who drew the conclusion from this that a decrease of the American Negro population would be advantageous. Indeed, says the very same paragraph (on page 169): 'almost every Negro, who is brought to think about the problem, wants the Negro population to be as large as possible.'

Should Clarence Thomas be removed from the Supreme Court?

Who is Clarence Thomas?

 

President Obama's 2015 State of the Union Address:  This year, six justices were in attendance, while three of the most conservative members of the court, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were noticeably absent. In the modern era, custom has held that the justices would show up in their official robes and sit impassively. But in recent years, they've become more resistant to the tradition.

1.   Timeline

1982: In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

1987: In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to Republican Congressman Dick Armey.

1991: Thomas's formal confirmation hearings began on September 10, 1991.

2006: Though Congress had reauthorized Section 5 in 2006 for another 25 years, Thomas said the law was no longer necessary, pointing out that the rate of black voting in seven Section 5 states was higher than the national average.

2009: In 2009's Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, Thomas was the sole dissenter, voting in favor of throwing out Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

2011: In 2011, Thomas's wife stepped down from Liberty Central to open a conservative lobbying firm touting her "experience and connections", meeting with newly elected Republican congressmen, and describing herself as an "ambassador to the tea party".

 

This tension between the speech and the highest court in the land came to a head in 2010, when President Obama directly criticized a conservative Supreme Court decision.

Should Clarence Thomas be removed from the Supreme Court let someone with insight, heart, and intelligence replace him?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is “Clarence Thomas: A Black Knight in Tainted Armor”?

Is Thomas and others like him are ruining the country?

Did Thomas joined with four other “radical reactionaries” on the court, creating a majority that he says represents the sentiments of “un-Reconstructed Jefferson Davis rebels?”

“Has Thomas been a major source of embarrassment to those who believe that all people are equal?”

Has the Supreme Court’s retreat on the rights of minorities, blacks, Hispanics and women?

 

Why would Thomas vote for the 2013 decision invalidating a component of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and opening “the flood gates for the resumption of mischievous gimmicks used previously to disfranchise millions of African Americans?”  

Did Thomas and his allies of use deception to gain his confirmation in 1991?

Were many blacks lulled into thinking that Thomas wouldn’t be substantially different from his predecessor, the late Thurgood Marshall?