There are times I really appreciate the Duluth News Tribune especially when it comes to stories relating to the issue of Race and Civil Rights. I wanted to write about one such instance, related to my old colleague Mary Cameron, in particular for a long time and a quick search of LD’s search engine reveals that I wrote about it in this post.
I had lunch with Tim (the young black man I’ve written about in previous posts) yesterday before I went to play in the snow. (I’m working on a snow sculpture in Canal Park for Destination Duluth) He wanted me to pose a question on my blog about race and I told him I was currently preoccupied with Art Johnston’s travails so I wouldn’t. In fact, I can’t remember what he wanted me to ask. I’m getting old.
But race seems very relevant right now. Today’s DNT has a story that expands on the comment I made a couple days ago about an Internet “joke”/threat in which one of our African-American students had his picture with a noose around it circulating on the Internet. There is also by chance a story about three black men selling heroin in today’s paper with their mug shots. Next to the latter story is a fun picture of a black UMD student in a snowball fight. I suspect it was intentional; a little reminder that a few bad apples don’t represent the whole bushel.
But there is that story about the lynching joke. I suspect it was meant as more a cruel joke than threat. I suspect it was put up by kids who are clueless how hateful it is. It could happen in any school district but this one is our baby. Its the sort of thing a school board that wasn’t absorbed in its own feuds ought to dig down to and try and uproot. Instead the Board would rather uproot the only member of the Board who serves on the local NAACP board.
There is a great irony about how they attempted to do this. It was by slander accusing Art Johnston of saying something racist last June. There is little Art could do about it. It was only raised as an allegation but that didn’t stop it being on the front page before being set aside by Mary Rice who kindly said she couldn’t prove it and that anyway, the comment was barely racist in her opinion. Thanks Kevin Rupp. The damage was done by the front page headlines. The reason Art could do little about it is because we are all public officials. Elected officials have shed some of their protections against libelous allegations.
I mentioned the Supreme Court Case Near vs. Minnesota recently. That’s a case that protects Newspapers from being crippled when they misreport things. There is another case that protects Newspapers called New York Times vs. Sullivan. Coincidentally I was removing things from my attic just now when I found a paper I’d written back in my college Constitutional Law class. It was on that case. I’ve heard Jennifer Martin Romme of the Zenith mention the case several times and so I thought I’d read my old paper to remind myself what the case was about. In short the New York Times ran an ad disparaging an Alabama elected official with incorrect information in it. An Alabama Court awarded the elected official half a million dollars for libel. The Times appealed the crippling award (half a mill was a lot of money back in 1960) and this is when the Supreme Court first decreed that elected officials didn’t have the same protections as ordinary citizens. I’m grateful because my blog might get me in big trouble if this were not true. The primary exception to this is if I or anyone else knowingly and maliciously lies. I’ll leave it to my audience to decide whether I’ve crossed those barriers.
What I’d forgotten was that this ruling was very much a part of the Civil Right’s Era. In 1960 blacks weren’t allowed to vote in the Deep South and a southern court awarded the monstrous libel award to a local official because some of their black citizens had put the ad in the Times a “Yankee” newspaper to shut its mouth. Thank God the Supreme Court had changed since the days of Plessy vs. Fergusson.
Today, by coincidence, is the 50th anniversary reenactment/celebration of the March on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It was the subject of a recent film called Selma. (Its very good by the way.) I see that Tom Emmer a newly elected republican congressmen from Minnesota is down there to be a part of the celebration. Good for him. It might be more evidence of the birth of a kinder gentler more thoughtful GOP.
I’d like to stick to this topic for a while and maybe even finish the post I started a couple weeks ago reviewing the movie Selma. But gosh, I’m a Hatfield. I’ve got to get back to my feud with the McCoys. Please forgive me.
