Complementary Contradictions: This Gemini Life

“There’s no way like the American Way” ~ (if you have the “proper” social location) 

Courage.

One of my favorite books, a real eye-opener on the realities of the latter period of the 1960s & 1970s Civil Rights Era.  Below is one of my favorite passages from the book

The sugar-coated confections that pass for the popular history of the civil rights movement offer outright lies about most white Americans’ responses to the freedom movement instead of reminding us how profoundly it challenged American practices of justice and democracy.  No one, in the rosy glow of our hindsight, was opposed to this movement except potbellied, tobacco-chewing racist rednecks in Mississippi.  And thank God for the federal government, who in these fantasies rode over the hill like the cavalry to iron out these little difficulties on the frontier of American society.  Polling data revealed that the majority of white Americans in 1963, prior to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, believed that the movement for racial equality had already proceeded “too far and too fast.”  North and south, whites avoided social contact with black people and strongly objected to integrated housing and schools.