Black woman feels sorry for self for 73 years; DUmp swoons

[BannedFromDU]

KamaAina (63,863 posts)

Woman, 93, granted a library card 73 years after being denied because she was black
http://thegrio.com/2015/07/06/woman-library-card-73-years-later/

In 1942, Pearl Thompson, who was studying at Shaw University, went to the library to check out a book that she was required to read for her class.

Unfortunately, the library told her that she could not get a card because of her race, and she had to stay in the basement of the library to read the book because she could not take it home with her.

But on Thursday, Thompson arrived at the Cameron Village Regional Library to much fanfare as she finally received her library card 73 years later....

“I just feel like this woman was denied access to a library and a book,” Burlingame said. “I just wanted the opportunity to rectify that, not just for her but for us as the library system.”

   
   

I guess I'm the only one willing to call bullshit on this. Actually, I call lazy.

73 years later she gathers the nerve to go re-apply for a library card? Yeah, right. And look who's there to issue it to her, fresh from the 7-11 where he was schooling a 70-year-old:

randys1 (7,872 posts)
1. This will happen in 2016 if we are not vigilant. Racism is the core agenda of the R party

Actually, Shaw, we're going to make sure that black people can ONLY have library cards, so they're forced to read back issues of Reader's Digest and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Because we're
like that.

[DLR Pyro]

She was denied a library card in 1942. Remind me again who was  president in 1942.

[thundley4]

This might be relevant if she tried to get a library card every year since then, but has been denied until now. 

[SVPete]

This might be relevant if she tried to get a library card every year since then, but has been denied until now. 

Bingo! Somewhere between 1942 and 1972 she would have been able to walk in to that library and get a card, without any race-related question. The reason she didn't is probably because she moved elsewhere after college. This "event" was just an empty symbol.

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see a city or town mentioned in the article. Maybe the writer expects Shaw University to be universally known. Anyway, I DDGed Shaw and learned this took place in Raleigh, NC.

The US was not homogeneous nor strictly regional wrt race coming into the 1950s and 1960s. There was plenty of racism in "the North"; I can remember blacks in the late 1960s having to sue the plumbers union in San Francisco over excluding blacks from being members. OTOH, my parents attended schools in a small California Central Valley town, from about 1919 through 1932, and they had classmates who were black, Hispanic, Chinese, and Japanese (probably "Native American" as well, though I don't remember my parents mentioning anyone of that ancestry). My parents weren't any sort of activists, they just showed me that racism is silly by working and socializing with anyone/everyone while I was growing up.

r1 is so paranoid and hysterical that he's almost a caricature of a really bad mole. Nixon and Ford were President for 8 years. Why no return to this sort of racism-in-action? Reagan and G. H. W. Bush were President for 12 years. Why no return to this sort of racism-in-action? G. W. Bush was President for 8 years. Why no return to this sort of racism-in-action?

r1 might know that blacks, as a demographic group among Americans are economically less well off than they were in the 1960s, and probably even in the 1950. What r1 cannot - and dare not - realize is that this is due pretty much entirely to government programs making dependence on government a viable lifestyle, sexual promiscuity becoming socially "acceptable", and a sub-culture of refusing to accept responsibility taking root among many blacks (I'm not saying whites were unaffected by these social trends; it's a difference of degree, not of kind).