this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

My grandfather started going on a anti-trump, anti-fascism rant and I saw him kind of pause to check if I was that trump cultist lol. It was very heartening

My other grandfather was a vocal racist, sexist, homophobe who died of covid because he believed Trump's lies. Rot in pieces

Trump literally killed off hundreds of thousands of bigots with his lies about covid. That was silver lining of his term

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Are we counting the people that ignored reality as the group behind?

[–] [email protected] 68 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, there was certainly a third group who was willfully avoiding involvement.

There still is, but there was one back then too.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

A lot of the time, willfully avoiding involvement still meant ostracizing groups.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I believe they’re represented in the photo by the man in a white shirt in the top right corner who isn’t paying attention to anything. Kind of on the nose, really.

(Which is a somewhat uncharitable interpretation, he could be looking away in disgust or just happen to glance away when the photo was taken)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

MLKs letter from a Birmingham jail is a good take on the white moderate in times of inequality. Order matters more to some than Justice or even the law itself. Their inaction is the apathy that the aggressors can pave over in an attempt to look like a larger group than they are.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Apathy is participation when the issue is bigotry.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I don't understand what the image is depicting exactly, there's one black person in the picture and she's sitting there while that guy is about to drip something on the head of the woman next to her?

Is it a picture of white people bullying a group for having a black friend?

[–] [email protected] 102 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is from the Woolworth's sit-in, where people sat at the segregated lunch counter in protest.
Other people who did not like this verbally and physically abused them.

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-anne-moody-20150211-story.html

[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Also, the white guy covered in dessert is presumably an ally there to show solidarity and, judging by the size of him, also physically protect them if necessary.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I hope that wasn't their plan or they'd have found out very quickly that size is a great advantage 1 on 1 but a bigger advantage is being 2 on 1.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fair enough, but telling the minority group they should try to outnumber the majority group is not exactly helpful

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Lunch counters were segregated in the US. A fairly common protest was black folk sitting at lunch counters and trying to order lunch. This often causes uproar and unrest, riots. I believe the woman who's about to have water poured on her head is black, it's just that the picture makes her look white, or she's fairly passing.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think the woman with water poured on her is white and sitting with the black woman.

My understanding of the two sides were the white people attacking them and the white people sitting with a black person to protest segregation.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Thanks for the clarification

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

They’re having salt dumped on them too, for the grave offense of sitting at a Whites-only lunch counter.

If this mob of hick bullies wasn’t there to torment them, well, black people might eat lunch there. Obviously that would be the end of the world, and all would be lost.

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/educate/lunch.html

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

It’s a sit in, protesting laws that said establishments could refuse to serve black people (or serve them horribly,)

This was the form civil disobedience took, where they would go, make a scene, get arrested, and then argue in court that the law was unjust.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Unfortunately some folks identified with both.

Grandfather was a MoC, he still forbade my mom from dating black men because he thought they were all thugs.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

That's not identifying with both that's just adhering to a slightly different cultural norm.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Yeah. Not that unusual for the time.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

This is the "great america" they are always referencing.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Have you all ever seen the Monsoon Motor Lodge acid attack?

Facebook says this image is fine by them when Nazis post it, of course.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

I regularly think about how many of our sweet loving grandmothers were the ones we see in the pictures hurling slurs at the tops of their lungs. How many grandfathers strung up the rope for the lynch mob.

These things all "ended" less than a century ago.

[–] FryHyde 13 points 4 months ago

I'd like to know more about this Hot Donut Department

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My mother used to refer to Indian owned motels as "Paki palace", used to tell me not to run away with a black man like the neighbour who was in a biracial relationship did, and I distinctly remember a family friend yelling "run you N word run" when an African guy was running an Olympic race on TV.

So that was all really fun.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Well my grandparents wouldn't have been allowed in that shop, given there was an embargo in the us against people like my grandparents until 1943, though its not at all why my grandfather hated America and Americans for most of his life.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Your point is well taken about not being allowed in the country, but I have a feeling that this may have been later than 1943 based on the non violent reactions of the racists and that this looks like a sit in. Sit-ins were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s but I don't know how prevelant they were before that.

Could be wrong. If someone knows for sure lmk

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

HOT DONUT DEPARTMENT

For a second I thought they had their own police outpost.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Were any of these kids found and interviewed later on in life?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The kids getting abused, yeah.

https://www.crmvet.org/nars/greensit.htm

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/12/577343980/the-civil-rights-activist-whose-name-youve-probably-never-heard

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/lessons-worth-learning-moment-greensboro-four-sat-down-lunch-counter-180974087/

The kids doing the abusing - strangely, no. No one’s interviewed them so far as a quick search could tell.

Interestingly, the waitress not pictured here was interviewed for StoryCorps. https://storycorps.org/stories/woolworths-lunch-counter-waitress/

That was in Jackson, MS, as opposed to the Greensboro one.

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