“What’s Past is Prologue…”
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES(Originally posted on November 26, 2014):
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
MICHAEL BROWN, the St. Louis Grand Jury, and the rest of us--“Remember, everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal” (see original source of this quote below):
“We are a nation of laws so we must accept the Grand Jury’s decision (in the Michael Brown case).”
--President Barack Obama
“The black man has no rights that the white man need respect.”
—Judge Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (on behalf of the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857)
“Remember: everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal” --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ('Letter From a Birmingham Jail', April 16, 1963)
“Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, become as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”
—Ella Baker
“Slavery was legal, Jim Crow apartheid was legal, denying black people the right to vote was legal, denying women in general the right to vote was legal, banning and/or destroying labor unions was legal, child labor was legal, putting the indigenous population (i.e. “Indians”) in concentration camps…er, I mean “reservations” was legal, lynching was legal, residential segregation was legal, denying black people access to housing, restaurants, schools, theaters, department stores and public transportation was legal, denying black people the right to read and write was legal, raping black women and then forcing them to have children by white men was legal, killing, torturing, arresting, and imprisoning black men for pursuing romantic or sexual liaisons with white women was legal, assaulting and even murdering black people in general—especially if those assaults and murders were committed by white males—was legal, and excluding immigrants of color from entering this country was legal. So my question is this: Given these indisputable facts established by legal statue and custom in the United States what exactly does President Obama mean when he robotically keeps uttering the patently absurd, demonstrably false, and cowardly phrase “we are a nation of laws”?…”
—Kofi Natambu
