53 years ago today
An unknown black woman refused to surrender her seat at the front of the bus for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.
If you were on that bus, brought up in a culture where Rosa Parks was expected to surrender her seat, would you have seen her as a civil rights icon in the making, or as a lazy troublemaker?
Labels: civil rights
posted by Dan at 12/01/2008 07:46:00 AM
8 Comments:
And to this day, Gloria Squitiro would call her "Mammy."
Kingsfield is correct. Gloria would call her Bernie Mac.
Because Bernie Mac, first of all, was not my
3 birth name. I pre- -- I prefer to be called
4 Burnetta. And I don't know why she felt like
5 she had the privilege to call me something
6 other than that.
When I read the Fimkhouser and depositions, one term keeps coming to mind: Perjury.
Nice typing and anonymous accusation, coward.
I read it, and it has the ring of truth.
Care to specify what in there you think was a lie?
I've waded through Funk's and Burtin's depos. The Mayor didn't come across as lying to me. Even when he was engaged in Clintonian parsing (I loved the bit about how, in his opinion, having your mother in law on the honeymoon would not be considered disruptive), he was pretty open about it. Didn't seem cagey at all. Reading it just made me sad, because you can see how earnest he is about improvement (of his own understanding of things, and of the city itself). It's too bad he's unwilling to realize that setting appropriate boundaries on his wife in the office does not equal disparagement or rejection of her.
Burtin's was a hoot. People bitch about the pay of municipal judges, but damn... I wouldn't mind doing Mrs. Burtin's job for 90k. (I do not begrudge city employees their salaries, I am merely jealous). Burtin came across as a very proper and competent individual who had been coached to answer "I don't know" to everything outside of a narrow set of questions (most of the outside questions were, admittedly, irrelevant).
The Burtin depo made me sad, too, because between how she presented herself and how she talked about Wolf, I just got the sense that Funkhouser had put together a good team. And now they're both gone, because they objected to Squitiro. And the Mayor has turned supporting Squitiro into the lithmus test for wanting "change." It's an unfortunate mess. I keep wishing there were some way to get through the Mayor, but if Wolf couldn't do it, no one can.
Fortunately, the depo ends on a high note with a lawyer bitch fight that was entertaining to read (although undoubtedly uncomfortable for the witness). Skip to Banks' questions.
"Eye-rolling decrybabies" may be the best new phrase published in 2008. Bravo.
Wrong thread. Sorry.
No more gin before lunch.
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