Racism in the Land of Lincoln

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From: Jim Allen <jimallen@consolidated.net>

Sent: 06/18/13 10:59 PM

To: dibendahl@mail.com

Subject: 13th Congressional District reply

Rodney Davis will win and the love child of the D.N.C. will be back in Shitcago by May of 2014 working for some law firm that needs to meet their quota for minority hires.

The truth is Nancy Pelosi and the DEMOCRAT party want this seat. So they called RINO Timmy Johnson to be their pack mule and get little queen to run.

Ann Callis gets a free ride through a primary and Rodney Davis has a battle.

The little queen touts her abstinence and she won the crown because she got bullied in school,,,boohoo..kids are cruel, life sucks and you move on..Now, miss queen is being used like a street walker and her pimps are the DEMOCRAT PARTY and RINO REPUBLICANS…These pimps want something they can’t get,,, the seat held by a conservative REPUBLICAN  Rodney Davis and Nancy Pelosi can’t stand it..

Little Queenie and Nancy Pelosi have so much in common but the one thing that stands out the most.. both are FORMER QUEENS, their crowns are tarnished and time has run out on the both of them.

The above racist, as well as sexist, email sent by Montgomery County Republican Chairman Jim Allen reminds us of how  racism still pervades society and politics in Illinois despite the election of Illinois’ own Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States.  The above words come from a county chairman of the party of another son of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.

This really should come as no surprise.  While Illinois was not a slave state and while certain communities in Illinois were way-stations for fleeing slaves in the underground railroad, the history of Illinois is also replete with segregation and anti-black behavior, some of it very violent.  This is certainly true of my hometown Chicago, one of the most highly segregated cities in the United States in which the July 27-August 3, 1919 race riots resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of black people.

But it is also true of downstate Illinois.  Eleven years before the above race riot in Chicago, in August of 1908, blacks were lynched and injured in a race riot in Springfield.  This race riot was largely responsible for the founding of the NAACP in 1909.

I personally experienced the effects of racism in the town of Pontiac, Illinois in Livingston County. When I was a young boy I would spend a certain amount of time each summer visiting my aunt and my younger girl cousins.  My aunt owned the two hotels that were then there, the Pontiac and the Imperial Hotels.  She employed an African American maid who had a son my age.  When Johnnie and I went to the movies together, he and I would sit in a tiny balcony reserved for blacks, and out of sight of other whites.  I could have sat on the main floor but chose not to because I wanted to sit with Johnnie.  Johnnie had no choice.

One day my aunt gave me money to buy a model airplane kit.  To my aunt’s chagrin, I split the money and bought a kit for myself and one for Johnnie as well.  To her greater chagrin, we sat down together in the hotel lobby to assemble our kits. My aunt called me into her apartment and told me that blacks were not acceptable in the lobby (unless of course they were cleaning it.)  Once again our being together had to be out of public sight, this time in the hotel’s basement.  This was not in the South.  It was only a couple of hours southwest of Chicago on the old Route 66.

That was in the 1940s and 1950s.  I have no idea what Pontiac or Livingston County are like now.  But I have heard of a mayor in Champaign County, one even belonging to the party of Lincoln just like Mr. Allen, who only a couple of years ago denied that our first black president was even an American.

 

 

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