Where My Heart Lay on the Fourth of July this Year

     This recent fourth of July, my heart was not in it.  It was in it, in a sense, because I am patriotic, and I enjoyed celebrating with friends, but my heart was really with how black people did not, for so many years in this country, enjoy the freedoms, that whites did. 
      Black men went to WWII, to fight Hitler, in a segregated army.  They went to help the holocaust prisoners, but they were victims here.  The south was a continuous lynching.  F.D.R. disregarded this.  His wife cared, but he did not.  Truman disregarded it.  Back in the twenties, Theodore Roosevelt disregarded it.  
     Isaac Woodard had just returned from WWII, was still in uniform, and for asking a greyhound bus driver, if he could stop for him to use a restroom, he was beaten by police in South Carolina.  He was hit in the eyes with billy sticks, they poured alcohol upon him, and he woke up blind.
     I posted these blogs, to say exactly what Frederick Douglas said in the speech that I posted, acted by Danny Glover.  
     It all just seems grossly unfair.  We see ourselves as great for fighting the Nazis, while torturing our own.
     It seems like hypocrisy.  Ironically, as I said in my blog on July fourth, or one of them, that most of the New Yorkers, who went down to Mississippi to protest the execution of Willie McGee, a black man, falsely accused of rape of a white woman, were Jewish, including Einstein and Norman Mailer, whom I am related to by marriage, although he is passed on.  William Faulkner also protested, and many northern women.  No white man has ever been executed for rape, and Willie McGee was in fact, innocent.
     However, Willie McGee was electrocuted in the traveling electric chair, and there are chilling audio records of this happening live, with spectators, as if they were going to a fireworks display.  This type of thing that went on down here in 'Dixie,' makes me ashamed of the south, where I am from, but we have come a long way.  It was, however, not that long ago, that these horrors happened.  
     It also makes me proud to have Jewish heritage, because Jews are by nature, intelligent, compassionate people, who have received much hatred and injustice, but have the wisdom and integrity to stand for righteousness.