i was like, ‘are you serious!?’

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Yet another disheartening story of hatred in the form of racism.  Maybe instead of naivety it’s because of who and what I am that I find it shocking that so-called “racial purity” is an obsession for some.  A crusade.  A cause to kill and die for.

Harrowing Story of Racism

Staff
Charleston

http://www.wvmetronews.com/index.cfm?func=displayfullstory&storyid=32733

Meredith Harris is white.  Her husband is black.  She has white friends and black friends.  She says the color of their skin has never really mattered to her, but she says it does to some… Harris, 22, has what some may call an unbelievable story about racism. But it is true,  and it happened in Charleston, WV. The story ended with a man named Darrell Fierce pleading guilty to violating Harris’ civil rights.  Fierce was never sentenced because he died after shooting himself on the day of  his sentencing hearing.

It began in late June 2007 when Harris found a house to rent. Next door was Fierce and his partner, both older white men.  After signing a lease with Fierce’s partner, it was move in day for Meredith. Her white friends were there to help.

“That was actually the first day I met Darrell. I was carryin’ stuff in and out of the house.  He came up and walked over in the yard and introduced himself. He actually gave me a bottle of champagne with like a red ribbon and everything. (He) told me ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ (and) if there was anything I need to let him know…  He was just really friendly to me the first day….he was very friendly. Ben had always been friendly. Darrel was friendly. So, I thought everything was going to be fine.”

But everything wasn’t fine.  Two days after moving in Meredtih Harris brought a young mixed-race girl to the house along with who is now her father-in-law, a black man.

“My goddaughter…she’s mixed.  And she was over there and as soon as they saw her the next chance they got they confronted me in the front yard.  (They) called my goddaughter some very inappropriate things.  (They) said that they weren’t having a day care for ‘mixed monkeys.’  (They) said they didn’t like my kind and that I was going to have to leave. (They) pretty much called me white trash. At that point, that was when they tried to evict me. ”

Harris says that after a wonderful initial reception things had changed suddenly.

“When they first said it I didn’t believe them. I was like ‘are you serious?’  But once it like clicked to me that they were being serious -that they were really that racist and this wasn’t like a joke- that’s when I called my dad. He came over and he confronted them. Once he got there they pretty much said the same thing to him. ‘We know why you don’t want her. She’s white trash. We know you’re probably ashamed of her. I’d be ashamed of her too.’  (They) just said things like that that were really inapproriate.  At this point i didn’t want to live there anymore.”

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Having been given an eviction notice by the men for what they called “incapability” Meredith began looking for a new place to live. Then came the night of July 15th, 2007. As she often did, Meredith went to bed late. Her wake up call on July 16th was scary.

“It was about five o’clock in the morning when I woke up and my dog woke me up. By the time she did, the smoke was so thick in my room I could hardly see,” Harris said. “I usually sleep with my door closed, but it was actually open that night. As soon as I woke up I knew it was him (Fierce) that did it.”

“He made like a little brush pile with trash and flammable stuff,” she remembered. “They started the fire right outside my bedroom and at the front and backdoor, I guess, to try and trap me in there.”

Harris would later find her and her boyfriend’s cars had slashed tires and sugar-filled gasoline tanks.

That was her last night in the house, but she kept her belongings there as she looked for a new place to live. She says within a week the house was empty and when she returned she says Fierce reminded her what he had said before that he was going to evict her.

“I walked inside the house and everything that I owned was gone. Everything from by shower curtain, to my toothbrush, to my hairdryer, everything was gone,” Harris said.

“After he said those things about me and my goddaughter I knew he was crazy, but I never thought my life would be in danger for staying there until I found another place,” Harris recently said in an exclusive interview with MetroNews.

Harris was waiting for Fierce to go to trial and she admits today she was surprised when he agreed to plead guilty to the charges. He did so earlier this year, although when the plea hearing began before a federal judge he made up a story about why he set the house on fire. Before the hearing was over, Harris says Fierce told the truth, but she could tell he wasn’t sorry.

“Even after the fact he felt no remorse,” Harris said. “He didn’t think there was anything wrong with what he did.”

The 69-year-old Fierce was scheduled to be sentenced in late July, but he didn’t show up for his hearing. Federal marshals soon discovered he had shot himself in the stomach in a Kanawha City motel room. Fierce was hospitalized for several days, before passing away.

“I didn’t want him to die. I would have much rather seen him go to jail to be honest,” Harris said. “I guess everybody else thought I would feel safer. I just felt bad and it made me feel worse.”

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libraries

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library these are not books, but minds

librarian climbing

library 3

library 4

library cool

library with great ceiling paintings

library with spiral stair

library at Alder Manor NY

In my opinion, the following is the coolest one.  It’s in a private home.  Specifically, the home of Jay Walker.  Funny name.  Awesome library!

jay walker's libraryNothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker’s library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.

ff_walker5_fReading Room In the foreground are several early-20th-century volumes with jeweled bindings—gold, rubies, and diamonds—crafted by the legendary firm Sangorski & Sutcliffe. On the table (first row, from left) is a 16th-century book of jousting, a Dickens novel decorated with the author’s portrait, and (open, with Post-it flags) an original copy of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, the first illustrated history book. Second row: the 1535 Coverdale Bible (the first completely translated into modern English), a medieval tome with intricate illustrations of dwarfs, a collection of portraits commissioned at a 17th-century German festival (“Facebook in 1610!”), a tree-bark Indonesian guide to cannibalism, and a Middle Eastern mother goddess icon from around 5000 BC.

ff_walker6_fGadget Lab A brand-new One Laptop per Child XO, far left, sits next to a relatively ancient RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100. In back, a 1911 typewriting machine and a 1909 Kent radio. The large contraption at center is the Nazis’ supposedly unbreakable Enigma code machine. The book to its left is a copy of Johannes Trithemius’ 1518 Polygraphiae, a cryptographic landmark. On the right is an Apple II motherboard signed by Woz. An Edison kinetoscope sits beside an 1890 Edison phonograph (along with three of the wax cylinders it uses for recording). Nearby is a faithful copy of Edison’s lightbulb. The gadget with the tubes is an IBM processor circa 1960. In front of it stands a truly ancient storage device, a Sumerian clay cone used to record surplus grain.

See more of Walker’s library here.

cereal

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if you hadn’t noticed by now…

i heart 80s

I also love cereal.  In the 80’s they made so many fun cereals.  I bet they weren’t very good, but they were fun.  I was a cereal nerd.  I like boring things like corn flakes, special k, raisin bran.  The most fun cereal that I enjoy is rice krispies. But what ever happened to these?

oops

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  • “It will be years —not in my time— before a woman will become Prime Minister.”
    —Margaret Thatcher, October 26th, 1969.

  • “That virus [HIV] is a pussycat.”
    —Dr. Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor at U.C. Berkeley, 1988

  • “Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.”
    —Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his suggestion to drill for oil in 1859.

  • “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.”
    —New York Times, 1936

  • “Reagan doesn’t have that presidential look.”
    —United Artists Executive, rejecting Reagan as lead in 1964 film The Best Man.

  • “The singer [Mick Jagger] will have to go; the BBC won’t like him.”
    —- First Rolling Stones manager Eric Easton to his partner after watching them perform.

  • “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
    —Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859)

  • “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
    —Lord Kelvin, 1895.

  • “There will never be a bigger plane built.”
    —A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.

  • “Taking the best left-handed pitcher in baseball and converting him into a right fielder is one of the dumbest things I ever heard.”
    — Tris Speaker, baseball hall of famer, talking about Babe Ruth, 1919.

  • “Ours has been the first [expedition], and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality.”
    —— Lt. Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861.

  • “If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.”
    —W.C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954.

  • “You better get secretarial work or get married.”
    —Emmeline Snively, advising would-be model Marilyn Monroe in 1944.

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marriage license refused

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I guess it’s not really a big deal seeing as he’s let a black person use his bathroom and all.  Of course I do not mean that at all and I am appalled by this.  Especially because his reason is to prevent the creation of miserable people like me.  Good God!  I think when this man sees and interracial couple he sees (in his mind) something like this:

white woman black horse

rather than this:

2100800164_a84aecde84

No Marriage License for Interracial Couple

By MARY FOSTER, AP

HAMMOND, La. (Oct. 15) – A white Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

“I try to treat everyone equally,” he said.

Bardwell estimates that he has refused to marry about four couples during his career, all in the past 2 1/2 years.

Beth Humphrey, 30, and 32-year-old Terence McKay, both of Hammond, say they will consult the U.S. Justice Department about filing a discrimination complaint.

Humphrey, an account manager for a marketing firm, said she and McKay, a welder, just returned to Louisiana. She is white and he is black. She plans to enroll in the University of New Orleans to pursue a masters degree in minority politics.

“That was one thing that made this so unbelievable,” she said. “It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”

…”It is really astonishing and disappointing to see this come up in 2009,” said American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana attorney Katie Schwartzmann. She said the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 “that the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry.”

The ACLU sent a letter to the Louisiana Judiciary Committee, which oversees the state justices of the peace, asking them to investigate Bardwell and recommending “the most severe sanctions available, because such blatant bigotry poses a substantial threat of serious harm to the administration of justice.”

“He knew he was breaking the law, but continued to do it,” Schwartzmann said.

…”I’ve been a justice of the peace for 34 years and I don’t think I’ve mistreated anybody,” Bardwell said. “I’ve made some mistakes, but you have too. I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”