What is happening in this country…Jim Crow Lives!
What the hell is going on in this country; all the shit is coming to light now that Obama is president? Since we all wanted a real conversation about race, some black folks who face it every day in a real way are no longer afraid to “really” talk about what’s going on in their daily lives. Here is an article from the Philadelphia Daily News that is so disturbing and unbelievable in the year of our lord 2009.
It seems as though Jim Crow is alive and well and living in Pennsylvania at the city’s transportation department facility in Roxborough.
IT MAY BE the ultimate indignity.
Lawrence “Lonnie” Powell, 58, a semiskilled laborer at the city’s Northwest Transfer Station, in Roxborough, said that since he began working at the trash-handling plant in 2003 he has had to seek the superintendent’s permission to go to the bathroom — then descend five flights of stairs to use it.
Powell, who is black, said that white employees have been permitted to use a bathroom just 25 feet from his work station.
“On several occasions I’ve actually defecated on myself, trying to get down to the bathroom,” said Powell, who operates a machine that packs trash into tractor-trailers to be taken to landfills.
Photo: SARAH J. GLOVER / Staff photographer: Workers at the Northwest Transfer Station say they read "Runaway Slaves," found in trash, for inspiration.
Recently, after the black workers found in the trash a book titled Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, by historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, they began to read it for solace and inspiration, Young said.
“When this book turned up on our platform in the trash, …it just made us think that this is like slavery again,” Young said. “So we started keeping the book…as our little Bible in the drivers’ shack, where all the black drivers sit and we relax and eat lunch.
“And we just try to encourage each other to every now and then, when he does something racist to you or that really pisses you off, to read a couple pages of the book, to show you that this is not the first time this happened, we can get through this, but we got to do it together.”
This just breaks my heart.
As always, be well
CF
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