"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Republican, Supreme Court Justice, Union officer in the Civil War. Upon his death (two days shy of 94) he left a portion of his estate to the United States government.
Men of Kansas vote in favor of granting the right to vote to women.
The men of Arizona, which became a state in the same year, grant the right to vote to women.
Although a hot topic while the state constitution was being formed, a conservative block in the senate, mostly consisting of Southerners, defeated all attempts to give women the vote in the state’s constitution.
Just a few months later, Arizona men voted and changed that short sighted lack of compassion and freedom.
With the right to vote on the Oregonian ballot for the sixth, and final time, most women are granted the right to vote.
Statutes persisted preventing first-generation Asians (male and female) from becoming citizens and therefore voting, and Native American women are also barred from voting, except those married to white men.
“And maybe officials are right to be afraid [to take tough action], given the massive size of the banks in question relative to the economy. In fact, those banks are bigger now than they were before the crisis, and, as James Kwak and I documented at length in our book 13 Bankers, they are much larger than they were 20 years ago.”
“Let’s build a government that serves the interest of property owners. We’ll fight on their behalf against their oppressors, for promises of trinkets, fine speeches, and honest work. One that keeps all women, all non-whites, and poor whites outside the power structure as much as possible….”
"Martin Luther King himself became more and more concerned about problems untouched by civil rights laws-problems coming out of poverty. In the spring of 1968, he began speaking out, against the advice of some Negro leaders who feared losing friends in Washington, against the war in Vietnam…
King now became a chief target of the FBI, which tapped his private phone conversations, sent him fake letters, threatened him, blackmailed him, and even suggested once in an anonymous letter that he commit suicide. FBI internal memos discussed finding a black leader to replace King. As a Senate report on the FBI said in 1976, the FBI tried “to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King."
- Howard Zinn, “Or Does it Explode?”
A People’s History of the United States. No assassin was ever conclusively caught. James Earl Ray, the man who went to prison for the assassination, fought the rest of his life for a retrial, at the end with the support of the King family. Whether or not the government was involved in his assassination, it is clear that as soon as King shifted his focus from civil rights to poverty, he was considered an enemy of the state.
(Source: historyisaweapon.com)
"… it’s inevitable that we’ve got to bring out the question of the tragic mix-up in priorities. We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development… when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer."
- Martin Luther King, Jr, Spring 1968. King began to realize that civil rights laws could only do so much. The true threat to black oppression was the systemic poverty that the Civil Rights laws recently passed would have no effect on. Friends close to him advised against speaking out against it since he would lose allies in Washington. He was assassinated by an unknown marksman on April 6th.
"The provisions of this section shall not apply to acts or omissions on the part of law enforcement officers, members of the National Guard … or members of the Armed Forces of the United States, who are engaged in suppressing a riot or civil disturbance…."
- United States, Civil Rights Act, 1968. It also defined a riot as three or more people involving threats of violence.
