The biggest news of the past two weeks in the United States has been the protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., against the Ferguson Police Department because one of its officers killed an unarmed 18-year-old African-American.
The complete story about what happened on Aug. 9 might never be known because the victim, Michael Brown, is dead. Apparently, there are witnesses who believe that officer Darren Wilson shooting Brown six times, twice in the head, was completely unwarranted, while other witnesses, including Wilson himself, believe that Brown was a threat to Wilson and the officer had to fire in self-defense.
More important than the incident itself has been the reaction to the incident. Polls indicate that white Americans are far more likely to support Wilson and condemn Brown, while African-Americans are far more apt to condemn Wilson and believe that racism was a pivotal factor in the shooting. Whites are also far more likely to think that a police department with 50 whites and three blacks in a city with a population that is 67 percent black is acceptable.
The bottom line, as numerous other polls have shown, is that African-Americans are far more likely than whites to believe that anti-black racism still exists in the United States today.
I don’t know what precisely happened on Aug. 9 and I don’t know whether the white police officers in Ferguson, Mo., are inept racists, but I know this – the USA has a very sordid and very weird history of discriminating against lots of people, including blacks, women, native Americans, Jews, Catholics, Latinos, Asians, and recent immigrants of innumerable nationalities (I intend to post a column on the debate about the Washington Redskins football team within the next few days).
As much as I knew about the USA’s sordid history of discrimination, I was shocked two weeks ago when I learned about the “Ugly Laws.” I was asked to ghostwrite an article about a living civil rights activist. Being different, I decided to research the disability rights movement and wound up writing a feature on disability rights activist Richard Pimentel.
Here is how Wikipedia describes the “ugly laws” – “From the late 1860s until the 1970s, several American cities had ugly laws making it illegal for persons with "unsightly or disgusting" disabilities to appear in public. Some of these laws were called unsightly beggar ordinances.”
Fortunately, Pimentel had the fortitude to try to right these wrongs. Below is part of what I wrote about Pimentel, who is on the upper left in the above photo, which I found by googling “Ugly Laws.”
“Richard Pimentel, 67, has been a disability rights activist since 1971 when he and friend Art Honeyman (he’s in front of Pimentel in the photo) organized sit-ins at restaurants to protest the fact that they were both convicted of violating the “Ugly Law” in Portland, Ore.
“Honeyman (1940-2008) had cerebral palsy. Pimentel became disabled in 1969 when he was fighting for his nation in Vietnam. He became almost completely deaf after a bomb exploded in a bunker he was in and he also sustained a traumatic brain injury and tinnitus, a constant ringing in his ears.
“A waitress refused to serve Honeyman because she said he was “disgusting.” Under laws that existed in 23 American cities, being “unsightly or disgusting” in public was against the law. The waitress asked both men to leave. When they refused, the police arrested them.
“After the incident at the pancake house, Pimentel and Honeyman “recruited disgusting people” to protest Portland’s Ugly Law, Pimentel told his audience in Bridgeport, W.Va. Dozens of people with cerebral palsy and spina bifida as well as dozens of disabled veterans and people with developmental disabilities began showing up en masse at Portland restaurants. There were 34 sit-ins, he estimated.
“The law got changed. Then, Pimentel found out that 22 other cities had ugly laws so he began organizing protests in those cities too. The last Ugly Law was repealed in Chicago in 1974.
“When Pimentel learned about the 22 ugly laws as well as other laws that discriminated against disabled people, he became interested in fighting for a national law — the law that became the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
“We knew there was only one way to (repeal these laws) and that was to have a federal law making all those laws unconstitutional,” he said.”
Pimentel played a crucial role in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Today, he helps Fortune 500 companies and other employers interview and work with disabled people so a larger percentage of them are hired and promoted.
Pimentel is still working to help disabled people because the discrimination against them, while not as malicious as the 1970s discrimination, still exists. I am reasonably sure that the discrimination against people like the late Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., also still persists, although it might not be as malicious and sordid as the discrimination against his grandparents.
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