Please read the article at this link.
http://heightsobserver.org/read/2011/07/13/emotions-run-high-at-community-forum-on-youth-issues
My Comments: First, Lewis Pollis is a very impressive young reporter. Now, onto the moment at the meeting that really got my hackles up:
In what was perhaps the tensest moment of the evening, Kathy Wray Coleman was booed by the audience for her assertion that the new curfew laws are “targeting the black community.” She said the curfew violates the 14th Amendment and suggested that, next, “we will have to ride in the back of the bus.”
Bill Swain from Revolution Books agreed with Coleman, calling the curfew “totally racist” and “an actual Jim Crow.”
Swain is an avowed Communist. So he wants mobs, public disorder and violence because it will further damage America's "evil" capitalist system. His agenda is transparent and I will leave him alone for now.
But matters are not helped when we have people like Kathy Wray Coleman turing the flash-mob problem into a race issue. For her to say that the curfew is just a foot in the door to putting African-Americans in the “back of the bus” is a slap at the memory of Rosa Parks and others who faced real discrimination. Uncivil behavior by unruly mobs of youths is not a racial issue – it is an issue of conduct and it is driven by bad and inattentive parenting. If any of you think thug behavior is a “black” problem, pay a visit to Parma and see the white thugs hanging around Pearl and Ridge Roads.
The curfew is not perfect, and it seems to me that Cleveland Heights leaders are trying to find their way through a difficult situation. They will undoubtedly tinker with the curfew until the right balance is found. If a law is well intentioned but not perfect, the right solution is to improve the law – not throw it out. The Constitution has been amended time and again over the centuries for the same reason.
I wish the Heights council the best of luck. Because lack of respect for adult authority is a disease and it will spread to neighboring communities.
Your article here makes me even more convinced that race has played a discriminatory role here, and the curfew law amendment is also unconstitutional with respect to all children because there is no rational basis for a 6 pm curfew. It is is overly intrusive.
ReplyDeleteYou write well though. I urge you and Mr. Pollis to research the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on student rights and children's rights with respect to to peaceful assembly and free speech.
Kathy Wray Coleman www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com