re: Did Coaches: Faulk, Joseph and Raymond walk with team last week for BLM?

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Black players, recruits, and coaches read this board daily. All they see is how Tiger Nation really doesn't give a shite about what's important to them. It's sad that something matters so much to someone else and you guys come here and say, "Nah, there's no racism."

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And for the life of me I can't figure out why it's so awful to acknowledge the racism in Americas past.

That wasn't any of us, we didn't do that, our only connection to slavery is standing in the same general area where some horrific shite happened 300 years ago. So just acknowledge how we got here, it's no reflection on you.

Start in 1619, when the first slave ship (the White Lion) arrived. Native Americans owned slaves here before European settlers did.

This is a full year before the Plymouth Colony was established in 1620.

For the next 160 years, slavery thrived in the US, until Vermont became the first colony to ban it in 1777.

Other northern states followed but in no way are they the good guys here. Yeah the Confederate govt was awful to Black people but the official US govt was only marginally better.

In 1787 the Constitutional Convention decided black people only counted as three-fifths of a "real" person.

After that we decided to expand, and suddenly didn't give a shite if states had slaves anymore. Missouri was admitted as a slave state in 1820. The Kansas-Nebraska Act went even further in 1854, allowing all the new western states to hold slaves.

Black people had been here for 235 years at that point, and they were still being kept as slaves.

White people used that time to build a nation for themselves, an infrastructure with some of the worlds finest colleges and universities, and the greatest government history had ever seen, all while black people were still living in the dirt with nothing.

So yeah, we gave ourselves a pretty decent head start.

In 1865 the Emancipation Proclamation was ratified.

Big step forward.

Lincoln died a few months later and was replaced by Andrew Johnson.

Big step back.

Johnson was more than happy to see Black Code laws wash over the south, slavery was still alive in all but name.

In 1866 Congress passed a Civil Rights bill to give Black Americans the rights of full citizenship.

Johnson vetoed it.

In 1870, with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal govt finally gave black men the right to vote.

It essentially would not matter, Jim Crow laws evolved from the Black Code laws, they kept segregation legal on the local level, Black people were still denied the right to vote and other basic freedoms for another hundred years.

It wasn't until 1954 that Brown v. Board of Education finally ended segregation of schools.

It took another decade for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban segregation in public spaces.

One more year for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Another three years for the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to end legal discrimination in renting and selling homes.

That was only 50 years ago.

Black people have been here for 400 years, and it took 350 for us to reverse course and officially declare that they're human beings, with the same right to a free and happy life as white people.

And even that is only according to the letter of the law. If you think the spirit of the law magically changed overnight than you're willfully ignorant, theres no other option and no other way to say it.

I don't believe in reparations, I'm not some self-loathing liberal, I have no white guilt, but things have never been fair to black people here. We need to at least acknowledge and talk about that.