The Woke Generation - Fighting Back

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So eager to rush to label Oberlin college as woke.

I would be interested to hear why some students, faculty members, and employees of Oberlin College protested against the bakery, alleging racism?

People don't do this unless there was a reason. I'm also curious why the 4 republican high court judges rejected an appeal from Oberlin College,. Something smells of a rat here.

Oberlin College haven't paid a cent. They obviously have their reasons and I wouldn't get sucked into the MAGA black hole so quickly to explain away this incident.

The business was hurt financially. This trial was a few years back but if I remember correctly it
was brought out that the owners did not disproportionally detain black people and local black residents testified for the owners.

The business is 137 years old. I assume between 1885 - 1965 (80 years) the shop didn't allow black people to enter their premises. The old man pictured in the article probably had "Whites Only" signs on his shop front. It would be interesting if this shop had a history of watching black patrons and developed a reputation, Otherwise why would staff from Oberlin College join the protests in front of their shop?

The business is 137 years old. I assume between 1885 - 1965 (80 years) the shop didn't allow black people to enter their premises. The old man pictured in the article probably had "Whites Only" signs on his shop front. It would be interesting if this shop had a history of watching black patrons and developed a reputation, Otherwise why would staff from Oberlin College join the protests in front of their shop?

Local police records showed no previous accusations of racial profiling by Gibson's Bakery.Of the forty adults arrested for shoplifting from the bakery in a five-year period, only six were black. As a part of the three students' guilty plea in August 2017, each read a statement saying, "I believe the employees of Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated. They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale." Reporters obtained an email written by Emily Crawford, an employee for the school's communications department, telling her bosses that she found the protests "very disturbing," saying, "I have talked to 15 townie friends who are [persons of color] and they're disgusted and embarrassed by the protest. In their view, the kid was breaking the law, period... To them this is not a race issue at all."During the trial, Eddie Holoway, a black man who worked his way through technical college while working at Gibson’s Bakery, testified that the racist allegations against his former employer were untrue. "In my life, I have been a marginalized person, so I know what it feels like to be called something that you know you’re not. I could feel his pain. I knew where he was coming from." Clarence 'Trey' James, a black man employed at Gibson's since 2013, testified that he had observed no racist treatment of customers or employees. "Never, not even a hint. Zero reason to believe, zero evidence of that."Trey also told the student-run Oberlin Review, "When you steal from the store, it doesn't matter what color you are. You can be purple, blue, green; if you steal, you get caught, you get arrested."

Oberlin was not founded as an abolitionist town. Its status changed with the enrollment in 1835 of the Lane Rebels, a loose group of several dozen students coordinated by abolitionist Theodore Weld. They had withdrawn en masse from the new Lane Theological Seminary of Cincinnati because of its treatment of the Black community and opposition to abolition of slavery. Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, was not a city where free blacks were safe, nor did Cincinnati welcome fugitives.

By chance, this group encountered Shipherd, who was travelling around Ohio looking for students for his new Collegiate Institute. The group agreed to come to Oberlin, but on condition that Asa Mahan, who had resigned as a Lane trustee, come as president, and that Oberlin treat Black and white students equally, something no college in the United States did at the time. The trustees, although reluctantly, agreed to these conditions. The first Black enrolees, James Bradley and the brothers Gideon Quarles and Charles Henry Langston, did not enroll in Oberlin but in an affiliated school, the Sheffield Manual Labor Institute. (Their younger brother John Mercer Langston, who in 1888 became the first black elected to the United States Congress from Virginia, also studied at Oberlin.)

By the middle of the 19th century, Oberlin had become a major focus of the abolitionist movement in the United States. Blacks were relatively safe there. Thousands of fugitives crossing the Ohio River from Kentucky came through Oberlin—some to stay in the area, but most as a way-station to recover on their way to Lake Erie, where they found transportation across the lake to the safety of Canada West (Ontario).

The town of Oberlin, then, was an active "station" on the Underground Railroad.Fugitive slaves were assisted by a new Ohio law that allowed them to apply for a writ of habeas corpus, which protected them from extradition back to the Southern states from which they had escaped. In 1858, a newly elected Democratic state legislature repealed this law, making fugitives around Oberlin vulnerable to enforcement of the Federal Fugitive Slave Law, which allowed Southern slave-catchers to target and extradite them back to the South.

This situation came to a head with the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a pivotal event described in Nat Brandt's book The Town That Started the Civil War. On September 13, 1858, a fugitive named John Price was captured by federal officials and held in neighboring Wellington, Ohio. A large group of Oberlin residents, consisting of both white and black townspeople, students, and faculty, set out for Wellington to release Price from captivity.

The men took Price back from the arresting US Marshal, and eventually smuggled him to Canada, but the authorities were not content to let the matter rest. United States President James Buchanan personally requested prosecution of the group (now referred to by sympathetic parties as "the Rescuers"), and 37 of them were indicted.Twelve of those were free blacks, including Charles H. Langston. State authorities arrested the US Marshal who had captured Price. In negotiation, the state agreed to free the arresters, and the federal officials agreed to free all but two of those indicted. Simeon M. Bushnell, a white man, and Charles H. Langston were both tried and convicted by an all-Democrat jury. Langston's eloquent speech against slavery and injustice persuaded the judge to give them light sentences, with Langston receiving 20 days in jail and a fine of $100.They appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, but on May 30, 1859, their petition was denied.

Three Oberlin Blacks—Lewis Sheridan Leary, Shields Green, and John Anthony Copeland, Jr.—participated in John Brown's famous 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Leary died during the raid, and Green and Copeland were hanged after arrest and conviction. The bodies of Green and Copeland wer

On Thursday, Oberlin College and Conservatory said it would pay a $36.59 million judgment to Gibson Bakery after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on August 30 not to take up the college's appeal of a lower court ruling that upheld the judgment.

"The power of truth has enabled the Gibson family to survive Oberlin's onslaught," attorney Brandon W. McHugh, representing the bakery owners, said in a statement. "Truth Still Matters, David can still overcome Goliath."

Oberlin, in a statement, said it would not pursue the matter further and called the decision disappointing.

"This matter has been painful for everyone," the statement said. "We hope that the end of the litigation will begin the healing of our entire community."

The entire premise of this thread is crazy to me.

I'm just picturing old man grandpa simpson shouting at kids because they want society to treat people better than it ever has in the past and grandpa just can't grasp having to treat everyone with dignity and respect - even people that don't look, act, or worship like he does.

Followed up with a closing statement of "GET OFF MY LAWN!" of course.

I think you might be missing the point as to why there's a pushback to wokism. It's like linguistic authoritarianism. That kind of social engineering just doesn't bode well with most folks. And it tends to be counter-productive.

Yes, it's so terrible when polite society updates it's vocabulary and the world makes progress. It's just awful how people can't run around referring to black people as the N word these days.[/sarcasm]

You so completely missed the point. You can't force these changes on people, there had to be a,natural evolution through dialog and education. That works a whole lot better than canceling people for using bad words.

Disagree. Yes, people can force good changes. It's how progress happens instead of just letting nasty people steamroll nicer people into giving up their fight for the betterment of society. No civil or human rights were won by people just politely waiting for them to spontaneously happen when oppressors felt like it.

There's a huge difference between the civil rights movement and forcibly trying to change people's manner of speaking.

Disagree, no there isn't. Of course there's more to civil and human rights than just words - like actions, for instance - but a massive part of it had to do with forcibly changing peoples' manner of speaking.. and thinking.. and doing - but speech was, and remains, a huge part of it so it's not that different.

Are you advocating for people to be rude and mean spirited to others in their speech with impunity and no expectation of them to improve their ways?