Though this is an old story in internet time, it’s still worth a comment.
WBAY-ABC-2 Green Bay:
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) - A Kenosha County judge has ordered a teenager convicted in a racial attack to write essays about civil rights leaders.
Seventeen-year-old Archie Phillips was also sentenced to 60 days in jail for battery and misconduct.
Phillips, who’s black, was accused of using a racial slur before punching a white classmate at Bradford High School in Kenosha. The victim saw Phillips jumping on some other students and tried to intervene.
Judge [*****] asked Phillips is he was familiar with Medgar Evers or Frederick Douglas. [*****] says he was stunned to learn Phillips was not.
So he ordered Phillips to write three 150-word essays — one each about the assassinated Medgar Evers, his brother and Civil Rights activist Charles Evers and Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave-turned-abolitionist.
The judge says he chose the essay subjects because the men tried to improve race relations, whereas Phillips only tried to tear them down.
Three comments:
(1) Somehow, I doubt that any American public school (or most private schools) does not engage in exhaustive lessons about the Civil Rights Movement and the Abolitionist Movement. If Mr. Phillips did not know about the two Mr. Everses and Mr. Douglas, it is because he wasn’t paying attention.
(2) I disagree with this judge’s statement about how the two Mr. Everses and Mr. Douglas “tried to improve race relations” whereas Mr. Phillips “only tried to tear them down.” Leaving Frederick Douglas aside, the Civil Rights Movement, of which Medgar and Charles Evers were icons of, only let the genie of anti-white racism and hatred among blacks out of the bottle, resulting in crimes like those of Mr. Phillips today.
(3) I wonder which punishment Mr. Phillips will have a harder time with — the jail time, or the three essays. Smart money says the essays.
