February 1947: Influential Black Americans Sanford Bishop, Darlene Clark Hine, Avel Gordly, Willie Earle, Jeff Fort, George E. Curry & Ronald Crutcher

Also, Dan Quayle and Roy Moore as white male of the right wing misogynist and racist archetypes & Mendez v. Westminster is decided

February 4, 1947 (Aquarius): Lawyer and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Georgia's 2nd congressional district since 1993 [the year I graduated high school], Sanford Bishop, born.

He became the dean of Georgia's congressional delegation after the death of John Lewis.

February 4, 1947 (Aquarius): Misogynist and former vice president under George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, born.

On May 19, 1992 [when I was 16 years old and being raised by a single mother due to a deadbeat father], Quayle gave a speech titled Reflections on Urban America to the Commonwealth Club of California on the subject of the Los Angeles riots.

In the speech, he blamed the violence on a decay of moral values and family structure in American society.

In an aside, he cited the single mother title character in the television program Murphy Brown as an example of how popular culture contributes to this “poverty of values,” saying, “It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’”

The “Murphy Brown speech” became one of the most memorable of the 1992 campaign.

Long after the outcry had ended, the comment continued to have an effect on U.S. politics. 

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history and the author of several books and essays about the history of marriage, said that this brief remark by Quayle about Murphy Brown “kicked off more than a decade of outcries against the ‘collapse of the family.’”

In 2002, Candice Bergen, the actress who played Brown, said “I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless, but his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.”

Others interpreted it differently; singer Tanya Tucker was widely quoted as saying “Who the hell is Dan Quayle to come after single mothers?”

February 7, 1947 (Aquarius): Author and professor in the field of African-American history, Darlene Clark Hine, born.

Hine received her BA degree in 1968 from Roosevelt University, her MA from Kent State University in 1970 and her PhD in 1975 [the year I was born] from the same institution.

Hine has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Massachusetts Amherst [my alma mater], in 1998 [when I was enrolled as a graduate student there].

February 11, 1947 (Aquarius): Pedophile, rapist and chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2013 to 2017, Roy Moore, born.

Each time, he was removed from office for judicial misconduct by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.

He was the Republican Party nominee in the 2017 U.S. Senate special election in Alabama to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, but was accused by several women of sexually assaulting them while they were underage and lost to Democratic candidate Doug Jones.

Moore ran for the same Senate seat again in 2020 and lost the Republican primary.

Moore was a strong opponent of a proposed amendment to the Alabama Constitution in 2004 [the year my eldest son was born].

Known as Amendment 2, the proposed legislation would have removed wording from the state constitution that referred to poll taxes and required separate schools for “white and colored children,” a practice already outlawed due to civil rights-era legislation during the Civil Rights Movement.

Moore and other opponents of the measure argued that the amendment's wording would have allowed federal judges to force the state to fund public school improvements with increased taxes.

Voters in Alabama narrowly defeated the proposed amendment, with a margin of 1,850 votes out of 1.38 million cast.

Moore's opposition has been cited as a reason for the failure of the referendum.  

In 2011, Moore said on Aroostook Watchmen, a right-wing conspiracy radio show that getting rid of all the constitutional amendments after the Tenth Amendment would “eliminate many problems.”

Amendments adopted after the Tenth Amendment include the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery); the Fifteenth Amendment (which barred the government from denying persons the right to vote based on the “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”); and the Nineteenth Amendment (which guaranteed women's suffrage).  

In the same appearance, when asked about the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (which provides for equal protection of the laws), Moore said that he has “very serious problems with its approval by the states.”

During his 2017 campaign, when asked about these statements, a spokesman for Moore said that he did not favor repeal of these amendments but was merely expressing concern over “the historical trend since the ratification of the Bill of Rights" of “federal empowerment over state empowerment.”

In a November 2017 speech at a revival in Jackson, Roy Moore stated that “they started [to] create new rights in 1965, and today we've got a problem” in an apparent reference to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

White male of the right-wing supremacy is the greatest domestic terrorist threat tracked by DHS, DOJ and the FBI.

Please vote for the woman prosecutor on November 5.

February 13, 1947 (Aquarius): Activist, community organizer, and former politician in the state of Oregon, Avel Gordly, born.

In 1996 [when I was an undergraduate student], she became the first Black American woman to be elected to the Oregon State Senate.

She served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.

Previously, she served for five years in the Oregon House of Representatives.

February 14, 1947: Mendez v. Westminster is decided.

It was a federal court case that challenged Mexican remedial schools in four districts in Orange County, California.

In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision, held that the forced segregation of Mexican American students into separate “Mexican schools” was unconstitutional because as US District Court Judge Paul J. McCormick stated:

The evidence clearly shows that Spanish-speaking children are retarded in learning English by lack of exposure to its use because of segregation, and that commingling of the entire student body instills and develops a common cultural attitude among the school children which is imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals.

February 16, 1947: Willie Earle, a 24-year-old Black man, was being held in the Pickens County Jail in South Carolina, on charges of assaulting a white taxicab driver.

A mob of white men, mostly taxicab drivers, seized Earle from the jail, took him to a deserted country road near Greenville, brutally beat him with guns and knives, and then shot him to death.

When arrested, twenty-six of the thirty-one defendants gave full statements admitting participation in Earle’s death.

A trial commenced, and at its start, Judge J. Robert Martin warned that he would “not allow racial issues to be injected in this case.”

During the ten-day trial, the defendants chewed gum and chuckled each time the victim was mentioned.

The defense did not present any witnesses or evidence to rebut the confessions, and instead blamed “northern interference” for bringing the case to trial at all.

At one point, the defense attorney likened Earle to a “mad dog” that deserved killing, and the mostly white spectators laughed in support. ‪

Some Greenville leaders cited the trial as progress in Southern race relations: “This was the first time that South Carolina has brought mass murder charges against alleged lynchers.

This jury acquitted them.

If there should be another case, perhaps we may get a mistrial with a hung jury.

Eventually, the south may return convictions.”

February 20, 1947 (Pisces): Mobster and former gang kingpin from Chicago, Illinois, Jeff Fort, born.

Fort co-founded the Black P. Stones gang and is the founder of its El Rukn faction.

Fort is currently serving a 168-year prison sentence after being convicted of conspiracy and weapons charges in 1987 for plotting to commit attacks inside the U.S. in exchange for weapons and $2.5 million from Libya, ordering a murder in 1981 and a conviction for drug trafficking in 1983.

February 23, 1947 (Pisces): Journalist, George E. Curry, born.

Curry was considered the “dean of Black press columnists” and his weekly commentaries enjoyed wide syndication.

He died of heart failure on August 20, 2016.

February 27, 1947 (Pisces): Musician and academic administrator who served as a professor of music and 10th president of the University of Richmond from 2015 to 2021, Ronald Crutcher, born