From: HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: Re: East St. Louis/Belleville
Date: 11 Jan 1993 10:42:01 -0800
Organization: Stanford University
Distribution: usa
NNTP-Posting-Host: morrow.stanford.edu

In article <93011.073354KRB104@psuvm.psu.edu>,
<KRB104@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>  For those of you like Terry Parks and others who claim that discrimination
>does not occur in today's USA,  I hope you watched "60 minutes" last night.
>For those of you who didn't, I will give a quick recap.  East St. Louis and
>Belleville, MO are adjacent to one another, the former is 98% Black, the latter
>93% white.  East St. Louis is the murder capital of the USA and has an extremly
>high number of its inhabitants on the social welfare rolls.  Belleville is an
>upscale white community.
.
.
I thought East Palo Alto was now numbah one by the new rating.

  There was a "crime wave" in Belleville where there
>was "robbing, mugging and raping".  Of course the Belleville police department
>blamed the Black inhabitants of ESL.
.
.
Right.  A crime wave by not 10, not 20, but one (1) brother man.

>   I, as a Black male, and obviously white america's biggest fear, was totally
>appalled by the report,  but not shocked.  For those of you who say that the
>playing field is equal, there was the story of Black Texaco executive who
>works in Bell. who has been stopped three times on his way to work for no
>reason (once he was cited for driving without insurance and once for having
>an expired license, two things a police officer can see from his car (scarcasm
>heavy here), and both charges were thrown out because they simply weren't true)
>How would you feel if you were an honest citizen going to work and having to
> fear being stopped by the police simply because of your race?
.
.
I was pissed when I saw that mess on prime time, but hey, this is
not restricted to Belleville. For all the folks in East Palo Alto
going to work, raising their kids right, and being law-abiding
citizens, there are the crack monsters, the drug lords, the other
criminals right in their midst, and preying on them.

>   It was appalling to hear the town's people reactions.  Now for those of you
>who didn't see the story, the big crime wave that I mentioned above, well
>it was the work of ONE black man, quite a reason to stop every Black male
>driving through.  Another bit of information, in the over 150 years of the
>town, there have been exactly ZERO black people who were employees of the city.
>This includes garbage men and other "nonskilled" positions.  Under court order,
>the company did hire the first Black employee, a person in the sanitation
>department.  It was a sick story and I am curious what others thought of it.
.
.
When Mike Wallace said that they had finally hired someone, I
immediately said "janitor" to the TV.  Sanitation worker is close
to the mark.
.
California has its despicable parts, but I sure don't have a great
impression of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Ohio.  After knowing
some of the brothers and sisters from there, you begin to see why
they are so freaky-deak--it's the white folks.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american,soc.culture.african