A November article on the history of the Elks Club in Everett noted the event that stands as its low point: In 1977, Carl Gipson, a respected City Council member, was the only one of 67 applicants for membership to be rejected.
Even though blacks were allowed in the organization, and Gipson was sponsored by the club’s leader, he was rejected under an old rule that allowed just three members of a lodge to reject a member by anonymously dropping black balls into a ballot box.
“It was devastating, because I was on the City Council and I had worked in the city since 1945 and worked my way through my own business,” said Gipson, who was raised in segregated Arkansas before joining the Navy. “It made you feel like you were in the Deep South again.”
Indeed, it’s hard to believe that such a racist action took place here as recently as 1977. It’s even harder to accept that racist incidents continue today, but they do:
It was reported Thursday that Lockheed Martin Corp., the world’s largest military contractor, will pay a record $2.5 million to a former avionics electrician who was called the N-word, threatened with death and laid off after he reported racism at the company. Charles Daniels, 45, said he was targeted on nearly a daily basis by co-workers while working in South Carolina, Florida, Washington and Hawaii from 1999 to 2001.
“I have to believe it was strictly due to the color of my skin,” Daniels said. “I was born in an era where I was told things are going to get better. We still have a long way to go.”
Meanwhile, a study released this week shows that emergency room doctors are prescribing strong narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities are less likely to get them than whites. Linda Simoni-Wastila of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Pharmacy said the race gap finding may reveal some doctors’ suspicions that minority patients could be drug abusers lying about pain to get narcotics.
Dr. Thomas L. Fisher, a black emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center who was not involved in the study, said he is not immune to letting subconscious assumptions inappropriately influence his work as a doctor.
“If anybody argues they have no social biases that sway clinical practice, they have not been thoughtful about the issue or they’re not being honest with themselves,” he said.
As Mr. Daniels said, we still have a long way to go.
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