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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, SEP 24–30, 2025  
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_ Affirmative Action Had a Long Run, But Not Nearly Long Enough
(1965), Working for Amazon Is Very, Very, Dangerous (2000), Witch-Hunt
Targets Hazel Scott (1950), Bad Medicine at Johns Hopkins (2015) _

Martin Luther King, Jr., President Johnson, Whitney Young, Jr., James
Farmer,

 

_AFFIRMATIVE ACTION HAD A LONG RUN, BUT NOT NEARLY LONG ENOUGH   _

SEPTEMBER 24 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of President Lyndon Johnson
signing Executive Order 11246, requiring federal agencies and federal
contractors to practice both non-discrimination and affirmative action
in employment matters.  The 1965 rule, which survived innumerable
legal and political challenges for almost 60 years, was rescinded by
the current occupant of the White House in January of this year.

A thorough defense of the value of affirmative action in this space is
more than I am capable of. I think that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji
Brown Jackson was persuasive and as succinct as possible in her June
2023 dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v University of North
Carolina, where she wrote” “Our country has never been colorblind.
Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in
America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers
whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its
applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented
“intergenerational transmission of inequality” that still plagues
our citizenry.”

For the complete text of that dissent, visit
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_WORKING FOR AMAZON IS VERY, VERY, DANGEROUS_

SEPTEMBER 26 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the Center for Investigative
Reporting’s release of its stunning report, “Catching Amazon on a
Lie,” showing that Amazon warehouse workers suffer from sky-high
injury rates. The company’s primary response is to attempt to
mislead the public, job safety enforcers and lawmakers by denying what
the records show. For access to both the 53-minute audio version of
the CIR report and its transcript, visit
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_WITCH-HUNT TARGETS HAZEL SCOTT_

SEPTEMBER 29 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of a mid-20th-century case of the
same kind of right-wing cancel-culture that is seeing a full-barrel
revival  today.

The cancellation victim then was the wildly talented
vocalist-pianist-composer-actress Hazel Scott, who was described as a
Communist in “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in
Radio and Television,” published in June 1950. 

Scott, who had never been a Communist, denied the accusation, and
demanded the opportunity to testify to that effect to the House
Un-American Activities Committee. When she did so on September 22, she
told the committee she had never been a Communist, but when questioned
by the committee staff, she could not deny having supported Communist
Party member Benjamin Davis's successful run for New York City City
Council in 1945.

When Scott testified to HUAC, she was the star of the very successful
3-month-old “Hazel Scott Show,” on the DuMont television network.
Even having merely voted for a Communist was too much for DuMont
bigwigs, who pulled the plug on the show a week later.

Scott lost her TV show, and her career as recording artist was never
as successful as it had been before her HUAC run-in, but she did
perform frequently in clubs and made several television appearances on
variety shows such as “Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars” and
“Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town.” She moved to France in 1957 and
remained in Europe for 10 years.

Earlier this year, radio station WQXR aired a 2-hour special, “Still
Swinging, Still Classic, A Musical Biography of Hazel Scott” hosted
by Terrance McKnight. You can listen to the program, which mixes Hazel
Scott’s fascinating life-story with dozens of her exciting
performances,
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_BAD MEDICINE AT JOHNS HOPKINS_

SEPTEMBER 30 IS THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the termination, in 2015, of a
profoundly unethical program that was conducted for years by Johns
Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. 

The Johns Hopkins program, which was ostensibly intended to diagnose
and treat cases of Black Lung Disease among coal miners, had for years
been acting as a front for the coal mining industry. It had been
conducting X-Ray and CT  examinations of coal miners who were
experiencing the kind of respiratory distress that afflicts people
with coal workers' pneumoconiosis, which is also known as Black Lung
Disease, which is caused by the deposition of large amounts of coal
dust in the lungs.

Even though Black Lung is always suspected in the case of respiratory
insufficiency among workers with heavy exposure to coal dust, the
disease can only be diagnosed by means of X-Ray and CT imaging.  Only
a physician can make such a diagnosis after viewing the images.

The Johns Hopkins scam was simplicity itself. Make sure that the
diagnosing physicians would rule out Black Lung almost no matter what
they could see on the images. The reputation of Johns Hopkins as one
of the most lauded medical institutions in the U.S. was so impressive
that efforts by other doctors to contradict the Johns Hopkins findings
were almost always ignored. The result was that literally hundreds of
coal miners who were very belatedly (often as a result of an autopsy)
discovered to have Black Lung Disease, were denied government benefits
that they would have been legally entitled to. You can read the Center
for Public Integrity’s Pulitzer Prize winning report of Johns
Hopkins unethical behavior here:
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For more People's History, visit
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* affirmative action
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* workplace safety
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* Hazel Scott
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* Black Lung
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