Talk:Paris, Tennessee

Back to my sandbox for now

This was in such bad shape that I've moved everything back to my sandbox for now. Hope to bring it back out for collaboration sometime before long.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:44, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

This page under construction

This is a signed article (by me) and is under construction; I don't yet know what it's final format will be. It is what I would call an experiment. However, one of its goals is to provide a more complete history of the town and county as regards race relations. Per online sources almost everywhere, these are the kinds of lies by omission that have long been carried forwards: 1) there was never school segregation, and there were never any all-black schools, 2) there were never separation of the races (different doors, bathrooms, seating areas, etc), 3) People of color were never required to live in a certain section of town and not allowed to come into the rest of the town except on Mule Day, 4) Men of color were never banned from almost all jobs except picking cotton or tobacco, and 5) There were never lynchings and intimidation and discrimination against blacks. In this important time of social change, it is time to provide a more honest accounting, and that is one of my main goals in this article. I grew up in Paris, TN, and still have friends and relatives there whom I regularly keep in touch with. I am old enough to rcmember when the public schools were first integrated. There are many nice things to know about this small town, but none of those matter in the face of the Big Lie that slavery never happened, the denial that the population percentage of people of color has gone from 25% down to less than 10%, which is undeniably at least in part a product of their still being confederate street and building names, confederate monuments, and widespread silence on the injustices of the past. The silence about these matters has, in my opinion, festered into a poisonous cancer, a boil which needs lancing.

I welcome comments and feedback and collaboration--but not wholesale deletion of material at this time without consulting with me first.Pat Palmer (talk) 18:51, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I do recognize that the approach may not seem objective, but this article is in its early stages and I expect it to change a lot. I take your feedback seriously. Although I could just work on it over in my sandbox, I'd rather have it here and get people's reactions to it so that I can think about those and work on the article to address their concerns. Thanks for reading it. The fact is, they renamed a school this year in Paris, Tennessee--which is HUGE--and that's not in the article yet. The sections now being built are about the distant past, and they need to be reorganized and placed into an appropriate "History" section--and they will. And there will be more positive things there too. But you've got to understand what really happened--Europeans moved in, conquered the indigenous people and banished them, then instituted slavery, rebelled against the U.S. Government, and then oppressed the freed slaves for another century. Plus, they pretend like none of that ever happened. It happened.Pat Palmer (talk) 21:49, 5 February 2021 (UTC)