Finding a mate just isn’t what it used to be. Back in the “good ol’ days,” the parents were more parental, the sexism was more sexist, and the hysteria over sex was more hysterical. The courting rituals were truly bizarre, and we can thank our lucky stars they no longer exist. Of course, most of these rituals were only practiced by white straight people, and some only by wealthier colonial or Victorian-era Americans. But today we can all mock them relentlessly together. Let’s get to it.

WHEN YOUR DAD PICKS WHO YOU’RE GOING TO BED WITH FOREVER

Gone are the days when your old man could get together with his buddy at the tavern, kick back, down a few cold ones, and decide who you’re going to spoon for the rest of your f*cking life. Yes, if you were unwise enough to be born in colonial times, dorky dads would arrange your marriage for you, hearing not your sobs but rather the jingling of cold hard cash wrought from your dowery or inheritance (depends on your gender). End up with some ugo disgustor? If you didn’t have any Freudian reason to think of your dad during business time, you certainly had this reason.

WHEN THE GIRL SEDUCES YOU WITH A FAN

When you see a well-to-do Victorian gal cooling herself with her fan, she ain’t cooling herself with her fan, son. She’s engaged in a complex system of signals ranking somewhere between the high-step strut of the Blue-Footed Booby and the third base coach of the New York Yankees. Is she fanning herself slowly? Sorry, she’s engaged. Quickly? Single. Fanning with the right hand? Oh my God / look at that face / you look like / my next mistake. Left hand? F*ck off. Fan open, then shut? Kiss her, bro. Fan open wide? She loves you. Fan half open? You’ve just been friend-zoned. Legs shut — I mean fan — fan shut? She hates you. Good luck remembering all that. Don’t mess this up.

WHEN AGE REALLY WAS JUST A NUMBER

The age at which most colonial women married hovered around 19-22 (men were usually in their late twenties). So not too different from modern times. But remember, that’s an average. Some girls did marry when they were teenagers (others were married off as children). The age of consent in the American colonies was usually 10, though sometimes 12. Eventually, states started raising it. California raised it to 14 in 1889, then 16 in 1897. Others followed suit after that, though one technically kept the age at 7 until the 1960s (looking at you, Delawarean sickos).

WHEN YOU HAD TO DO ALL YOUR FLIRTING IN FRONT OF HER MOM

Remember your middle school and early high school dances and the agonizing embarrassment of the ever-present, complex surveillance apparatus made up of moms, dads, older siblings, teachers, and Principal Bacon? Well, back in the olden days, chaperones weren’t something you could just wait out as the years ticked by. When a man came a-calling, he had to sweep the girl off her feet in front of the potential mother-in-law. There was no one-on-one time. You went over to her house and, if f*cking Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightly is any indication, make boring conversation while drinking tea, playing cards, or abusing a piano. Want to come back again? You’ve got to impress the ‘rents.

WHEN YOU COULD GET MARRIED LITERALLY BY JUST SAYING YOU WERE

Yes, one courting ritual was called “handfasting” or “spousing.” If you wanted to be married (by law, mind you), all you had to do was just hold hands and say you were married. You could do this anywhere and at any time, during this age that now sort of sounds like a Libertarian paradise. Apparently (to absolutely no one’s surprise), men would often be all for this, getting married on the spot to a nice yet sexually repressed girl, having sex, and disappearing into the night. Then daddy had to hunt you down — not to kill you for sleeping with his little angel as might happen today, but to force you to actually be her husband.

WHEN YOU PARTOOK IN SLEEPOVERS AT HER MOM AND DAD’S

It was a simpler time, when religious parents knew that kids would mess around and knew there was nothing they could do about it, so they decided to pretend to do something about it while willfully facilitating it. We’re talking bundling, people. When parents said Yes, you kids can have a sleepover as long as you promise not to have sex, let ma sew boyfriend up in bag, and let pa install an impervious one-foot-tall bundling board between your sides of the bed. Not letting Nathaniel sleep over was, apparently, deemed an ineffective way of preventing two lovebirds from engaging in smash game in the room adjacent to mom and dad’s.

WHEN THE “COURTSHIP STICK” WAS HOW YOU SEXTED

Just like today, when lovers send texts to each other while snuggling on the couch together after Christmas dinner so relatives can’t overhear them, colonials found a way to keep things spicy with secretiveness. The courtship stick was a six-foot-long hollow stick that allowed young men and women to whisper some sexy messages to each other in a world of zero privacy. Small homes with parents or parents-in-law, especially those that think touching is a no-no, mean there’s just no way to tell your gal her butt looks great in that dress she wears daily or your man that his plowing is an incredible turn on.

WHEN YOU COULD SKIP THE ENGAGEMENT RING AND GIVE HER A THIMBLE INSTEAD

If you lived among the Puritans, you didn’t have to get your woman an engagement ring. Instead, you could give her a helpful piece of sewing equipment. Puritans weren’t showy people, so a little thimble could be offered to the woman (in their defense, it would later be fashioned into a ring; cheap-ass Puritans), presumably as a sign of all the trousers she will have to repair over the course of her lifetime. That’s how you really blow away the ladies.

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First off, let me say there are many folk who could give a speech better than I. On top of that, there are many better men and women who walked the halls of this fine institution who should be standing here before you instead. Highlander Folk School shines on as a beacon for equality, a garden that continues to grow the best civil rights activists and labor organizers in the country. I am very happy to be back here and honored to speak on the bus boycott that occurred in Montgomery just a few years back. Seems people are under the impression these days that the boycott happened because of me. I would like to assure you this is untrue. I can’t take credit for the crusade that occurred in Alabama. I was just the last straw. There were others who would not give up their seat on a bus and were arrested long before me. On the day it happened to me, I just couldn’t bear the thought of giving up my seat on a city bus to another white man and standing in the back for the rest of the long ride home. I would rather be hauled off in handcuffs than face that humiliation and degradation again. As Mrs. Virginia Durr once wrote to you, Highlander gave me a taste of freedom and equality; I thought of this place while the officers dragged me off the bus and to the station.

Look ahead a single year, and our world is changed for the better. A boycott occurred, and it succeeded. After a single year, no black man or woman has to feel the burn of embarrassment or the injustice of segregation on a city bus again. The boycott didn’t succeed because we were organized, though that was part of it. It didn’t succeed because we were angry, though that was part of it as well. It succeeded because we had perseverance. Organization defines the road, anger gets you on the road, but making the long journey to the end of the road, that is perseverance.

Activists like Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women’s Political Council, demonstrated what perseverance really is, and indeed so did her members. Mrs. Robinson wrote Mayor of Montgomery W. Gayle in 1954, with a polite request for more fair policies on city buses. She did not even ask for desegregation, but instead requested that blacks begin sitting at the back of the bus and whites begin sitting at the front, and when they meet in the middle and all the seats are occupied, that would be it. She asked that the buses make more stops in black neighborhoods and that we wouldn’t have to pay at the front of the bus and make the humiliating trudge to the back entrance.

Her message fell on deaf ears, for that same “honorable” judge she wrote to would two years later speak at the rally of the Central Alabama Citizens Council about how to preserve segregation. His presence supported and offered legitimacy to ten thousand angry white racists encouraging the killing of black men, women, and children. Jo Ann Robinson would not take no for an answer, however. Briefly mentioning the possibility of a boycott in her letter, she later organized it and made it a reality in December of 1955. She and her WPC members worked tirelessly into the early morning of the fifth to distribute tens of thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott all over Montgomery. Mrs. Robinson and fellow activists were arrested quickly after the movement began, but even in the face of harassment, imprisonment, and threats of violence, they did not yield.

If any two men showed us true strength of character and steady perseverance, it was the two reverends, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. They held Montgomery Improvement Association meetings every week until the boycott succeeded. Dr. King was unequivocally our leader. If I was the spark, he was the fire. He, under the same death threats and mistreatment we all faced and experienced, ignited a passion in our hearts that helped us see this thing through. At one MIA meeting, Dr. King said, “With every great movement toward freedom there will inevitably be trials. Somebody will have to have the courage to sacrifice. You don’t get to the Promised Land without going through the Wilderness. You don’t get there without crossing over hills and mountains, but if you keep on keeping on, you can’t help but reach it. We won’t all see it, but it’s coming and it’s because God is for it” (Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaks to the Crowd). We did what Dr. King called us to do. We kept on keeping on. We braved the wilderness. Dr. King, in his wisdom and his own depth of perseverance, inspired us to stay the course.

Then there was everyone else; every man, woman, and child who refused to ride the Montgomery buses. This boycott began as a one-day movement. Instead, it lasted a year, because the black folk of Montgomery united and persevered together. At the first mass meeting of the MIA, Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy had to fight their way into the church through a joyous crowd of seven thousand people. In February 1965, activist Bayard Rustin noted that “42,000 Negroes have not ridden the busses since December 5” and that two men “walked 7 miles and the other 14 miles” to work each day (Bayard Rustin’s Diary). They weren’t the only ones walking those distances, either. Moreover, during this period dozens of taxi drivers and car-pool drivers were arrested. Yet we did not yield. All the while white folks talked about using “guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives” to “abolish the Negro race” and act on white people’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers” (Handbill from Central Alabama Citizens Rally). Yet we did not yield. We persevered together. As one black maid said during the second month of the movement, “When you do something to my people you do it to me too” (Interview About the Boycott). That is true unity of spirit.

 Our spirit went unbroken, and in November 1956 the Supreme Court upheld what we fought for in Browder v. Gayle. Bus segregation was rejected as unconstitutional and the next month buses in Montgomery were integrated. It was a glorious day when I again road a city bus. True equality is still a long way off. We are not out of the wilderness yet. However, the boycott victory has kept us going. As Dr. King said, “Let us continue with the same spirit, the same orderliness, with the same discipline, with the same Christian approach” (Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaks to the Crowd). There will be a day when prejudice and hate are not tolerated in this country. It is only a matter of time. Until that day, we will continue to persevere. We draw closer to the Promised Land.

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In this month of January 1935 Congress will vote on the Social Security Act. While the debates are waged in our national legislature, in barbershops and department stores, and at kitchen tables across the country, it is the intention of this paper to shed light on several key areas of the bill in drastic need of revision. The Social Security Act, if passed as-is, would create an unjust burden on American workers in trying times. By implementing change to the means by which we achieve a noble end, working men and women can look forward to a brighter future rather than a darker.

The Social Security Act will enact much-needed care for our underprivileged countrymen. The elderly, the unemployed, the handicapped, and dependent children will all benefit greatly from welfare. This paper has no bones to pick with President Franklin D. Roosevelt concerning the admirable and necessary measures this bill will take. The act will create insurance, a pool of money that can be tapped into for relief to the poor, dependent, and unemployed.

One component of the bill that must be revised, however, is who will be included (or more importantly, excluded) from the benefits of social security. The act primarily benefits white males. What about the other factory workers? What about the other farmers, and working women? Mr. Roosevelt is leaving them in the dust, to fend for themselves. The NAACP criticizes the Act, pointing out occupations such as cash tenants, sharecroppers, and domestic servants will be excluded from social security, simply because blacks dominate those jobs. Mr. Roosevelt has bowed to the wishes of prejudiced southern congressmen, and as a result most blacks, and especially black women, will never see minimum wages, unemployment relief, or money for retirement. This, in our view, is unacceptable.

A graver issue is how Mr. Roosevelt plans to pay for this pool of relief money. Employers and employees will both pay a one percent tax on the first annual $3,000 earned. This will allow the Federal government to send monthly checks to retirees. Meanwhile, unemployment hovers at 25 percent. Millions of Americans who are bringing in a small income still live in poverty. The shacks in Hooverville did not disappeared when Hoover did. The United States economy has never been more severely crippled. And Mr. Roosevelt wants to take money from workers’ paychecks? From businesses? A business that is not burden with such a tax will have more money for innovation that could stimulate the economy, or can hire a new worker and get someone off the streets. A worker with a bit more discretionary income will spend it during these hard times, saving his or her family from starvation and kick starting the economy at the same time. The Los Angeles Times has declared that the current method of funding will slow recovery. The American people want reduced taxes, and have written Mr. Roosevelt pleading for such a motion. Now is clearly not the time to burden the American family, nor American business, with an extra tax.

Instead, consider the views of Huey Long and Francis Townsend, who thought it would be better not to burden the poorest, but the richest. Does that not sound more reasonable? Redistribution of national income continues to receive huge numbers of supporters. The Townsend Plan alone has five million members, with a petition of 20 million names. People see this plan as their salvation. Long suggests capping an individual’s income at a few million dollars and collecting the rest to use for the welfare system. The top one percent of America owns a hefty percentage of the nation’s wealth. Those millionaires would do right to give more. Mr. Roosevelt says that a worker paying into the system gives him (and in this case, it is almost certainly a him) the moral right to receive money once retired or laid off. This paper would ask, what about the moral right of the rich? The moral right of Mr. Roosevelt? In our view, the wealthiest would be immoral to say five million a year is not enough, immoral not to care for the elderly and the poor when the common man, the forgotten man, cannot. Long, Townsend, the Congress of Industrial Organization, this newspaper…we do not ask that millionaires give up their millions. Just their discretionary millions.

The Social Security Act should be passed, there is no question. However, it must be made more inclusive, refusing to stoop to the levels of older generations by enforcing Jim Crow laws on welfare. The plan must also be funded not on the backs of those suffering, but by those in mansions with new cars, who never have to fear for being out of work, out of money, or out of food. The common man deserves freedom from such fear. Mr. Roosevelt understands this. If Mr. Roosevelt wishes to drive the money changers from the temple, as it were, it is the opinion of this paper that he do so not with a stick, but with a sword.

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