Doesn’t it seem like mainstream electronic mortgage adoption has been coming for so long now? Lord knows I’ve been talking about it long enough. And some people tell me, “Enough already. I’ve heard it all and I don’t want to hear anymore.” To them I say, “Too bad, I’m not going to stop talking.”
Why you might ask do people still talk about adopting e-mortgages? Because the work is still not done. Until e-mortgages are mainstream you can’t stop talking about it. You can’t let lenders forget and you have a responsibility to continue to educate lenders about the benefits. It’s a process and unfortunately that process is still ongoing.
And let’s face it, most people don’t get anything the first time they’re told. Sometimes it’ll take 1,000,000 times before an idea takes hold among the mainstream. Because it takes time to sink in does that mean you should stop evangelizing? If that were the case there would be no progress. Just read this brief history of race relations here in the U.S. to understand how sounding the same message over and over again is important.
RACE RELATIONS IN AMERICA
1619: The first African slaves arrive in Virginia.
1793: A federal fugitive slave law is enacted, providing for the return of slaves who had escaped and crossed state lines.
1808: Congress bans the importation of slaves from Africa.
1820: The Missouri Compromise bans slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri.
1831: Willian Lloyd Garrison begins publishing the Liberator, a weekly paper that advocates the complete abolition of slavery.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin is published. It becomes one of the most influential works to stir anti-slavery sentiments.
1857: The Dred Scott case holds that Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in states and, furthermore, that slaves are not citizens.
1861: The Confederacy is founded when the deep South secedes, and the Civil War begins.
1863: President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate states "are, and henceforward shall be free.
1865: Congress establishes the Freedman’s Bureau to protect the rights of newly emancipated blacks (March).The Civil War ends (April 9).Lincoln is assassinated (April 14).The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Tennessee by ex-Confederates (May).Slavery in the United States is effectively ended when 250,000 slaves in Texas finally receive the news that the Civil War had ended two months earlier (June 19).The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, prohibiting slavery (Dec. 6).
1865-1866: Black codes are passed by Southern states, drastically restricting the rights of newly freed slaves.
1868: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, defining citizenship. Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens, including those born as slaves.
1870: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, giving blacks the right to vote.
1896: Plessy vs. Ferguson: This landmark Supreme Court decision holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for the repressive Jim Crow laws in the South.
1948: Although African Americans had participated in every major U.S. war, it was not until after World War II that President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order integrating the U.S. armed forces.
1954: Brown vs. Board of education of Topeka Kansas declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional (May 17).
1957: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a civil rights group, is established by Martin Luther King, Charles K. Steele, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth (Jan.-Feb.)Nine black students are blocked from entering the school on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus. (Sept. 24). Federal troops and the National Guard are called to intervene on behalf of the students, who become known as the "Little Rock Nine." Despite a year of violent threats, several of the "Little Rock Nine" manage to graduate from Central High.
1960: Four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter (Feb. 1). Six months later the "Greensboro Four" are served lunch at the same Woolworth's counter. The event triggers many similar nonviolent protests throughout the South.The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded, providing young blacks with a place in the civil rights movement (April).
1961: Over the spring and summer, student volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities, which includes bus and railway stations. Several of the groups of "freedom riders," as they are called, are attacked by angry mobs along the way. The program, sponsored by The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), involves more than 1,000 volunteers, black and white.
1962: James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi (Oct. 1). President Kennedy sends 5,000 federal troops after rioting breaks out.
1963: Martin Luther King is arrested and jailed during anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Ala. He writes "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which advocated nonviolent civil disobedience.The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is attended by about 250,000 people, the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital. Martin Luther King delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The march builds momentum for civil rights legislation (Aug. 28).Despite Governor George Wallace physically blocking their way, Vivian Malone and James Hood register for classes at the University of Alabama.Four young black girls attending Sunday school are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings. Riots erupt in Birmingham, leading to the deaths of two more black youths (Sept. 15).
1964: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin (July 2).The bodies of three civil-rights workers are found. Murdered by the KKK, James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been working to register black voters in Mississippi (Aug.).Martin Luther King receives the Nobel Peace Prize. (Oct.)
1965: Malcolm X, black nationalist and founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is assassinated (Feb. 21).State troopers violently attack peaceful demonstrators led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as they try to cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Fifty marchers are hospitalized on "Bloody Sunday," after police use tear gas, whips, and clubs against them. The march is considered the catalyst for pushing through the voting rights act five months later (March 7).Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements that were used to restrict black voting are made illegal (Aug. 10).In six days of rioting in Watts, a black section of Los Angeles, 35 people are killed and 883 injured (Aug. 11-16).
1967: President Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. He becomes the first black Supreme Court Justice.The Supreme Court rules in Loving v. Virginia that prohibiting interracial marriage is unconstitutional. Sixteen states still have anti-miscegenation laws and are forced to revise them.
1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. (April 4).President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing (April 11).
1978: The Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action, but imposed limitations on it to ensure that providing greater opportunities for minorities did not come at the expense of the rights of the majority (June 28).
1992: The first race riots in decades erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four white police officers for the videotaped beating of African-American Rodney King (April 29).
2003: In Grutter v. Bollinger, the most important affirmative action decision since the 1978 Bakke case, the Supreme Court (54) upholds the University of Michigan Law School's policy, ruling that race can be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students because it furthers "a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." (June 23)
2006: In Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson, affirmative action suffers a setback when a bitterly divided court rules, 5 to 4, that programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., which tried to maintain diversity in schools by considering race when assigning students to schools, are unconstitutional.
2008: Sen. Barack Obama, Democrat from Chicago, becomes the first African American to be nominated as a major party nominee for president.On November 4, Barack Obama, becomes the first African American to be elected president of the United States, defeating Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain.
2009: Barack Obama Democrat from Chicago, becomes the first African-American president and the country's 44th president.
See what I mean? Sometimes you just have to keep driving the same message home over and over again. Hopefully it won’t take 300 years to get mainstream e-mortgage adoption, but if that’s what it takes, so be it. It’s just the right thing to do, plain and simple.
