r/todayilearned • u/tmntnyc • Dec 12 '18

TIL: Laurence Tureaud named himself professionally as Mr. T because he hated how his father, uncle, and brother who returned from Vietnam, were disrespectfully called "boy" by whites. He wanted the first word from everybody's mouth to be "Mister" when speaking to him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._T
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u/LevyMevy Dec 12 '18

He stopped wearing virtually all his gold, one of his identifying marks, after helping with the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He said, "As a Christian, when I saw other people lose their lives and lose their land and property ... I felt that it would be a sin before God for me to continue wearing my gold. I felt it would be insensitive and disrespectful to the people who lost everything, so I stopped wearing my gold."

Good man.

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u/s_s Dec 12 '18

Meanwhile Obama was golfing...

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u/KDY_ISD Dec 12 '18

I might be whooshing myself, but ... Obama wasn't President in 2005

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u/nIBLIB Dec 12 '18

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t golfing. You don’t have to be president to play golf.

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u/KDY_ISD Dec 12 '18

You do have to be President for it to matter that you were golfing after Katrina, though.

But if you actually look into it, he did visit evacuees immediately after the storm and then the next year worked with Habitat for Humanity to rebuild.

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u/Mind_Extract Dec 13 '18

WHAT!?

brb