July 4th Column: Bill Clinton Could Have Said Less

[Cap'n Billy]

Read it here.

[6079smithW]

That's a pretty funny column. I'd take issue with this part, though:

In 1944 he wrote a letter to Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, in which Byrd said: “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. … Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

This was pretty nasty stuff even for 1944.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm, it was extremely common for people to talk about the mongrelization of the white race and such, on through until the 1970s. They've written most of it out of the history books now, to the point that many southerners think that the confederate flag is just a quaint symbol of Civil War heritage, and not the banner of 100 years of white supremacist state government. Less than 20 years earlier, in 1927, the Mississippi River flooded huge swaths of Arkansas, Mississipp and Louisiana, and the whites reacted by, among other things: forcing blacks to work on levees at gunpoint without compensation; keeping blacks imprisoned in what were called "concentration camps"; and actually tagging the blacks, with giant cloth tags required to obtain food, so they'd know which sharecropping, debt peonage county that each one belonged in. Only whites were evacuated, and they kept all the best Red Cross rations for themselves, while they actually made the blacks pay for theirs. If a black person complained, they got lynched.

The insane viciousness of the Jim Crow years has been neatly buried, for now. Point is, Byrd's comments weren't exceptional, even for 1944. He was a representative of the people, sadly enough.