My point, missed
Irecently wrote a long “piece from my heart” in the Rappahannock News about my hope for our future in America. It was a clear call for an end to the lingering racial discrimination in our culture and a straight- forward acknowledgement of building that future by continuing the work begun in the 1960’s. I have spent much of my life involved in that “dream.”
I went to jail back then. I was shot at, sucker- punched, and threatened by the KKK. After I moved to Atlanta, the “Capital of the Civil Rights Movement,” in 1969, I made friends with folks like John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Coretta Scott King, all of whom supported me when I ran for Congress down there.
But if you read Edward Hughes' response to that column of mine, you would think that I was the local version of Lester Maddox. I knew Lester, too. He called me a “commonist,” which is how he pronounced “communist.” I’m not kidding.
Mr. Hughes (who moved here recently from Boston, Massachusetts) was offended by my take on the hard-won progress we have made in the last 60 years. Now, I don’t know Edward, nor do I put much credence in Yankee transplants who assume that “crackers” like me are surely limited in assessing the major domestic issue of my lifetime. My larger point in that lengthy column was that the recent leftward drift of academia and the “liberal” party is counter- productive to those hard-won gains. “Cultural Marxism” doesn’t make anything better. Indeed, it surely exacerbates the divisions. That was the simple point I was trying to make. And surely the majority of the column’s readers understood that.
One time a Black lady friend from South Georgia said to me, “There ain’t nothing more integrated than pickin’ cotton.” And I said, “Yep, ‘cept for diggin’ taters and peanuts…” Mr. Hughes probably doesn’t know that I have African blood, or that I grew up in a railroad shack without electricity or indoor plumbing, and that all of our neighbors back then were AfricanAmericans. And I can show him the scars and the broken teeth of my “Close Encounters of the KKK Kind.”
Mr. Hughes assumes that I don’t know basic American History, or the sins of Roger Taney, or much of anything that people from Boston know. ( And I don’t mean the “Boston” on Highway 522…)
In fact, he seems to exemplify the humorous stereotype of the condescending know- it- all “Yankee,” the sort who gives our friends from the North a bad name in some quarters.