{"id":2727,"date":"2002-12-16T13:55:11","date_gmt":"2002-12-16T13:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=484"},"modified":"2002-12-16T13:55:11","modified_gmt":"2002-12-16T13:55:11","slug":"mo-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2727","title":{"rendered":"MO’ RACE"},"content":{"rendered":"

In today’s Slate, Timothy Noah types: The Legend of Strom’s Remorse – A Washington lie is laid to rest<\/a>, and goes after what he calls the ‘myth’ of Strom’s redemption. <\/p>\n

For many years, there’s been a cherished Washington lie about Strom Thurmond. The lie is that Thurmond, though once a leading segregationist, later renounced that view as morally wrong.
\n…
\nBut there never was any such expression of remorse or plea for forgiveness. Thurmond has never publicly repudiated his segregationist past, and with his 100th birthday and a Senate career behind him, it’s doubtful he ever will. The legend of Strom’s Remorse was invented, by common unspoken consent within the Beltway culture, in order to provide a plausible explanation why Thurmond should continue to hold power and command at least marginal respectability well past the time when history had condemned Thurmond’s most significant political contribution. Now that Thurmond is finally leaving Washington, the lie serves no further purpose and will fade away.
\n…
\nIs Chatterbox saying that the Strom of today (what’s left of him) is identical to the Strom who ran for president in 1948 on the pro-segregationist Dixiecrat platform? He is not. Clearly, Thurmond made shrewd accommodations late in life to changing times. In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide and to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship. In the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (not because he agreed with it but in belated deference to “the common perception that a vote against the bill indicates opposition to the right to vote”). Strom also came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King (about whom he’d once said, “King demeans his race and retards the advancement of his people”) a federal holiday. Thurmond didn’t do much else to promote equality among the races, but these token gestures were enough to demonstrate that he was no longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who had said, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” (Pedantic aside: Standard accounts of the speech render “Nigra” as “Negro,” but when listening to an NPR sound clip, Chatterbox wondered whether the word Thurmond uttered was “nigger.” In transcribing, Chatterbox gave Thurmond, who even in his worst days was not known publicly to throw that ugly epithet around, the benefit of the doubt…)
\n… <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s see.
\nIn the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide.
\nIn the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship.
\nIn the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
\nHe came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King a federal holiday.
\nI donno, they may be ‘token’ to Timothy, but they seem kind of substantial to me. He also enrolled his children in an integrated school, which strikes me as a fairly personal level of at least tolerance.
\nI guess it would be nice to have a kind of ‘Paul of Tarsus’ public epiphany, preferably on Oprah, in which he renouced his evil ways.
\nKind of like my desire to get my Republican friend to agree that some form of racial redress was good public policy.
\nThen again, he’s just married to an African American woman (and had children with her) instead. Which makes the moral high ground kind of hard to find here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In today’s Slate, Timothy Noah types: The Legend of Strom’s Remorse – A Washington lie is laid to rest, and goes after what he calls the ‘myth’ of Strom’s redemption. For many years, there’s been a cherished Washington lie about Strom Thurmond. The lie is that Thurmond, though once a leading segregationist, later renounced that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}