re: #173 Scottish Dragon

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One of the weirdest fucking experiences of my life was finding out that one of the men in the little Primitive Baptist Church in my grandparents’ small Georgia town (pop. 300) at my grandfather’s funeral was Herman Eugene Talmadge. This was early 1980s. I know that most of my southern family (mom’s from said-GA town but married my Illinois dad and moved north where I was born) employed black workers but had strict rules about interactions. For both of my grandparents’ funerals, a large portion of the black community came out, but they stood outside the church dressed in funerary black suits. Anyway, that legacy is kind of why my mom felt she had to leave the south; my grandfather’s connection to Talmadge is unclear, but I have no doubt he held the same beliefs about segregation.