re: #61 goddamnedfrank

Regarding Thurmond:

Her father was not an ambient racist, carried along by the provincial thinking of his times; he was dynamically racist, a man who helped shape and amplify those currents. That he had a black daughter doesn’t simply complicate his legacy, it further damns it. In ways that run contrary to any parental creed, he worked to make the world a worse place for his child and her children. He was unable to extrapolate the humanity he saw in the teen-age Essie Washington to a whole population who looked like her and shared her experiences.

Sadly, that sort of thing had a long history in the South and was still uncommon but not very rare when Thurmond was a young man,

Oh, wait. He was a Senator. He could have done something.