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Susanna J. Sturgis's avatar

If you want a glimpse of that "educated people" are up to, take a look at what's going on at colleges and universities around Israel-Palestine. It's not monolithic, and it has a lot to do with money and long-held, unexamined assumptions. In MA, the Democratic Party is a big, unwieldy coalition, and many of those with power in the legislature are the direct descendants (often literally as well as politically) of the white urban ethnics who fought school busing in the 1960s and '70s. There's a reason the late Ed Brooke, the first African American to get elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, was a Republican. He was in the Senate 1967–1979. Before that he was the MA attorney general.

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kdsherpa's avatar

"There's a reason the late Ed Brooke, the first African American to get elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, was a Republican." That's a very interesting observation, to me.

I remember celebrating with my family that a Negro had been elected to the Senate. We lived in NC, and in1967 Civil Rights was obviously a massive issue. Desegregation was just 2 years old. That such a thing could (finally) happen in the U.S. was enormously important. I was 14 years old and remember thinking it was weird that he was a Republican. But I figured, whatever.

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Susanna J. Sturgis's avatar

Not all that weird when you consider the political party alignment in New England (and, I gather, certain other areas). The big urban machines were heavily Democratic, so "clean government" types were often Republicans. The white South was just starting to flip to the GOP (Nixon's "southern strategy"). MA had a reasonable GOP governor as recently as 2022: Charlie Baker.

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kdsherpa's avatar

Not weird in retrospect. But VERY weird (and wonderful) to a Southern family whose Senator was the grotesque Jesse Helms.

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Susanna J. Sturgis's avatar

He was a piece of work!

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kdsherpa's avatar

You're WAY too kind.

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Susanna J. Sturgis's avatar

Yabbut think of the competition. I have clear memories of, among others, Wallace, Thurmond, Eastland, Stennis, Talmadge (the younger one: Herman), Faubus, Barnett, Maddox . . . Bilbo was a little before my time, but I sure as hell knew about him. Just found this impressive rogues' gallery. I recognized well over half of them. Now I'm curious about the others. https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/segregationists

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kdsherpa's avatar

Jesse was just as bad as the ones you list! Thurmond is an interesting case. Are you aware of the Black maid who bore him a daughter?

She was 16 and he was 22, living in his parents' home. Apparently he and Essie Mae, his daughter, had a warm relationship after they finally met when she was 16 years old. He called her my "very lovely daughter". She said that no one ever asked her to keep the identity of her father a secret, but she felt that was best for his sake, and only came forward after he died at age 100 in 2003.

He supported her and paid for her to go to college. She went on to get a Masters degree, and had a successful career. He stopped supporting her after she finished college, but resumed supporting her after she was widowed at age 45. Thurmond's only marriage was to a very kind woman who was around 40 years his junior. She was a former Miss SC. His daughter, Nancy Moore, named for her mother, died when she was hit by a car just after her 22nd birthday. She was going to attend law school with a goal of working for championing children's causes. After Nancy Moore's death -- yes, we do love to use double names in the South, don't we -- her mother "was never the same" (depression and alcohol abuse, likely self-medicating). After it became public about his Black daughter, his three surviving children welcomed her and her children into the family with open arms. I think that Thurmond was publicly a racist in order to get elected, but possibly not so much privately. (Yes, I do know quite a bit about this fascinating family.)

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TCinLA's avatar

Or perhaps he was jut another southern hypocrite. There's no hypocrisy like southern hypocrisy.

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kdsherpa's avatar

The fact that he apparently loved her, encouraged her to pursue her education, and stayed in close touch with her means something to me.

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TCinLA's avatar

That's more honor and decency than I would have expected from him, given his public face. So definitely there is that. But that everything can be compartmented like that - my personal life nothing like my public life, my public life making everything worse for people like I know in my private life... that's what I mean.

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JDinTX's avatar

Back then, all repubs weren’t guanofied (bat Schitt for brains).

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