Ouch!

A footnote from Tam, on her post about the March on Washington last week.

What's the difference between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter? Barry's never eaten in a segregated restaurant.

That's true of course, and even at my advanced age I have to go back to the dim reaches of my memory to remember our segregated past.  President Obama doesn't have a clue, nor do almost anyone his age or younger about what real racism looked like.  It was horrible, it was degrading to both races, and it was mainly promoted by died-in-the-wool Democrats.

Names like George Wallace of Alabama, Orval Faubus of Arkansas and Ross Barnett of Mississippi were men that actively fought desegregation, and each of them, along with a multitude of lesser elected officials were Democrats.  Indeed, I'd be remiss if I didn't include the segregation history of my own home state of Louisiana.  I recall that when I went to register to vote on my 18th birthday in 1971, I had to pass a literacy test before I could vote, and when I was allowed to fill out the voter registration form, the pre-printed block on the form for Democrat registration was already checked.  I asked the registrar what would happen if I tried to register as a Republican.  He laughed and said that as long as he was Registrar, no one had ever registered as a Republican.  So, for the first decade of my voting, I was a registered Democrat.

If you know the history of segregation, it's Democrats all the way to the bone.  Of course, in this day and age, the folks who talk about such things might try to make you believe that Thomas Jefferson was a Republican, and that Abe Lincoln was a Democrat.