Since the Great Society drowned in the rice paddies of Vietnam, Americans (and their government) have been content to let the grinding poverty, intractable hopelessness and staggering ignorance of the Mississippi River Delta region sort its own self out.
Well, it has. And that means things ain't changing a whole hell of a lot.
Squalor still abounds, government is still rotten, schools are a joke, black folk lack opportunity (and in many cases fair treatment), and white folk ain't much better off themselves. And -- as these things go in the Deep South -- the past isn't really past at all.
AND YOU GET THINGS like nooses hanging from schoolyard oak trees. White boys pulling guns on black ones. Black teens cold-cocking a white one who they heard had been hurling racial slurs.
Black malefactors getting the book thrown at them, while the white ones get a slap on the wrist . . . along with an official wink and a smirk.
Mayors of small towns in the Louisiana hinterlands thanking Mississippi white supremacists for their moral support.
You get redneck burgs like Jena, La., and the latest incarnation of America's Original Sin. You get the Jena Six. And the righteous protests. And the white right's backlash.
AS I'VE SAID, the little bigots who hung those nooses on the "white tree" at Jena High School threw a great big rock into a pond of iniquity, and the ripples have been spreading ever since, getting all the bigger the farther they travel.
And the nooses hang all across this troubled land.
From WCBS television in New York:
Well, it has. And that means things ain't changing a whole hell of a lot.
Squalor still abounds, government is still rotten, schools are a joke, black folk lack opportunity (and in many cases fair treatment), and white folk ain't much better off themselves. And -- as these things go in the Deep South -- the past isn't really past at all.
AND YOU GET THINGS like nooses hanging from schoolyard oak trees. White boys pulling guns on black ones. Black teens cold-cocking a white one who they heard had been hurling racial slurs.
Black malefactors getting the book thrown at them, while the white ones get a slap on the wrist . . . along with an official wink and a smirk.
Mayors of small towns in the Louisiana hinterlands thanking Mississippi white supremacists for their moral support.
You get redneck burgs like Jena, La., and the latest incarnation of America's Original Sin. You get the Jena Six. And the righteous protests. And the white right's backlash.
AS I'VE SAID, the little bigots who hung those nooses on the "white tree" at Jena High School threw a great big rock into a pond of iniquity, and the ripples have been spreading ever since, getting all the bigger the farther they travel.
And the nooses hang all across this troubled land.
From WCBS television in New York:
There was a disturbing discovery near Ground Zero in Manhattan Thursday. A noose was found hanging from a lamppost at the Church Street Post Office. This is just the latest message of hate striking the city.Police said it wasn't clear where or at whom the Church Street noose might have been directed.
"At this point, there was no target that was evident or any motive," U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Al Weissman said Friday morning. He said no postal workers had reported any threats or other problems.
Postal workers in a second floor office at Church Street noticed the noose Thursday afternoon
Building managers removed the noose, which was later turned over to the NYPD's hate crimes unit for investigation, police said.
Speaking to reporters following a ceremony at a police memorial, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly suggested that the noose outside the post office could have been an attempt to imitate the discovery at Columbia, which shocked the Ivy League campus and received extensive news coverage.
"We have to be concerned about a copycat being out there," he said, adding that police had no suspects or motives in either incident.
Meanwhile, detectives at the NYPD Hate Crime task force have 56 hours of surveillance tapes to comb through, trying to catch the person who hung a noose on Professor Madonna Constantine's door at Columbia University.
A colleague, who Constantine is suing for defamation, says she had nothing to do placing this vile symbol of racism at her door.
"This whole thing is utterly, utterly despicable, ugly. As I've said to several people, nobody in the world should have to go through something like this," said Columbia Professor Suniya Luthar.
Nooses -- deplored as symbols of lynchings in the Old South -- have appeared in recent incidents in the New York area and across the country.
In Queens, a white woman was arrested after threatening to kill her black neighbor's children with a noose.
Other nooses have been found at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, and in the Hempstead Police Department's locker room on Long Island.
According to Morris Dees, co-founder of Southern Poverty, "Maybe Jena, Louisiana, has caused a copycat situation. There is no real database on nooses around the country, but there's been an increase in the last 10 to 15 years all over the U.S. -- not just the south."
NOW THE NATION will come to understand what we Southerners know from the day we're ripe for knowing. As William Faulkner -- who knew a little about these things -- so succinctly put it, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
God help us all.
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