------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the July 10, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
EDITORIAL: FINALLY
[The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones," says Mark Antony in the play "Julius Caesar."]
How things have changed since Shakespeare's time!
You can't pick up a newspaper or turn on television without hearing about the great contributions Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox made in their political lives. Both died in the last week of June. The evil they did has been reduced in the capitalist media to bad career choices, made necessary by the political realities of an earlier period. And this even after the adulation that Trent Lott expressed for Thurmond on the latter's 100th birthday led to Lott's downfall as Majority Leader in the Senate.
Who were Thurmond and Maddox? They were the most hateful white supremacists. They built their political careers on whipping up racism and bashing African Americans. But it would be wrong to see them as oddities, part of a political fringe. Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox were mainstays of the capitalist political establishment in the segregationist South.
What more fitting place for Thurmond to make his home than the segregationist club for millionaire white men known as the U.S. Senate. This elite club has had only two African American members since the days of Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War--and none since 1998.
Thurmond, dead at 100, was the longest-serving Senator in the history of this country. He also spans the spectrum of bourgeois political parties.
As a Democrat, he was elected governor of South Carolina in 1933 and served as president of the Southern Governors' Conference, where he was heralded as a foe of civil rights.
Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the States Rights Democratic Party--the Dixiecrats-- who split from the Democratic Party because they couldn't tolerate even the mention of civil rights or equality for Black people.
As a pro-Confederacy Dixiecrat, Thurmond ran on the platform of "Segregation Forever." And far from being on the fringe, he won Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina--all states where Black people risked economic and physical retaliation if they dared to vote.
Lester Maddox of Georgia was cut from the same cloth--white sheets.
Maddox, like George Wallace of Alabama, was an openly racist gubernatorial candidate in the 1960s supported by and associated with the Ku Klux Klan. And, like Wallace, Maddox won, becoming governor of Georgia in 1967.
Maddox had made segregation the heart of his campaign. He was already infamous for defying the newly passed desegregation laws. He had stood in the door of a restaurant he owned holding an axe handle and vowing to beat up any African American who tried to enter, while the media cameras rolled. Rather than comply with the law, he eventually closed his restaurant, assuming the mantle of a martyr.
This stance won him support from the arch-segregationists in the state's ruling circles, who backed his successful run for governor in 1966.
In 1970 he ran for lieutenant governor on the same ticket as Jimmy Carter, who became the new governor. Later, when Carter ran for president as a liberal Southerner with the blessing of the kingmakers in the Rockefeller-dominated Council on Foreign Relations, the big business media played down his association with Maddox.
Neither Thurmond nor Maddox was able to halt the rising tide of the civil rights movement. But, now that they are dead, the corporate media coverup of the terrible things they did is but another indication that those on top haven't changed much. What has changed is the masses of workers, especially people of color and youth, who will never let the clock be turned back to the "good old days" of segregation, lynchings and cross burnings.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
