RC Macaulay wrote: "Jed.. I didn't use the word black.. you did."
Oh how clever of you. You talked about "school integration in the 1960s" but you did not mean black kids. You meant Martians. Martians "will drag you down to their level." Let me remind you, and the readers here, what happened in 1962, and what this is all about. I was just a kid but I lived through it, my friends here in Atlanta lived through it, and we shall not forget. I mentioned the class valedictorian in my daughter's class. My daughter is no academic slouch. She graduated with honors from Cornell, but this kid ran rings around her, and so did many of the other black kids. Now what would have happened to that child if he had tried to go to our Atlanta neighborhood school in 1962? The law would have prevented him. He would have been forced to attend segregated schools, some of which were only open a half-day, because there was not enough room in the building for all the children. All of them were funded at a fraction of the level of the white schools. If his parents had defied the law, and tried to register him here, mobs of angry of people would have come out, and they would have tried to beat him to death. And who were these angry mobs? They were people like RC Macaulay, who vowed they would not be "dragged down" by integration. "Segregation now, and forever." No black kid from Atlanta, no matter how brilliant, would have made it to Harvard back then. He probably would not have made it to college. Now we send thousands to the best schools in the country. That's what we are talking about. I am not exaggerating one tiny bit. You can read the history of the Atlanta schools anytime you like. We talk about injustice as it were in the distant past, or as if it was some abstract quality, that affected everyone on average perhaps, but only a little. "After all, how inconvenient was it to use a separate water fountain?" as one white woman put it not long ago. As if water fountains were the only issue. What these laws and customs did was to ruin the lives of millions of people right here in Atlanta. They cut off the creativity and potential of these people, depriving society of their contributions. Thousands and thousands of potential valedictorian chess champions and Nobel laureates ended up digging ditches all their lives. Many of them are still doing it -- still middle aged, their lives still blighted. This was a monsterous injustice, and it was all the fault of people like you who opposed integration, and who oppose it still. And you have the gall to blame the victims! - Jed
