Apartheid Yardbirds and the Saints

Nuke's news and comment ^ | 10/15/06 | nuke gingrich

[grandpa jones]

I have lunch with a good friend of mine at Alcorn State fairly often. Not long after we met, we discovered that we had quite a bit in common. Not only were we the same age, but we had both grown up in the 1960’s in the river city of Natchez. We both have two kids, and our daughters attend the same college. Plus, we both have a passion for providing opportunities for young people to grow and excel. Having so much in common, you might have thought we probably would have crossed paths so many years ago in Natchez, but that wasn’t the case.

As with many towns across the South, the lines of demarcation between white and black sections of town were very clearly delineated, and there was very little interaction between the two. That began to change in earnest around Christmas 1968 when a Federal judge decided it was time to bring the full weight of the law behind earlier decisions to desegregate Southern schools. The schools remained closed for an extra two weeks during Christmas vacation, and when they re-opened, school districts had been re-drawn, several schools had been re-named, and life as we knew it in Natchez had changed forever.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It had to change.

I was thinking about this while the chicken was on the grill — marinated in garlic-pepper sauce — and the aroma was, I’m sure, making the neighbors pretty darnqtime.jpg jealous on this overcast and breezy Sunday afternoon. I would check on the bird, and walk back over and the french door and keep an eye on the Saints-Eagles game.