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Anyone who has ever been in Mississippi, particularly in the delta, knows that feelings still run deep. At Tunica, cotton rows run up to and end at huge casinos with familiar names like Harrah's, Hollywood, Horseshoe and Bally's. Today the cotton is picked with mechanical behemoths that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while millionaire black entertainers like Bill Cosby and Chris Rock entertain inside.

In the forties and fifties, Mississippi blacks abandoned those same cotton fields in droves. They also fled inhuman behavior and squalor beyond belief. Most fled on US highways leading to places like Detroit, Chicago and Gary. Two of those US Highways ran through my home town, and to get to their destinations, delta black families, six, eight or ten to a car passed through my home town on US Highways 45 and 51. I watched and sometimes interacted with them as a teen.During those years, at the upper reaches of the delta, at the borders of Tennessee and Kentucky, and along the rich bottomlands of the Missippi river that seperated both states from Missouri and Kentucky from Illinois, I worked sometimes in service stations and sometimes at an all night restaurant on the bypass leading both highways North or North East. Many of those travelers stopped at the places where I worked as a boy, just about a mile after they left Tennessee. They were, I am sad to say, not allowed to enter the restaurant. Not even to go to a bathroom. They would be fed, if they had the money, by going to the kitchen door.

By 1954, and Brown V Board of Education, the exodus continued. We all know the rest. Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky were not hospitable places for blacks, and a very large percentage of whites in those days, although we whites had it better.

It is against that backdrop that I view these happenings fifty years later. In places throughout the South, the sons and daughters of those who fled have returned. Not all is well, but those of us who saw the old, are encouraged by the new.

Old experiences can be helpful, and perhaps Senator Lott lost temporary brain functions while flattering Strom Thurmond. On the other hand, I can appreciate some of the feelings on the other side.

My solution would be for him to remain in the senate, but in a chairmanship, not as majority leader.

As for Robert Byrd, he should just shut up and go away. Back to the white niggers that he left behind.

Your #260 is one of the best posts I have ever seen on FR...and I don't say that lightly.

You obviously are speaking from a lifetime of rich experience...and have provided a wonderful window on a slice of real history.

If you aren't a novelist, you should be.

By the way, not to make light of what is a sorry piece of that history, but now we all go to the kitchen door...they just call it drive-through! ;-)

My solution would be for him to remain in the senate, but in a chairmanship, not as majority leader.

Mine too...it's the only way.

Migration to the South Brings U.S. Blacks Full Circle