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Continued...

What is astonishing in all this is not the bigotry toward blacks that Southerners like Thurmond and Maddox and even Lott -- and, for that matter, millions of Northerners -- took in with their mothers' milk. It is the speed and thoroughness with which that kind of bigotry became intolerable to whites. In the space of only a few decades -- a blink of an eye, historically speaking -- America repudiated the racial cruelty and meanness that had always been part of its makeup.

The stories preserved in "Reporting Civil Rights" seem like snapshots from an alien land. The lynching of 16-year-old Emmett Till for speaking to a white woman, George Wallace's vow to "stand in the schoolhouse door" and block integration at the University of Alabama, the anxiety of Mississippi newspaper editor Hodding Carter over his decision to begin referring to married black women with the courtesy title of "Mrs." -- such scenes, once so typical in this land, are now inconceivable.

Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox are dead and so is the entrenched racism in which America once was steeped. Intolerance still exists and perfect color-blindness is still a long way off. But to look back at where we were is to see how incredibly far we've advanced. In the ways that mattered most, we did overcome.

C'mon, have some class...

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I love my country. She once did indecent and shameful things but she faced up to her dark and ugly side and resolved to become the kind of country the Founders wanted her to be. A Union that cherishes the equality of its people and celebrates as one, the indivisibility of freedom from sea to shining sea. True, America still has flaws and imperfections and we're still a ways off from treating every one as we should be treating them. But what I love about America is we're still learning and in the death of racism we can rejoice in the triumph of goodness and justice in our national life.

>But to look back at where we were is to see how incredibly far we've advanced. In the ways that mattered most, we did overcome.

It's inconceivable today, that such a large segment of the population was treated so horribly. Thank goodness LBJ and the Republican members of Congress pushed to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed over the loud protestations of Southern Democrats.

Death of racism is a bit premature.

Racism is greatly reduced and has a more democratic tone in that it now occasionally is directed against the majority whites in addition to the various minorities. But racism is not dead yet.

I do find the whinings of the whites (reverse racism) and blacks (you owe us) to be tiresome given that racism was much stronger in the past and the victims handled it with much more grace and strength than the whiners of today.

In those days, you really did have something to whine about. I think today, whining has become a national pasttime.

The story about the Greyhound bus driver makes me all the more proud of my father. He was driving a Greyhound bus from Springfield MO to Tulsa OK in the 30s and 40s. He refused to enforce Jim Crow. He treated all passengers the same and was occasionally given grief for it by white passengers but, as far as I know, never by his employer.