The DLC's Failed Southern Strategy and Understanding Southern Society

[JDPriestly]

27. We run barely Democrats in the South, but because it is the South they are far more

Democratic than the society around them.

What to do about the South?

I'm really asking that question in my post.

When I went to high school there, and it was long, long ago, before Kennedy's election and before Martin Luther King was a recognized, national figure, my high school history course pretty much ended right at the end of the Civil War. We didn't have time to get much beyond that. It was all just sort of skimmed. It was as if time had stopped for white people in the city in which I lived at the end of the Civil War. After that, nothing mattered. That was a long time ago. I'm sure things have changed. But then when I think that Wallace came after that, then Nixon's Southern Strategy and then I think of what is going on today, and I ask myself how do we every heal our wounds, and why are Black people always victimized by these angry people in the North and in the South. I do not understand it. I just wrote my observations of the time and what I can understand about them now. But I think we have to come to understand why racists feel as they do before we can do anything to change racism. And I do not understand why they feel as they do.