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Lotts more where he came from

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This seems to me an appropriate moment not just for a shiver of apprehension at what’s ahead for us all, but for a second or two of hope as well. Trent Lott resigned his post this morning. Anyone who predicted such a possibility a month ago would have been deemed a raving idiot. Kissinger and Lott in a single week — not possible.

And yet here we are. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson reminds us in an op-ed in the LA Times today, we have endless Lotts to go, less flamboyantly racist perhaps but with similar attitudes and voting records. But let’s remember as well that that also means endless possibilities for unraveling. In a mood of nostalgia, I’m adding a fine RIP for Trent Lott, an op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson that ran a couple of days back in the Boston Globe and offered a little bio of the Trent Lott who has been in plain sight all these years.

This is the first of perhaps three postings meant to remind us that this administration is hardly invulnerable, that it can take hideous missteps, that the unexpected can happen, and then happen, and happen again — and who knows when or sometimes why. Tom

The Grand (Dragon’s) Old Party
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The Los Angeles Times
December 20 2002

During the 1999-2000 Congress, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People gave one senator a near rock-bottom rating on its scorecard of senators’ votes on civil rights issues.

That senator was not Trent Lott; it was Oklahoma Republican Don Nickles.

Though he has virtually called for Senate Republicans to dump Lott as Senate majority leader, Nickles at times has even exceeded Lott in his zeal to torpedo civil rights protections.

During the 1999-2000 Congress, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People gave one senator a near rock-bottom rating on its scorecard of senators’ votes on civil rights issues.

That senator was not Trent Lott; it was Oklahoma Republican Don Nickles.

Though he has virtually called for Senate Republicans to dump Lott as Senate majority leader, Nickles at times has even exceeded Lott in his zeal to torpedo civil rights protections.

Lott and Nickles opposed the creation of a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and voted to abolish affirmative action in federal hiring.

But on the King holiday, Nickles went further and insultingly suggested that the holiday should be an unpaid holiday, celebrated on a Sunday.

Though Lott has publicly recanted his opposition to the King holiday and affirmative action, Nickles has not.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of “The Crisis in Black and Black” (Middle Passage Press, 1998).

To read more Hutchinson click here

Brother Lott’s Real Record
by Derrick Z. Jackson
The Boston Globe
December 18, 2002

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to tell which sound is louder, the laughter of millions of black folks or the millions of mint julep glasses dropped to the ground by shocked conservatives who are screaming, ”Uncle Trent! Shut up!”

Black folks are in stitches because Lott cannot unstitch his record. The Republican Party wants to stitch up Lott’s mouth. A stitch in time nine years ago, when Lott was cavorting with offshoots of white citizens councils, might have save the Republicans from this moment. Finally, with Lott’s wistful praise of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign of 1948 threatening to put a white sheet over the entire party, Republicans are making moves to drop Lott as majority leader of the Senate.

They are not moving fast enough to stop the painful from becoming preposterous. In an interview on Black Entertainment Television, Lott was asked by interviewer Ed Gordon, ”What about affirmative action?”

To read more Jackson click here