Two Mississippi ironies

Yesterday I watched the wonderful Public Television special 'Freedom Summer' about the 700 mostly white students who went to Mississippi 50 years ago to engage Mississippi's disenfranchised blacks to begin the dangerous process of registering to vote. How dangerous? Yesterday was three days past a half century since the June 21, 1964, murders of two of them, along with local black James Cheney, horrified the nation and reinvigorated the volunteers and Mississippi blacks to proceed with their electoral entitlement quest. While marginally involved in the civil rights movement my freshman year at University of Chicago preceding Freedom Summer, I had no stomach to test fate in that barbaric relic of the post Reconstruction South. I greatly admired one of my classmates who did. 

A postscript to the special mentioned that Mississippi now has the most elected black officeholders in the country. And it was a fitting irony that as I watched that astonishing summer play out, enough Mississippi blacks, virtually all Democrats since most white racists switched to the Republican Party, crossed over to vote in the GOP runoff election for Senator to deny a likely victory to a Tea Partier promising to be even more regressive than the three term incumbent. A bitter irony is that as we celebrate what transpired 50 years ago, the very right to vote by minorities and the marginalized is being threatened anew, not by poll taxes and violence, but by Tea Party sponsored Voter ID laws whose sole purpose is to suppress the black and brown vote. Alas, working to improve the human condition is one venture in which retirement is not an option