I read an article by Brent Staples, “What My Mother Taught Me About Racial Segregation in the Fifties”, on the bottom of the Editorial Page of the NY Times this morning.  On the Op Ed page of the same NY Times there were three articles about the significance of Trent and his being thrown out of his position as Majority Leader of the Senate and what this means to the Republican Party.

            Brent Staples” memory of being shielded from the bigotry and prejudice as a young boy growing up Black provides a counter to all the wailing about a bigot who got the boot by his President and his Party.

            I have faced discrimination at times. However, I never experienced the same crushing segregation that drove Negroes into Ghettos and second-class citizenship. There is no justification for the current White leadership of the Republican Party (with no majority of the popular vote that granted a MANDATE) to go to war. There is an insane desire to revise the civil liberty gains of the past to reverse history and destroy the strength of the central power of the United States by giving it up to the States.  There is no talk of secession any more but there is plenty of contradictory action to force the States to provide protection for civil rights as the current leadership of our government transfers its power. The States need help to restore the support of the insensitive central government.

            If anything defines what Trent Lott’s departure from office while keeping his Senate seat means, it is the appearance of apologists. These whine about the time Brent Staples describes while growing up in a Black World that lived apart from the world Trent Lott bemoaned. There are “other Trent Lotts” who by conviction and by seniority who will rise in power in his place.  Trent may have “resigned to quit” but he has been joined by others (as pointed out by William Safire) who were forced by circumstances to leave their posts but not their tenure in either elected positions or claims for leadership of a defeated party. He named eight, including Lott, who appear regularly in the news who are afflicted by “quittingitis”.

            None of the departures will expunge the guilt of either political party for tactics of “playing to the closet racists and the Confederate Flag waving yahoos who mean so much to the G.O.P.” Brent’s memories have it right on the mark while Trent’s many apologies could not obfuscate the need for the “Republican Party to decide it really wants to end American racist inequality.” 

            Brent has it right and Trent and his ideas have to go.