Nina Simone Quotes
From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
Simone, Nina, and Stephen Cleary. I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone. Pantheon Books, 1992.
Bilbo was one of the worst racists who ever served in the Congress.
Jessie Helms was his young assistant who drafted this race baiting ad. There are two vicious but subtle aspects to this kind of attach ads. First, not that the ad does not address the problem of white men working along side of blacks. It only refers to wives and daughter. This interracial sex innuendo played on and increased the fear of whites that Blacks would commonly rape white women. The second nasty aspect of the ad is the specific attack on the opponent. Instead of saying that he favored desegregation, the phrase “mingling of the races” was used which implied that Graham was in favor of biracial intermarriage and children—again another sex innuendo. When integration of the workforce finally occurred in the South, there was no increase in Black men sexually assaulting white women. There has been a substantial increase in racial intermarriage however as racial bigotry has diminished in America.
Racism was so rampant in America that even after Blacks had won elections to Congress, they would be discriminated against even in Washington DC.
This classic quotation illustrates several things. First, the degree of racism that existed in 1944 in West Virginia. Second, not how young Robert Byrd immediately leaped from the possibility of integrating our fighting forces to interracial sex. That has been typical of white racism in America—a preoccupation with race and sex. Last, Byrd who became a member of the KKK, completely changed his mind over the year and ended up supporting the things that, as a youth were worse than the demise of the nation. He matured and grew on the race issue as much of the country did and ended as a strong supporter of equality and civil rights—including affirmative action.
Theodore Roosevelt, became President when President McKinley was assassinated. One thing that he did was to have the Negro leader, Booker T. Washington to lunch at the White House. He had previously had Blacks in his famous Rough Riders. Although Roosevelt had not taken a public position in inter-racial marriage, in the South, and much of rest of the country, accusing someone of favoring miscegenation was as serious an insult as there was. The accusation was used to attack anyone who did not favor segregation, lynching and Jim Crow in the same way that people who favored Medicare or Labor Unions were called “communists”. Cardamon himself was the target of many for his disrespectful and gross description of the president. See Quotation
Eunice Kathleen Waymon, known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned a broad range of musical styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop.
