Opinion polls indicate that the United States is ready for a black president. I don’t think so — or at least, they’re not ready down here in this part of the country:
GREENWOOD, La. — Two shotgun blasts were fired into the home of the town’s mayor, who says he had been cursed at before but never physically threatened.
Police stepped up security after the shots were fired early Monday at the home of Ernest Lampkins, who was elected in 2004 as the first black mayor of the small, predominantly white northwest Louisiana town.
According to the article, Greenwood, LA is about 150 miles from Westlake… where they’re dealing with this:
WESTLAKE, La. — In the hours before his death on the evening of Dec. 30, the first black mayor of this overwhelmingly white town started learning his new job.
About noon, he set City Hall’s alarm system for the first time. He got instructions on how to raise and lower the U.S. flag. He had already ordered a new mayoral letterhead with his name on it and a button-down shirt embroidered “Gerald Washington, Mayor.”
[snip]
But by 10 p.m. Gerald “Wash” Washington was dead in the deserted parking lot of a former high school, a bullet wound in his chest. His gun was found by the body.
The coroner and the sheriff have pronounced Washington’s death a suicide _ a finding that has embroiled this oil-refinery town in conspiracy theories, with Washington’s kin and friends insisting he had no reason to end his life.
Westlake is just outside Lake Charles, and all of 48 miles from Vidor, the town that recently found itself in the national spotlight via CNN:
Vidor is a small city of about 11,000 people near the Texas Gulf Coast, not too far from the Louisiana border. Despite the fact that Beaumont, a much bigger city just 10 minutes away, is quite integrated, Vidor is not. There are very few blacks there; it’s mostly white. That is in large part because of a history of racism in Vidor, a past that continues to haunt the present.
[snip]
“The vast majority of our citizens are not racist,” said Vidor Mayor Joe Hopkins. “We’d welcome anybody here who is a good solid citizen.”
Indeed, I was left with a genuine impression that some Vidor residents wanted the city to welcome other ethnicities. But when I sat down in a café, and talked to residents, I also heard the sound of prejudice.
Peggy Fruge told me she’d welcome blacks to her neighborhood. Then she said this:
“I don’t mind being friends with them, talking and stuff like that, but as far as mingling and eating with them, all that kind of stuff, that’s where I draw the line.”
Vidor is 76 miles from Jasper — the town that provided the world with this chilling story in 1998:
Churchgoers made the grisly discovery on the morning of June 7, 1998. It was the dismembered body of a man, later identified as James Byrd Jr., 49. The horrific details soon emerged: Byrd, who was black, had been chained to the back of a pickup in the East Texas town of Jasper and dragged to his death. As the world recoiled at the news, three white men were arrested. All three were tried and convicted in 1999 — two sentenced to die, the third to life in prison.
And Jasper is 122 miles from Greenwood, LA, where this post started. Anybody but me think there’s something just a bit off-kilter here?
This (red)neck of the woods is no way ready for a black president.
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