LETTERS

TO THE EDITOR

Politics and race

To the editor:

Last week, famed civil rights leader Jesse Jackson passed away at age 84.

His passing evoked a memory from spring 1988 when two friends and I attended the Marion County Democratic Party caucus at Marion County Courthouse.

The purpose was to select a candidate to support for nomination for president. We assembled in groups supporting candidates that were running, and over an hour or so we made speeches and eventually coalesced into a majority for one candidate.

I and my companions had come in support of Jesse Jackson. When the caucus was finished, two of the delegate votes went to him, and two were uncommitted.

I was selected to go to the state Democratic meeting as a delegate from Marion County for Jackson. Marion County, a rural place with a very low population of African Americans, had chosen to back the first black candidate for president.

He did not get the nomination at the national Democratic convention that year, but he was a presence and set the stage for later on.

Twenty years later, in November 2008, I was able to cast a ballot for Barack Obama at a polling place in Marion County and felt great joy and pride in our country when it was announced that he had won.

I felt that, as a country, we had made a great advance to overcome a history of slavery, prejudice, and the racist treatment of African Americans.

Within the last few months President Donald Trump has referred to African countries as “sh**holes” and Somali Americans as “garbage” and posted videos of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on social media.

This is not new for Trump, as he has a history of racist actions: being sued for “red-lining” real estate in New York, calling for the execution of the Central Park Five in 1989 in a full page newspaper ad (all were later exonerated), dogged promotion of the Obama “birther” conspiracy, and saying there are “good people on both sides” when defending a Neo-Nazi rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump’s attitudes and comments are not unique or even unusual in the United States, but to have elected him as president with his racist past is a grave error for the United States.

Harry E. Bennett
Madison, Wisconsin