A sad loss. I always liked reading Raspberry. I usually disagreed, but he was honest. When he had a conservative arugment, he wouldn’t try to spin it, but would honestly state the argument and then say why he agreed or disagreed.
He once wrote a column about black professional organizations, like organizations for black police officers. He said he supported the existence of these organizations, but wrote that he understood the criticisms.
Raspberry was born in Mississippi in 1935 and said he grew up under Apartheid-like conditions. If you spent your life watching talented black people being denied opportunities, I can see why you might think the Federal government was the best solution for the nation’s problems.
I bet if Raspberry was born in the sixties (as I was) he would have been a conservative.
That would not surprise me
Raspberry was like my professors in the history/government departments at the University if Texas back around 1960. They actually liked an argument. Many of my fellow students, however, were the kind of liberal that we associated with the “free speech” guys at Berkeley. They are just now retiring and, boy, did they leave us with a tribe of ideologues.
Well, the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to override the Dred Scot decision of the Supreme Court, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments did make the Federal Government the guardians of the black people of the South. The white people of the South blamed them for putting them under military rule and corrupt, Chicago-style government for almost ten years. Instead of co-opting the many decent black people in the South, we did create a kind of apartheid state and gave them no share at all in the governmental and economic affairs on the state, except as a kind of helot. On the other hand, Booker Washington tried to make lemonade out of lemons by blacks in the skills of they needed to prosper economically, and a large number of black folk did manage to create a life parallel to that of the whites. But the general effect was to make them a sub-culture who as a rule simply did not have the opportunities they needed to prosper. Of course, neither did most white Southerners. The South did not really recover substantially from the aftereffects of the Civil War until after WWII.