Free Republic

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.Kids at Creative Steps Day Camp were thrilled to go swimming once a week at the Valley Swim Club. But after only one trip to the private club, they were... "I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child,'" said camper Dymire Baylor. The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The...

Barack Obama gave Attorney General Eric Holder a mild spanking yesterday in an interview with the Times. Last month, Holder called America a "nation of cowards" when dicussing race in our country. But one question? Why did it take almost 3 weeks to rebuke Mr. Holder? And what's this crap about "if I had been advising my attorney general"? Isn't that The President's freaking job to supervise his Cabinet? Is Obama just letting these fools run amok while he's off "saving the world" with The Radical American Communist Experiment (R.A.C.E.)? This would have been nice to hear... I don't know......

SOMETHING to ponder during Black History Month: In the long night that followed Reconstruction, what was the engine that drove Jim Crow? Did segregationist laws codify existing social practice, or was it the laws themselves that segregated the South? Many people might intuitively assume that Southern racism had led to entrenched public segregation long before Southern legislatures made it mandatory. Not so. Separate facilities for blacks and whites were not routine in the South until the early 20th century. Racism there surely was, but as C. Vann Woodward observed in "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," the idea of separating...