I don' know whether it's true. The buzz on college campuses in the sixties - among folksong clubs like ours', who presented the Stanley Brothers - was that the band sang for, raised money for and supported White Citizens Councils.

What I do know is that people of Ralph's generation - my Yankee dad, my Texan father-in-law - found the absolute (bedrock racist) cultural certainties they'd been raised by under assault. However they dealt with that, if they were folk of any conscience at all, it was a greater crisis of conscience than most of us have ever have to deal with.

I have plenty of red-diaper-baby friends and their parents who were eventually forced to deal with the realities of Stalinism. And as bad as that was, I believe that what white southerners ( and probably us USA whites in general) had to deal wirh was harder....more local, more of a challenge to the air they breathed and the ground they walked on.

As Bobert says, it ain't hardly over either.

At the age seventy at which I find myself , I doubt that Barack is a magic bullet...just a damnsight better than the dum-dum we've had these past eight years. I imagine Dr. Ralph - older than I - is in a somewhat similar place. But I take a guess at what his journey has involved and I choke up. Can't help it.,,,,,,,, Never, ever, thought I'd see it.

Am I naive, or selling him short ?

- G

A