Lester Maddox needed company?
If I prayed, I would pray that God is black.
I was here first. 
That threat wasn’t serious. Really. I was just commenting on the self-congratulations I felt at being the first one with this story, and then seeing this, posted just moments before. You jerk.
Does this make the trifecta? Or was there someone after Gregory Peck & David Brinkley I missed?
How could you tell?
After what happened to Trent Lott, I think his colleagues are going to be real, real careful what they say in their eulogies.
Hume Cronyn on June 16…
I had a fleeting thought that I might be the first to post the news about Strom. As if!
I’m up in the Senate Press gallery covering the Medicare bill and was here when the Senate found out about ol’ Strom’s passing. Normally when the Senate is in this late, the chamber is devoid of people.
But when Strom’s passing was announced, suddenly there was staff lining the walls of the chamber and about 20 senators suddenly showed up in their desks.
Bill Frist and Tom Daschle delivered brief speeches, along with Fritz Hollings, who until Strom retired, was the longest serving junior senator in history. (Well, he still holds that title, but he’s no longer the junior senator from South Carolina.)
After that everyone stood up from their desks and had a moment of silence for about 30 seconds. And a press gallery full of reporters just begging to go home suddenly sprung into action.
No mention so far of the side of Strom that may not be remembered so well. But the Senate has always treated its own with great deference. In fact, I think Joseph McCarthy may be the only alum of the chamber that isn’t commemorated in some way.
Lindsey Graham, Thurmond’s successor, just noted that in Strom’s last election, he got more African American votes than any other candidate in the South. Interesting.
Addendum: I’m pretty sure the southern senators expelled in the 1860s for commiting treason by supporting the Confederacy are also not commemorated, but just about everyone who wasn’t kicked out of the Senate BY the Senate is remembered fondly here.
Darn you! I heard he’d died, and I logged in here specifically to make that joke!
No matter how you feel about the guy, 100 years is a pretty good run. If he hadn’t done everything he wanted to do by that age, he probably wasn’t going to.
A little respect here, guys. Yes, we all have our reasons to dislike his political position, but…the man is dead. At 100.
Just kidding, carry on!!
Well, y’know, if Hitler hadn’t died at the end of WWII, and had the chance to continue wielding political power, shaping the policy of postwar Germany, and otherwise surviving to moderate his legacy, soften his image, and so forth, it could be that if HE had croaked today, people would be saying nice things about him.
But I bet the Jews wouldn’t have forgotten.
I wondered if the old so-and-so would EVER retire, or die.
I do not rejoice at his death.
But I danced like a sonofabitch when he retired.
Well you know the old saying “The Good die young”.
Good, I hope he’s enjoying Hell, the old racist so and so.
Wasn’t Strom already in the Senate back then?
A friend just suggested that the Supremes striking down the sodomy laws was what finally did him in. This strikes me as plausible.
Maynard Jackson, three-term mayor of Atlanta, died on Monday, followed by Lester Maddox on Wednesday, then Strom on Thursday.
[hijack]
Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline after Jackson’s death:
“A Lion of a Man”
And after Maddox’s:
“Last segregationist governor dies”
[/hijack]