Br”er Ridgel”s April 7 letter, with its thin veneer of racial tolerance poorly disguising his nostalgia for a pre-Civil Rights South, continues his promotion of historical inaccuracies. My blonde, fair-skinned cousins in Sicily would be surprised that Ridgel”s redneck, peckerwood ancestors turned us “from brown to white” through marriage, thereby depriving us of democratic government “miracles.” I thought we Sicilians were just Mediterranean folks, from an island mix of many civilizations. If the marrying turned us white, how come it didn”t turn the rednecks smart and cultured like us Sicilians?
There are other reasons Sicilians don”t share Ridgel”s nostalgia. The single largest mass lynching in U.S. history occurred in Ridgel”s allegedly harmonious New Orleans in 1881. After the murder of a local police commissioner, the NOPD (then, as now, one of the most corrupt in the USA) rounded up eleven Sicilians, assumed to be criminals, socialists, subhuman anarchists, one brown-skinned step above blacks, and worse, papists and uppity activists for a decent life. They were charged, tried, and found to be not guilty. A Christian white mob dragged the 11 out of jail where they were supposedly being protected by the equally Christian, white police, and publicly lynched all 11. That sparked the lynching of other Sicilians in towns and farms around New Orleans, perhaps even by Ridgel”s redneck ancestors.
Those were the pre-“miracle” days, when the Republican Lincoln government had just torn the soul out of Ridgel”s South and its states” rights by winning the Civil War and ending slavery. If you are still upset over the South losing, then every federal government program seems a continuing violation of your rights, especially an Obama government.
A reminder to Ridgel: the blacks left the South in two great migrations, at the start of the 20th century through 1913, and then at the start of World War II, ending around the mid-1970s. Some 6.5 million migrated north and west to be able to vote, to work, to get educated, to escape being raped, lynched and murdered. They left so they could live like human beings and not, as Ridgel says, because of LBJ”s Great Society, War on Poverty or other Democratic “miracles” that Ridgel has variously called Leninist, socialist or communist.
“Miracles” that even Ridgel has probably enjoyed: Social Security, VA benefits, Medicare, GI Bill benefits, FDA benefits, voting rights, National Park system, benefits of the CDC, certainly the benefits of a standing military, maybe even the public school system ? all part of the “miracles” Ridgel has railed against in his public screeds (except for the military) while happily enjoying their benefits.
Ridgel”s letters from the far right most always argue from a pre-decided political position: Obama bad, health care bad, FDR bad, Democrats bad, civil rights bad, etc. Ridgel then reconstructs historic events into convenient premises that support the stated position ? the signal device of propaganda, and at best hypocritical.
Thomas R. Aidala, FAIA
Kelseyville
