Who is the President’s Opposition?

Most of the time we forget who these people are in the United States Senate who are opposing everything that President Obama tries to do to keep our country moving forward into the twenty-first century. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement on election night that “the voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president’s first term; they have simply given him more time to finish the job they asked him to do,” is a despicable pronouncement that portends more obstinacy from Senate Republicans going into the next Congressional session.

For those of you who don’t know who we are dealing with let me review some American history for you. In 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed on Sunday, September 15, 1963 and four young black girls were killed.  I remember this well, because I was thirteen years old and those girls were the same ages as my sisters. This act of domestic terrorism was one of the events that helped cement popular support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed many common acts of discrimination against black Americans.

It was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that denied access to the ballot box for almost all southern black.  I mention these facts because Mitch McConnell was born in Alabama in 1942 and attended the segregated public school system in Louisville, Kentucky during the 1950’s.  Louisville schools were not desegregated until 1975 and then only by court ordered busing.

In 1963, McConnell was a 21-year-old student at the University of Louisville.  White boys born and raised in the segregated south during the 1950’s and 60’s were taught white privilege – that is they were superior to black people and blacks were here to be of service to their white superiors.  Mitch McConnell, who is an avowed college basketball fan, graduated from the University of Kentucky Law School in 1967, two years before the first black basketball player played at the University of Kentucky.

The United States Senate has nine other southern state senators who were my age or older in 1963.  They include Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama who graduated from the University of Alabama, undergraduate in 1957 and Law School in 1963.  The University of Alabama was segregated until two black students were enrolled in 1963 even as the Governor, George Wallace tried to physically block there entrance.

Another is Senator is Jeff Sessions, also a 1973 University of Alabama Law School graduate.  In 1986, he was only the second nominee to the federal judiciary in 48 years whose nomination was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee because of a history of racial comments and actions while serving as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.   There is also Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi who graduated from that segregated school in 1959. I could go on but you get the picture.

These are the people who are in key leadership positions in our national government.  They are grounded in a bygone era we thankfully left behind.   They had their world view shattered in 2008 when a black man occupied the White House.  They cannot accept it. They need to retire back to their plantations and allow the country to move forward instead of trying to preserve an American that no longer exists.