A Man Spoke on The Floor of the Senate Tonight - And It Gives Me Hope and Makes Me Proud

 

 

In the narrowest  sense of the word what Cory Booker has done  for the past 25 hours matters very little to the grand scheme of things. He endorses no legislation or is saying nothing that has not been said in some sense countless times before over the last decade and will no doubt be said countless times again.

In another sense it is little more the kind of performative activism I have railed against in this column so many times and which I find loathsome. Nothing Booker does will likely changed the most vehement opposition to his point of view, which at best is held by half the country and may very well be held by more of the still unenlightened minds which will forever fill the nation and the world.

It's even possible that this will do nothing more than accomplish a momentary stir in the news cycle which seems to change on a minute by minute basis. Given what comes out of Washington these days in mere minutes all of this may change again and our attention will go to something else. It depends just how many people are even paying attention now.

But the thing is even if nothing is changed immediately or long term, its impact on me and maybe the rest of the country needs to be remembered. As someone who has more insight into political history then most I am more aware of the significance then the average millennial or social media user. Perhaps even the self-styled progressives will still scoff at is as meaningless. But for anyone who argues that America is not capable of changing, who still wants to hold to the idea that we are still essentially the same country that we were when the republic was founded and that America can not and will not change, what Cory Booker did – and is doing – gives lie to that very concept that America is still the same nation it was in 1619 or 1776. And while there are many ways to define it, I think the very best way is to talk about two men who, save for the fact that they both served in the Senate, have nothing else in common and for good reason.

The first is J. Strom Thurmond. Thurmond was born in 1902 and died in 2004. His life spans, for all intents and purposes, the entirety of 20^th century America. This era that brought about transformative and radical changes – all of which, it’s safe to say, Thurmond was against for his entire life.

He came from South Carolina, the state whose secession from the Union was the final step that led to the Civil War. Thurmond would have been the first to tell you otherwise but make no mistake the war was solely about the right of men of the white race to own men of the black race to make them rich on land they would never own from birth to death, toss them aside and use their children to work the same land.

When the war ended South Carolina did little to acknowledge anything had changed. They didn’t enslave black men but they were just as free to kill them for any reason and deny them basic human rights. The North, which had ostensibly gone to war to free them, had little use for them as a citizens in the South and for the better part of three quarters of a century let Jim Crow reign.

Thurmond was born and completely embraced the idea that ‘the Negro’ was naturally inferior to white men and deserved no humanity at all. Back then, black women were for practically property so he had no problem to have ‘relations’ with his domestic and father a half-black daughter with him. This only troubled him – slightly – when he decided to enter politics. Not because South Carolina would find what he had done criminal but because it might hurt him in a campaign down the road. So he bought the domestic’s silence and his daughter’s existence only came to light after he died nearly a century later. It certainly did nothing to make black people human beings.

He was a Democrat only because there was no other path to political power in South Carolina. He had little use for the New Deal aside from what it could do for South Carolina and while he fought in World War II he saw no contradiction in fighting to stop an ideology based fundamentally on racism overseas and going back to his home state to protect that same ideology. He would soon be elected as Governor and in 1948 – reluctantly – became the Presidential candidate for the so-called Dixiecrats, a wing of deep Southern Democrat representatives who thought Harry Truman’s efforts into civil rights a betrayal of their way of life. Thurmond would proudly speak of segregation and win 4 states in the electoral college, including South Carolina.

Not long after that he would run for Senate as a write-in candidate. Still a Democrat and increasingly angry against the movement for civil rights coming from ‘Northern agitators’, he would be more inflexible then even some of his more senior Southern Senators. As the Supreme Court and other institutions moved forward he wanted to make sure the South stayed where it had always been. For that reason he crafted the Southern Manifesto and gathered signatures from Southern Congressmen and Senator, making it clear the South would vigorous oppose any bill that involved civil rights.

And in 1957 when Eisenhower’s administration combined with majority leader Lyndon Johnson to introduce the first Civil Rights Act of any kind since Reconstruction, he demanded that Richard Russell and his fellow Senators filibuster it. When they refused on August 28^th, he spoke for 24 hours and 27 minutes, shattering the record for the longest speech in Senate history. This speech was denounced by Russell and his fellow Senators – no fans of civil rights – as grandstanding and making a cheap stand for his own reelection.

The bill – weak as it was – did pass. And Thurmond spent the next half a century in the Senate. Eventually he would leave the Democratic Party altogether when President Johnson endorsed another Civil Rights bill, a much stronger one. He’d never really been comfortable in the party anyway and spent the rest of the century as the clearest representative of how the conservative movement which would involve the Republican dominance of the South and for all intents and purposes the very worst aspects of what America truly is.

Now consider Cory Booker. Cory Booker is the kind of man who Strom Thurmond would consider unworthy to shine his shoes. He would use all the epitaphs that we use for African-Americans in private – and in his state in South Carolina he would have said them in public. The idea of a man like Booker serving in the U.S. Senate would have been abhorrent to him when Thurmond was young and was, no doubt thankfully to him, something he barely had to endure in all his years in public service. Thurmond died in 2003, one year before a young man named Barack Obama would become the first Democrat African-American to be elected to the Senate.

Booker was elected as Mayor of Newark and would run for the U.S. Senate to fill the vacant seat by Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey in 2013. He would win election in his own right in 2014, one of the few Democrats to hold that his seat in a bad year for the party. He would attempt a run for President in 2020, something else that Thurmond was not thrilled with while it was happening in his lifetime and is likely not happy that in his own state of South Carolina, a ‘Negro’ holds the seat he once held. Say what you will about Tim Scott but Thurmond would have never eaten dinner with him.

Booker will now be in the Senate until 2026 at which point he will have served longer in the Senate than any African-American in the history of the body. Never mind it’s ‘only fourteen years’; the previous record was held by Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and he lost reelection for his third term in 1978. The wheels of progress move slowly but they do move.

And now consider what Booker finished accomplishing tonight. He has spoken for 25 hours and 30 minutes about the problems facing America led by a party that Thurmond did everything in his power to help mold in his image and is led by a President who I know he would have great respect for in every way. He has defeated a record in the august body of the Senate that was made by a man who hated everything America was becoming and was determined to stand in the way of. Strom Thurmond represents everything that is abhorrent to me as an American and that he was admired and respected by so many in that institution personally disgusts me in every way possible. He represents the most odious and loathsome aspects of our humanity.

So in a sense I could care less about what Booker actually said during those 25 hours but rather who and where he made it. For the first half of the nineteenth century the Senate spent as much time as possible trying to paper over the problem of slavery. When it was abolished, they made a token effort to fight for the rights of African-Americans and then left them on their own, largely because men like Thurmond were the rule in both parties of Congress when it came to black men. Thurmond was no worse than his predecessors from South Carolina even in the 20^th century but by the time he came to Washington the tide was irrevocably beginning to turn towards equality and he chose to keep the South as close to antebellum and was the representative of all that is the worst aspects of our political system. His ‘record’ in the Senate is not a dubious one but a disgraceful one.

Like so many people I have had trouble finding reasons for hope the last several months. I have argued for optimism even in the face of the dark forces that Thurmond represented and still are held too in to much of the country but I have found little concrete things to hold on to. And now Cory Booker has taken one of the more disgusting hallmarks of the Senate and turned it into a footnote. That was one of the biggest legacies Thurmond had in the Senate. And now its gone. Forever. His mark has been erased by a man who represents everything that Thurmond hated in life and is still idolized by too many.

Those on the far right will try to argue its irrelevant. Those on the far left will argue the same thing but for different reasons. But neither side will be able to erase it from the pages of history. An African-American senator has taken something away from Strom Thurmond forever. And that makes me proud. To be a Democrat, to be an American, and as a member of the human race.

Cling to that when times are dark.