GregsOpinion.com

Primary report: Black Waller County leaders file civil rights suit

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Chris Elam has a great take on this that's worth reading. Normally, one can be excused for thinking "Yeah, great because it probably validates your own worldview." Fair enough, but I'm sure Chris will confirm that he's not exactly in the same ideological camp as I. That we see something approximating eye-to-eye on a contentious lawsuit involving various political actors might qualify as a minor miracle of sorts.

The only thing I can really add to this is based on the 5 meager years I lived in Sunflower & Indianola, Mississippi. I was but a kid, then, so apply salt where needed to this searing memory. But Sunflower County in the late 70s was not unlike Waller County today in many regards, although my experience with the latter was limited to visits to a sister & neice in Hempstead. The similarity, to the extent that I'm willing to paint it, is that you've got something of the old-fashioned southern conservative "good ol boy" network that's been in charge since the dawn of time staring face-to-face with a numbers game that has a largely African American minority at odds with them ... only the political math has the two groups pretty close to a standoff.

Back in the day, Sunflower County had a lot of unregistered blacks and in a county where they outnumbered whites, you had the network running things long after segregation was swept aside. Problem was, in Mississippi you didn't have a deep bench of politically active people from the black community to start up a challenge to the mayor or the county judge spots. Also, neither party really appealed to them as both had their warts (some would say "still do"). It took time, but that's pretty much changed since my family moved back to Texas.

Taking this storyline back to Texas ... some of the differences I suspect in Waller County are that there is NOT the same shortage of people willing to buck the system, and this lawsuit is part and parcel to that. I haven't brushed up on my census data for Waller County and I'm not in too much of a rush to do so, but my hunch is that the "B+H%" is at or approaching 50% perhaps. Anytime you see the G.O.B. network trying to finagle elections at the margins with actions such as trying to see that black students at PVU can't vote or intimidating political opponents, you've got to realize you're on the losing end of the long version of history. If you can't win on ideas, then you don't deserve to win ... and I suspect there will soon be some candidates in Waller County who may realize that (to the extent that they haven't already done so).

SIDENOTE: The knock on the Chron for running an AP story on something in their own freakin' backyard is also one that really needs to be seconded, thirded, and fourthed. I believe the Kevster has the second, so can I claim the third?