and it isn't all black nor made up of liberals or others who've seen the light. While most of the openly racist elected officials from earlier decades are gone, newer generations of Democrats are still in office. Republicans have had pretty good success in presidential elections in the South over the past 30 years or so, but Democrats are still quite powerful in state, county, and local elections.

From the end of Reconstruction in 1876 until the 1960s, Republican elected officials were pretty rare across the South. That's also the era of Jim Crow, the Klan, lynchings, and just about every other vile act across the region. I personally don't think that the end of one party rule across the South and the end of Jim Crow is a coincidence.

You make it sound like the South is a Republican bastion. It really isn't the case. Sure, there are many more elected Republicans today than in the 1960s. For that matter, there are many more elected blacks, too. The political landscape has changed considerably over the past 40 years, much of it for the better. It's harder for grossly corrupt officials like Wallace to get away with the stuff they used to do all the time. Wallace wasn't just a racist in his heyday, he was practically the Marcos of Alabama. When virtually all of the elected offices in Alabama were held by Democrats, it was easy to get away with that level of corruption. It's a lot harder for officials of either party to do that kind of stuff anymore due to a better balance of power between the parties and that's a good thing.

The overt racism of the Jim Crow era is gone. Much more subtle racism lingers in much of the South (and the North, East, and West, for that matter). It is a poison that is destroying the region, as seen by the Lockheed plant rampage in Meridian, Mississippi last week.

My wife and I will be going back to Alabama for the first time in 3 years to attend a niece's wedding. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, has changed. Most of the time, when we leave, we say to one another, "Thank goodness we got out of there." We will always have roots and family there, but I don't know if we'll ever live there again. My hometown of Huntsville isn't bad due to the influx of people from other parts of the country and the general education level (more Ph.Ds per capita than any city in America according to a Time magazine article I read some years ago). However, the small town where my niece lives is almost a throwback to the 1950s.

As for the Congressional Quarterly link, I must have accidentially posted the wrong one. I was writing that post quickly and also managed to botch part of the HTML. Normally, I use italics when quoting from someone else. It appears I forgot to close the italics near the top of the post, throwing off the formatting for every thing that followed. Bummer.