Tom Brokaw Quotes
Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.
Brokaw, Tom. A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland. Random House, 2002, p. 45.
This quotation shows two important historical facts about Southern Racism. The first is now great the social pressures were against any white who would try and alter the status quo. The second was that none the less there have always been whites in the South who, despite the great social penalties, did the right thing and not only improved the situation, but more important, made most Americans realize that Southerners were not all racists any more than all of any group had any negative behavior.
He served a jail sentence in Britain for inciting race hatred. This statement was made in response to the accusation that he was an extremist.
What he meant by “crosses” was cross breeding or what we would call inter-racial breeding. He was under the scientifically false assumption held by many racists that interracial breeding deteriorates the progeny. Actually, without diversity, species are subject to genetic problems which is why we have prohibitions on marrying siblings and other close relatives. He was also historically inaccurate in the Arabs and the other Semitic people of the Middle East were inbred with less intermarriage than most European whites.
The Birth of a Nation was screened at the Woodrow Wilson White House as Wilson was the most racist president since Andrew Johnson. The editorial was persuasive to Boston liberals who were not prepared to impose censorship even to prevent racist propaganda from having an audience.
Theodore Roosevelt, became President when President McKinley was assassinated. One thing that he did was to have the Negro leader, Booker T. Washington to lunch at the White House. He had previously had Blacks in his famous Rough Riders. Although Roosevelt had not taken a public position in inter-racial marriage, in the South, and much of rest of the country, accusing someone of favoring miscegenation was as serious an insult as there was. The accusation was used to attack anyone who did not favor segregation, lynching and Jim Crow in the same way that people who favored Medicare or Labor Unions were called “communists”. Cardamon himself was the target of many for his disrespectful and gross description of the president. See Quotation
Thomas John Brokaw is an American retired television journalist and author. He first served as the co-anchor of The Today Show from 1976 to 1981 with Jane Pauley, then as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News for 22 years (1982–2004). He was also a weekend anchor for the program from before from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have hosted all three major NBC News programs: The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and, briefly, Meet the Press. He formerly serves as a special correspondent for NBC News and works on documentaries for other outlets.
