I knew Northam wasn’t a peer of former senators Strom Thurmond or Robert C. Byrd, with their Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan histories, respectively. No, he was from my own generation, born after me, in 1959, five years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. Northam, Herring and I are the beneficiaries of the civil rights generation. And by the time we were born, blackface was well understood to be a hateful stereotype. For our generation, Jim Crow laws were still in force when we were small children.

Source: Washington Post February 08, 2019 23:03 UTC