Yesterday's Beaumont Enterprise reports on a bus convoy full of poor black evacuees looking for shelter in the nasty small towns of East Texas.
As they sat outside on folding chairs, having a smoke, they described seeing people on their front lawns glaring at them with shotguns in hand, and pickup trucks with nooses hanging in back (most of the bus passengers were black).The drivers said whenever they tried to stop to rest or let their passengers use the restroom, town officials had court orders waiting for them to get out of town, an assertion those town officials later denied.Posted by Ben Brumfield at September 29, 2005 02:16 PM
Thanks, Ben. I've used this at housingfinance today. Sorry for the lack of attribution: citing to this space would have been self-promoting.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 29, 2005 07:25 PMI wonder if you could get your hands on a copy of "The Least of my Brothers", a documentary on Vidor — one of the southernmost "lily white" towns of East Texas — and what happened when the county decided to integrate it by placing black families in its low-income housing.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 30, 2005 08:01 AMYou know, it's funny, but after Kayne West said you-know-what about Bush, people were lining up to say one or other variation of "Well, I don't agree with him, but, you know, he was just speaking from the heart. We're all very upset.", etc. etc., as if he'd just made an embarrassing faux pas that everyone needed to distance themselves from. After all that, you would almost have thought race was irrelevant.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at September 30, 2005 09:17 AM