Peter Brimelow writes that it is time to rethink MLK Day:
Thus when my son Alexander was eight, he came home from public school early in January and told us that he`d been in some kind of play to dramatize an African American being turned away from a restaurant in the bad old days of the segregated South. In honor of Martin Luther King Day. Sort of like a Christmas Pageant. (Remember Christmas Pageants?)
The Connecticut Berkshires, where we lived, are a whitopia with absolutely no history of segregation whatsoever. Alexander was deeply puzzled. He was particularly impressed by the news that it was bad for policemen to use the word “boy.”
But this area of Connecticut was a hotbed of abolitionism. Those Connecticut farm boys joined up in vast numbers, and died in vast numbers, fighting to free the slaves. There was one famous regiment raised in Litchfield County: the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, which despite its name was an infantry regiment and which was shot to pieces at Cold Harbor.
There’s still a substantial blue collar population of colonial Yankee stock in northwestern Connecticut. The woman who cut my hair, the man who delivered my mail, had relatives who died in that battle. They were aware of it—but I have never heard any mention of it in the public schools.
