Thank you for posting this diary, and also for what you did in Mississippi 44 years ago.  I'm obviously a little younger than you, but was old enough (15) to be fully aware of what was going on in Mississippi that summer as I was living safely in Urbana, Illinois.  One Saturday that summer, after the 3 civil rights workers had been murdered, on the campus of the University of Illinois, I met several members of SNCC on the campus of the University of Illinois, who were collecting money to be used to defray the expenses of those who were in Mississippi for Freedom Summer.  I remember that I had just finished doing my collections from my newspaper route, and donated every penny that I had collected.  It was nothing like what you and others only a few years older than myself were doing, but I felt like I could at least help in that small way.  My very conservative father was furious at my "foolishness," but had to back off when I pointed out that he had always taught me to do what I believed in, and this was what I believed in.

I was raised as a Republican, and continued to be a Republican through the 1970's, but it was a different Republican Party back then.  The end of me thinking of myself as a Republican, albeit one who was more liberal than most other Republicans, can be traced to a single day: The day in 1980 that Ronald Reagan, as the new Republican nominee, chose to travel to Neshoba County, MS to make a speech praising "States' Rights," which everybody knew in the 1960's was code for letting the Southern states deal with "the Nigra problem" (as the somewhat more polite racists referred to it) as they saw fit.  I was convinced then, and am today, that no politician who uses appeals to nostalgia for the bad old days of the 1960's to seek white votes is fit for holding any office, much less the Presidency.

One thing that fills me with cold fury about the Clinton campaign is the Bill and Hillary Clinton know this history as well as anybody in this country, and I don't think that either of them are personally racist.  But I do think they've demonstrated that they're more than capable of making coded appeals (and having their surrogates make coded appeals) based on what they perceive as the racism of others, in order to seek some political advantage in this contest.  It's been going on almost ever since Barack Obama won in Iowa, and Geraldine Ferraro's comments of the past few days are only the most recent and obvious examples of it.  I had thought much better of them than that, and to say that I'm extremely disappointed would be a monumental understatement.