« Kilgore on Education: Readin', 'Ritin' and Recklessness | Main | Will "The Hammer" drive a nail into Frederick's Political Coffin? »

April 10, 2005

Barnie Day: Remarks to Young Democrats at their State Convention

College of William and Mary - Williamsburg, Virginia - April 9, 2005
Barnie K. Day

I turned 16 in 1968. It was the year I began paying attention politically. Richard Nixon was elected President that year. It was the year I became a Democrat. And not because of Nixon. I later remember as a student in Chapel Hill seeing a piece of graffiti that said "Nixon was one in '68. He'll be a bigger one on '72." But Richard Nixon didn't make me a Democrat. Cam Johnson made me a Democrat. I'm going to tell you about him in a minute.

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered in 1968. The war still raged in Vietnam. We were a long ay from civil rights for all Americans in 1968-and to a certain extent still are. When I was a kid, discrimination was openly expressed in public signs that read "White Only" or "Colored Only". Today it is expressed in terms of 'gay' and 'straight.' In 1968, women were not admitted to the University of Virginia. That didn't come about until 1970-largely due to the efforts of Alan Diamonstein who served in the House of Delegates from Newport News for 33 years.

1968 was the year my mom and dad divorced and I got my first job, after school, working second shift, loading trucks at a factory that made aluminum siding. Cam Johnson was a black man who worked on the loading dock with me. He was about 40, but he looked 65-from doing hard, manual labor his whole life. He had worked second shift on that dock for eleven years. In fact, he had helped build that factory. He had carried bricks and mortar to the bricklayers building that factory. And when they got it built, Cam got a job there.

In eleven years he had never missed a day of work. Cam Johnson couldn't afford to miss a day of work. He had six children to feed and clothe. He was a gentle man. Not educated. Not militant. He didn't know politics from theoretical physics. Cam Johnson just worked. I was a white boy, just a kid, and Cam Johnson was a black man with a wife and six children and we worked on the dock together.

We did exactly the same job. We loaded boxes of aluminum siding onto trucks, Cam on one end of the box, me on the other. The only real difference was our age, the color of our skin, the responsibility we had for other people and how much money we were paid. They hired me at $1.85 an hour. Cam Johnson, with six children, who hadn't missed a day of work in 11 years was making $1.80 an hour. I couldn't believe it. He showed me his pay stub.

It was then that I understood about the food Cam brought for his supper every night. Half the time it was a pig ear sandwich. Two slices of bread, with mustard, and a boiled pig's ear. Cam didn't eat pig's ears because he preferred them over ham and pork chops. A pig's ear was all Cam could afford. They cost about six or seven cents a pound.

So what to do? I did the only thing I thought I could do. It was the way my mother raised me. I went to our boss, a beer-bellied, red-necked cracker named Harold, and I put it to Harold like this. You either give Cam a raise or cut my pay-I'm not working for more than he's making. Harold looked at me like I'd spoken to him in Egyptian. And I said it again. And here's what he said to me: "You must be one of them goddamned Democrats!" and I smiled at him and said "I must be." I became a Democrat at that instant and I have been one every day since.

And, by the way, they gave Cam a raise. Ten cents an hour. It was in his next check. And until the day he died that old man would have killed for me. Cam Johnson made me a Democrat-not Roosevelt, not Truman, not Kennedy. For me it was Cam Johnson.

I want to back up and tell you this little story about my mother. Her name was Nancy. When she was fifty, she put all of her furniture and things in storage, rented out her house and enrolled as a freshman at Longwood College in Farmville-the same place they closed the schools from 1959-1964. She was practically disabled with rheumatoid arthritis by then-I'm not going to go into all of that-but physically, she just had a horrible life. Her hands were gnarled up like this.

So, anyway, she enrolls in school at Longwood and she moves into an old dowager's house there on Main Street-one of these big old antebellum mansions in downtown Farmville. Well, she hadn't been there no time before she calls me up. She's moving out. I've got to come back. She'd gotten into it with the old lady who owned the house over how my mother allowed the old lady's black domestic help to address her.

My mother insisted that the maid just call her 'Nancy,' but the old lady wouldn't hear of it. She insisted that none of the black domestics be allowed to address white folks by their first name. You see, this mindset that closed the schools in 1968 was still there.

So I borrow a truck and go to Farmville to move Mama out of this old biddy's house. It's a beautiful day. I get the truck loaded-it takes me all morning--and get mama in it-she's moving into a freshman dorm-and as we're pulling away the old lady is standing on the porch and my mother, with he gnarled up hand is trying to give her the finger. But her hand won't work. She can't get her middle finger up. She finally has to hold it up with her other hand. I'm sure that old lady had no idea what that two handed signal was that my mother was doing her best to give her through the truck window.

You see, almost from the beginning, it has been easy for me to be a Democrat.

Are there differences? Are there differences between Democrats and Republicans? You bet your life there are differences. Republicans have the misguided notion that they become stronger, that they somehow benefit when they can take strength away from those around them, when they can keep down the Cam Johnsons of the world. Democrats reject that view. We understand that you become stronger when you raise up the folks around you. My mother understood that. And she made me understand it.

Republicans wrap themselves in God and the Bible. Or think they do. We'd all be better off if they'd bray about it less and read it more. Read the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the Book of Mathew, in the New Testament. Read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me about cutting aid programs to the poor and the hungry, about throwing children off of insurance programs, about cutting funding to Head Start. Read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me about cutting prescription drug benefits. The Jerry Falwells of the world, the Pat Robertsons, thunder from the right that God is Republican, but I know better than that. The Bible tells me so.

Republicans make this great hue and cry about smaller government. They want government "off our backs." But they want the government peeping into our bedroom windows. They want the government looking over our shoulders to see what we're reading. They want the government in Terri Shiavo's hospital room.

You see, they have always talked one game and played another.

Politics does matter. Politics makes such a difference in our lives-for good and bad. It is so critical that you stay engaged. I want to tell you briefly about a man named Frank Porter Graham. You see, the forces of good and light do not always win.

Let me take you back to May 27, 1950. No, let's go back a little further. Let us go back to 1930. In North Carolina. Chapel Hill, to be exact. That was the year the trustees of the university there decided to make Frank Porter Graham, the diminutive, 43-year-old son of a Methodist minister, the University of North Carolina's next president. It's where I later went to school.

Graham came with good credentials. He had been Mr. UNC as a student. President of this, that, and the other. He had successfully led a statewide drive to raise badly needed capital for the school. He was an accomplished teacher and historian. And he was a non-confrontational sort, a gentle man with an easy way about him. Just what the university needed. And he paid off. Over the course of 19 years he drove a mediocre school to university greatness.

Time magazine labeled him the "ablest" state university president in America. He chaired the Roosevelt commission that led to passage of the Social Security Act.

You can't imagine now what life was like for some people in this country before Social Security

Frank Graham was a man of conscience, with a Biblical view of government, a man who believed and practiced the tenets laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. If you believed the Sermon on the Mount, you opposed segregation. If you believed the Sermon on the Mount you had this radical idea that we all are equal in the eyes of God and should be treated as such.

By 1949, that view was rubbing some folks a little raw down in North Carolina, particularly members of the legislature, and some of the trustees. The question was, what to do about it? Luck intervened. J. Melville Broughton, United States senator from North Carolina, died in office, and Gov. W. Kerr Scott appointed the greatest liberal in the South to fill the unexpired term. Frank Porter Graham, a small, gentle man left the University of North Carolina and went to the United States Senate.

The story could have ended there, but the 1950 election was coming up and the political apparatus in North Carolina-a big part of it anyway-was making plans to savage a gentle man.

You have to understand that by "political apparatus" I mean the Democratic machine in North Carolina. Republicans didn't play a role in anything in North Carolina. Not in 1950.

Frank Graham, this desegregationist, this liberal, was going to be challenged by his own party. In a four-way race, Graham led the balloting but he didn't win a majority. He didn't win by enough to avoid a run-off. Willis Smith, who finished second, beat Graham for the Democratic nomination on May 27, 1950 in what is generally acknowledged to have been the nastiest, vilest, race-baitingest political campaign in this nation's history.

A kid in Raleigh engineered that win for Smith, a kid still in his twenties. And he went with Smith to Washington as his administrative aide. That's how he got a toe-hold there.

What was his name?

He was a mean, race-baiting son of a bitch named Jesse Helms.

We have seen this week a look back at the life a remarkable man. Pope John Paul changed the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. changed it. If you never read anything else in your life, read his 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail.' Nelson Mandela changed it. Some of you will change it. Some of you will go to the legislature. You may go to the Congress or to the Senate. There may well be a future president among us this evening. Some of you will contribute in other ways. You will be good and productive citizens who will serve quietly just by going about your business. I hope part of your business will be this election we have coming up.

This is a critical, pivotal time for Virginia. We will continue to recover, continue to come back to truth and light with this election, or we will again lose our way and veer into the wilderness. It is so important that we put the reins of Virginia into the steady hands of Tim Kaine and the Democratic ticket in Novemberl. I wish you Godspeed in your lives and in your endeavors. Remember who you are. And remember the words of John Paul. Be not afraid as you go forward.

God bless and keep you. Thank you very much.

Posted by amahler at April 10, 2005 09:55 AM

Comments