Potomac Watch: Activists take on Russell Building over racism: Activist Dick Gregory wants the Senate's prime office building -- the Russell Senate Office Building -- to get a new name because it honors an avowed racist. Naming the building after Sen. Richard Russell is an "insult and an indignity" to black Americans, Gregory contends. He and other African American leaders plan to speak at black churches nationwide during February -- Black History Month -- to drum up support for their name-change campaign.
You know .... although I would not myself be averse to seeing the Russell building's name changed ... surely there are more important issues to be spending one's political capital on. Especially now that next year's budget proposal is out and one can see all the things that the administration plans to do. (Or not do, as the case may be.)
One wonders how much agitation there was back in 1972 when the building was being named. After all, that was a time when Congress was somewhat friendlier to hearing such protests than they are now. (Up to a point. Four years later would have been even more propitious, but nothing seems to have happened then, either.)
Mind, even for his era, Senator Russell seems to have been unusually vile:
In 1964, Russell offered a bill to establish a federal racial relocation commission that would "more equitably distribute" African Americans throughout the country so every state had about 10 percent of U.S. blacks. [...] When President Truman decided after World War II to end segregation of the armed forces, Russell tried to block it. He took to the floor of the Senate with charts to demonstrate how African Americans had "appallingly high rates of venereal disease," and said mingling the races in the armed forces would expose white people to this health threat. He also successfully blocked anti-lynching legislation in the Senate.
(One wonders, precisely, how commingled races in the armed forces could expose white people to this "health threat". I suppose it's possible that they could have been going to the same prositutes -- not that our soldiers would do any such thing, of course -- but then, it's kind of hard not to say, "You know, unless you're in Nevada, if you go to a prostitute and don't use any sort of protection, you're likely to catch something. And how can you tell how they got it, anyway?"
The only alternative to getting it from prostitutes is, of course, from each other .....)
Apparently, all you have to do is serve in Congress long enough, and sooner or later, they'll name something after you, completely ignoring what your record of service actually contains. One wonders what they'll name after good ol' Strom or Jesse or Teddy. (Oh, hush. He may be a liberal whose politics I generally like, but that doesn't mean that Ted Kennedy doesn't have some spectacularly reprehensible things in his background. Although, that said, most of them don't seem to have been conducted in the well of the Senate itself.)
"We're fixing to educate people all the way across the country," said Gregory. "Most people don't even know who Richard Russell was or that there's a building here named after him. Once the people become aware of it, the name change will happen real quick."
No ... you know, I don't believe it will. Mostly because people will look at the issue, say, "Well, yuck ... but hey, what about this war thingy? And why if the economy is getting better did my company just cut 10,000 jobs? And the EPA just said that the chemical company next door could start ignoring most of the clean water act, what's left of it." There are just bigger and more directly important issues out and about at the moment.
I have always applauded African-American activist Dick Gregory in his great drive for racial equality. But I part company with him on his new cause -- renaming the Russell Senate Office Building because it honors a long-gone, unreconstructed racist. [...] It is also true that the Lott affair reflects a willingness to re-examine our sorry past in dealing with minorities. That incident shows we do not tolerate such blatant bigotry in current leaders. But it does not mean we should go back and rename every building, monument, highway and bridge honoring our past heroes. [...] Russell's hammerlock on racial legislation was broken, and now, nearly four decades later, his name is not widely known outside Capitol Hill and his home state. The country has moved on. So should Gregory. For all his efforts to demonize Russell, he has not succeeded in getting one senator to support his "Change the Name" campaign. He should keep pressing his courageous struggle against America's racial divide, but he would accomplish more by looking forward, not back.
All of us who believe in equality could support him in that.
