"It's Fun to Eulogize The People You Despise"

Herewith, a bit of nostalgia from Tom Lehrer's National Brotherhood Week:

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks;
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize
The people you despise
As long as you don't let 'em in your school.

One of the byproducts of growing older is the occasionally tedious chore of having to explain dated cultural references to one's children. Hours could be wasted explaining everyone mentioned in Paul Simon's A Simple Desultory Philippic or Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire.

Be that as it may, former Dallas County, Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark died recently and was, if not exactly eulogized, remembered by former civil rights activist and current Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

Clark became the unwitting negative stereotype of the Southern police officer for his generation and an even more unwitting agent of change. The national media attention that followed his (anticipated) overreaction to civil rights demonstrators in what became known as Bloody Sunday actually helped the civil rights movement convince Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Years later, after losing office, Clark was convicted for conspiracy to import marijuana and served nine months in prison. By all accounts, Clark remained unrepentant unto death.

Sheriff Clark was never anything more than a footnote to history. Today, however, one still occasionally hears breathtakingly absurd claims that America is as racist as it was fifty years ago, a claim that cannot possibly be made in good faith by anyone who remembers what the America of fifty years ago was really like. In the story of our collective journey toward a more perfect union, Clark deserves no eulogy, but he needs to be remembered.