I don't care what Trent Lott REALLY thinks. As evidence of his racist-pandering segregationist past mounts, he is clearly a statistic as Senate Majority Leader, especially with Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma displaying some balls over the weekend, calling for new leadership elections.

With all of the political maneuvering sure to follow, it will be easy to lose sight of WHY this is such an important issue. Lott's comments advocate segregation - the codified separation of the races as existed in the Jim Crow south into the '50s.

Besides the legal ramifications of Jim Crow laws, an even more intimidating method of enforcement - lynching - mandated segregation with an iron fist.
THAT is what Lott's screaming insensitivity conjures up: the threat of an arbitrary, painful, humiliating death by white mob literally hanging over the head of every black woman, child, and especially man who would dare displease ANY white.

Lott's patrician, plantation mentality averts its eyes from this stark reality:

Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42 white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia (492, 39), Texas (352, 141), Louisiana (335, 56), and Alabama (299, 48). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the twentieth century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8 white), 83 in the racially troubled postwar year of 1919 (76, 7, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23, 7), and 28 in 1933 (24, 4).

Statistics do not tell the entire story, however. These were recorded lynchings; others were never reported beyond the community involved. Furthermore, mobs used especially sadistic tactics when blacks were the prime targets. By the 1890s lynchers increasingly employed burning, torture, and dismemberment to prolong suffering and excite a "festive atmosphere" among the killers and onlookers. White families brought small children to watch, newspapers sometimes carried advance notices, railroad agents sold excursion tickets to announced lynching sites, and mobs cut off black victims' fingers, toes, ears, or genitalia as souvenirs. Nor was it necessarily the handiwork of a local rabble; not infrequently, the mob was encouraged or led by people prominent in the area's political and business circles. Lynching had become a ritual of interracial social control and recreation rather than simply a punishment for crime.

THIS is what Lott's advocacy of segregation stirs from the memory of a nation: black body parts as souvenirs of vicious, violent oppression. Imagine the massive blinders and self-absorption required to miss the implications of his jaunty remarks.