Word: rastus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rastus. Only when an outrageous act angered him did McGill drop his civility. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, he assailed the "abscesses in America's society-the jackals, the cowards, the haters, the failures who hate achievers, the yapping feist pack that tries to drown out truth, those who dislike Jews, Negroes, Catholics, liberals." He won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1958 editorial that deplored the bombings of an Atlanta synagogue and a newly integrated Tennessee high school as the work of "rabid, mad-dog minds" and warned: "When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people...
...judged by the enemies they make, McGill was pained by the hatred he drew. His mailbox and front yard were bombed and raked by rifle fire. Telephoned threats often awoke him throughout the night. Crosses were burned outside his home. Redneck politicians drew votes by railing against "Rastus McGill," "Red Ralph (only a kaw-muh-nist talks like thet)" and "those lyin' Atlanta papers." McGill could detest the ideas of his enemies, but not the men themselves, nor could those who got to know him fail to respect him. In the '30s and '40s McGill and Georgia...
Assuming that you can take the country out of a country singer, there was a lot to take out of Glen Campbell. His home town, Billstown, Ark., is about as country as you can get. The downtown section still consists of a grocery store, where Rastus Williamson sits on the feed sacks and talks to Sewell and Sissy Dabbs all day long every Saturday. Color television has come to town, though - in the form of the set that Glen gave his parents for Christmas. This week, in fact, relatives and friends will be gathered at the Campbell home to watch...
...protest against the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, McGill's daily front-page columns were avidly read and misread by both Southern racists and Northern liberals. To the grasseaters of rural Georgia he was a "race-mixer" and worse; former governor Eugene Talmadge referred to him as "Rastus McGill." To the liberals he was the South's single beacon of rationality; they were apt to overlook his claim that "this was never a question of being for integration or against...
Ethnic and racial humor, virtually taboo during the selfconsciously liberal years following World War II, is more acceptable than ever. The jokes are not the same as in the old vaudeville days, when they were based on the comic ignorance of the victim. The Rastus and Izzie jokes are gone. Today it is largely Jewish comedians who tell jokes about Jews, Negro comics about Negroes. Italian Comedian Pat Cooper (Pasquale Caputo) tells how his seven-year-old son asks what N.A.A.C.P. stands for. When he is told that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...