Word: rastus
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...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...
Central Weakness. In the opinion of many Georgians, the Journal and the Constitution are a disgrace to all red-blooded white Southerners. Roy V. Harris, a rallier of the state's racists, usually refers to the Constitution's publisher as "Rastus" Ralph McGill. While in office, Congressman Davis frequently castigated the papers from the House floor. "The mud throwing of this collection of little peewees," he said in 1961, "amounts to about as much as a flock of grassbirds*in a fence corner chattering at an eagle...
...Through humor we create a stereotype, forget after a while that the stereotype is only a stereotype and begin to take it for the real thing. So all minority groups become in the eyes of the majority the exact image the jokesters turned them into: good natured, easy going Rastus and Mandy, shrewd money loving Ikie and Abie, alcoholic and irresponsible Pat and Mike. No offense intended mind...
...Rastus" Corning is a captive of Albany's notorious O'Connell machine, but the convention stage managers built a whoop-it-up show around him, paraded him, Jim Mead and dignified Herbert Lehman around the hall in red jeeps, got set to make a drive for the veterans' vote...