Thursday, 07/29/04

On Tuesday morning, listening to an NPR story about Barack Obama, I was struck by Renee Montagne's strangely tortured description of Obama, if elected, as "only the third black American to serve in the Senate in the last 100 years." His speech was the best fifteen minutes at the convention, but nothing in the NPR profile was as interesting as the unstated assertion that there were black senators more than fifty years before the civil rights movement.

Half the mystery, of course, is the 17th amendment, which only made senators directly elected by the population in 1913. A day later, I'd poked around enough to encounter the bizarre fact that not only was Mississippi the first state to send a black person to the Senate, but the gentleman in question served the balance of Jefferson Davis' term, who had decamped to run the confederacy. That's hilarious! Mississippi ought to put a capsule version of that fact on its license plates.

The next morning Slate ran a short piece on the subject, and did a better job than I would have anyway, so go read that. 09:38PM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type