Why on earth has this not been publicized? I wasn't aware until today that Donald Trump Jr., that alt-right little animal murderer, visited the Neshoba County Fair at Philadelphia shortly after the Republican convention where his father was named as the Republican nominee. Click here for an article in Mississippi Today by Adam Ganucheau and R.L. Nave, dated July 26, describing the visit.
That's not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; it's Philadelphia, Mississippi, population 7,500.
Why would a rich golden boy Manhattanite like Donald Jr. visit the Neshoba County Fair at a tiny town 100 miles from the nearest "big" city -- Jackson, Mississippi, population 125,000 -- and make a political speech? To learn the answer, you have to go back 53 years, to the summer of 1964.
That was when three civil rights workers -- 21-year-old black Mississippian James Chaney and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24 -- were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone in Philadelphia knew who had done it, but nobody was talking.
Fast forward 16 years to the summer of 1980, when the memory of the 1964 killings in Philadelphia had not faded. Shining star Ronald Reagan had just been nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency. Shortly after that convention, he gave a major speech at the Neshoba County Fair at Philadelphia, Mississippi, with all the national media present, which became known in U.S. political history as Reagan's "states' rights" speech.
For those who don't know, the U.S. Constitution sets out in detail the powers of the federal government. All powers which are not expressly granted to the federal government in the Constitution are given to the states. So the concept of "states' rights" would seem to be an innocent and straightforward idea.
Not in the racialized atmosphere of 1980 (or 1964). The phrase "states' rights" was a dog whistle: To those who heard the underlying meaning, it meant that the federal government had no right to impose integration on the South. "States' rights" meant that Mississippi -- like Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and the rest of the Confederacy -- should be free to make black Americans sit at the back of the bus, drink from separate fountains, and generally submit to white supremacy, without federal interference.
With that history, Donald Trump Jr. -- who has recently made a good half-dozen statements or tweets with connections to white supremacist or alt-right sites -- travels to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to make a political speech.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
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