Dear Mr. Little:
Thanks for the opportunity you offer me, as a fellow Washington and Lee University alumnus, to help "send the traditions of character, excellence and commitment we developed at W&L to the U.S. House."
December 7, 1941, some forty-three years before you graduated, I was a freshman at W&L, relaxing at my fraternity (Lambda Chi Alpha) after a big party the night before, when we learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The next day, half of the student body enlisted in the Army, Navy or Marines. These early volunteers suffered enormous casualties, especially in the Pacific. We freshmen enlisted months later as we came of age; but, W&L being a very friendly, sociable school, I knew most of the early enlistees quite well. You are right, therefore, in praising W&L "character, excellence and commitment."
Without suggesting that you lack any of these qualities, my question to you is why you think your opponent, John Lewis, is so lacking in these qualities as to recommend your replacing him In the United States House of Representatives.
John Lewis' character and commitment have been painfully tested. You acknowledge his "success" as a Civil Rights leader but fail to notice how John Lewis, no less than our fellow W&L enlistees, risked his life, and very nearly lost it, in terrifying battles against powerful, vicious enemies of our nation.
You also fail to notice that the struggle against oppressive violence is far from over, especially in the South. As William Faulkner put it, "The past is never dead, it's not even past."
The Republican party has chosen since Nixon a "southern strategy" that very effectively converted Democratic bigots into Republican bigots, and made the word "liberal" a code word for "N——lovers." If John Lewis sinned in voting, like the Democratic party's leader, the hated "liberal," Nancy Pelosi, "99.8% of the time," would you, Mr. Little, join the ''no" block of Republicans who seek to turn the clock back and reinstall a long discredited racist, sexist oligarchy?
Recalling W&L tradition, and the Virginia society I grew up in, I hasten to add, that apart from opportunist politicians, I never heard blacks spoken of disrespectfully until I went north to Philadelphia after the war to complete my education at the University of Pennsylvania.
I am proud of my Southern heritage (the famous novelist and Southern historian, Clifford Dowdey is a relative); but I am fearful, like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, that people like you, Mr. Little, are enablers providing respectable encouragement to a growing group of armed racist militias and other violent rightist hate groups. I don't have any idea of what things were like at W&L during the Reagan years when you were there, but I'm proud of W&L when I see at alumni meetings here in Atlanta the enthusiasm with which recent black and female graduates have embraced the "Southern Gentleman" tradition we inherited from our once president, Robert E. Lee.
Fraternally,
LANDON DOWDEY
P.S. Another Southern friend of mine, Carlos Dews, an author, professor and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome recently wrote in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, an Italian journal, and reprinted in the Philadelphia Inquirer
“Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. . . . But I know what [they] mean when they say . . . they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.”
photo: Mr. Fenn Little, courtesy, Fenn Little for Congress
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