One of the less famous figures of the civil-rights movement was Lincoln Ragsdale, a veteran Tuskegee Airman who was instrumental in desegregation efforts in Arizona, where his work was supported financially and politically by his friend Barry Goldwater, at that time a prominent businessman with growing political ambitions. When Ragsdale and his wife, Eleanor, moved into a previously all-white neighborhood in Phoenix, cowardly vandals, operating under cover of darkness, painted the word “ni****” in two-foot-high letters on the front of his house. His neighbors, both sympathetic and embarrassed, offered to repair the damage, but Ragsdale refused to paint over the slur. Why? “I wanted to make sure that the white folks knew where the ni**** lived,” he said.
I thought of Lincoln Ragsdale when I read about Twitter blocking the label “Uncle Tim” and other racial slurs directed at Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican who delivered the televised response to President Joe Biden’s recent speech to Congress. Twitter would have been doing a great public service if it had left that vile stuff right there in the sunlight where it could be clearly seen and understood. Like the graffiti painted on Lincoln Ragsdale’s home, it isn’t an indictment of the man targeted — it is a confession made publicly by his enemies. This is who they are.
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