Sandy Stimpson, re-elected as mayor, helps Mobile transcend race (Aug. 26):
MOBILE, Alabama — For the fifth straight mayoral election in this port city, Mobilians on Aug. 24 showed that people (even supposedly antediluvian Southerners!) are discerning enough to let considerations other than race drive their votes.
Incumbent Sandy Stimpson, one of those dreaded white conservative Republicans who is supposed to be inherently guilty of systemic racism, won a third term in a landslide against four opponents. His 57% of the vote nearly doubled the 29% of six-term city councilman Fred Richardson, who is black. In all three of Stimpson’s elections, the number of black people registered to vote exceeded white registration. In the two elections prior to Stimpson’s, when Mobile was still a white-majority city, it elected black Democrat Sam Jones as mayor — the first time when black registration was just 43%.
Maybe, just maybe, plenty of good people view the world without looking through racial lenses.
Stimpson certainly has given Mobilians reason to transcend race…. [Full column here.]
It’s past time for Biden to put race-based farm program to pasture (Aug. 26): In at least one case, for at least one time, the Biden administration is tacitly acknowledging that government cannot overtly discriminate on the basis of race.
This should have been clear 57 years ago. But better late than never.
This summer, federal judges issued three preliminary injunctions against a Biden-backed, congressionally created program that would have provided $4 billion in debt relief for farmers who are of minority ethnicities. It was a “no whites need apply” program, which clearly runs afoul of both Supreme Court case law and of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The injunctions were thus entirely predictable and appropriate.
It is highly unusual for an administration not to appeal a preliminary injunction against a program duly passed by Congress and signed into law by a president. Yet that’s what the Biden team did — let the injunctions stand, and let the law be held in abeyance, without a court challenge. A 60-day appeals deadline passed Monday without comment from the administration. [Full column here.]
