The confirmation process for Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions brings up the question: how long should you hold a grudge?
Sometime in the past, Sessions allegedly made racist remarks and may have been civil rights unfriendly sometime in his past. Don't ask me to verify it. When I crossed Alabama on the way to the Vietnam War in a car with New York license plates, I drove as fast as legally possible, didn't stop for gas or peanuts and haven't been back since.
When Douglas MacArthur teamed Uncle Frank's (aka Chaplain Francis Duffy) "Fighting Irish" 69th New York with the 4th Alabama to form the WW1 "Rainbow" division, there was a riot over who got the best of whom at Fair Oaks in 1862: the Irish or the Alabamians. MacArthur's idea of integration back in the day was to have the Irish and Alabamians get into fighting trim by training together on Long Island, NY, before shipping out to fight the Germans. MacArthur must have known what he was doing. We won that war.
The next to last straw in Alabama-Irish relations was August 11, 1921 in Birmingham. That's the day when Methodist preacher E. R. Stephenson assassinated Father James Coyle, while sat Coyle on the parish rectory's front porch. Coyle, an immigrant from County Roscommon, Ireland, had committed the sin of marrying Stephenson's daughter to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican.
The Ku Klux Klan arranged for Stephenson's defense. Stephenson's lawyer was bright young Klansman Hugo Black. Stephenson plead temporary insanity. The prosecution and defense degenerated into an argument over whether Gussman was a "white" Puerto Rican or "black" Puerto Rican... it wouldn't be murder if you shot someone for marrying your daughter to a "black" Puerto Rican. Defense attorney Black had the lights turned down in the court room to make Gussman look darker. Stephenson was found not guilty. Hugo Black was elected to the U.S. Senate and later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt. In time, Black became a highly regarded liberal Justice known his support of civil liberties... although he never stopped being an anti-Catholic.
The final straw in Alabama-Irish relations was when six of Alabama's Democratic Electoral College electors did not vote for John Kennedy.
"On February 22, 2012, Bishop William H. Willimon of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church presided over a service of reconciliation and forgiveness [for the assassination of Father Coyle] at Highlands United Methodist Church in Birmingham."
When my son called from college at Tucson and asked what I was doing today. I said,
"Writing a letter to the newspaper."
"About what?"
"Jeff Sessions."
"Who's Jeff Sessions?"
