On Carter Woodson and Washington Post ‘Redneck’

<div style="text-align: center"><img src="/files/u2/woodson-carter-large.jpg" title="carter woodson" alt="carter woodson" height="165" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="124" /></div>Washington Post columnist <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/29/AR2008012902215.html " target="_blank">Harold Meyerson today writes </a> about the Democrats dilemma. They can nominate Sen. Clinton and risk bringing "every Hillary-hater to the polls." Or, the Ds can pick Sen. Obama, who might <br />prompt a redneck reaction..."<br /><br />Nice! And people wonder why the Democrats have been losing rural America recently.<br /><br />Meanwhile, however, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/stripmining-black-history_b_83918.html" target="_blank">Jeff Biggers has a wonderful story</a> in the Huffington Post about Carter Woodson, a black man from the coalfields of southern West Virginia who attended Berea College in Kentucky, eventually earning his doctorate in history at Harvard. (Picture above.) Biggers explains how rural West Virginia helped the young historian to become the "Father of Black History." Biggers understands what Meyerson doesn't — that black and white, rural and urban, redneck and otherwise, we're all a lot closer than we imagine. And that one region's troubles are visited on us all.