Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, made one true statement when he questioned Sonia Sotomayor in July. He admitted he wouldn’t have had the courage to oppose segregation.

What an extraordinary thing to be thinking then, to be ruminating on the possibility that one is weaker than Frank Johnson, an Alabama judge who ruled in favor of Rosa Parks in 1955 when Graham was an infant. Later, local congressmen prevented the Nixon administration from nominating Johnson to the Supreme Court, but Jimmie Carter placed him on the Court of Appeals that served both Georgia and Alabama.

Graham didn’t have the advantage of Carter, whose mother, Lillian, knew the ways of the deep south well enough to blunt the effects of segregation in Plains, Georgia, without actually precipitating incidents that would endanger her family or the people she befriended.

Unlike Carter, whose father was a successful businessman who used his profits to buy land and whose mother was a nurse who joined the Peace Corps, Graham’s parents ran a bar and grill in Central, South Carolina, that catered to men getting off work at the local textile mill before OSHA and the EPA existed to protect workers from injury and air pollution.

His mother died of Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer that can be cured if treated early. His father died when he was 21, leaving him with bills to settle and a 13-year-old sister to support. While Carter had the connections necessary to be appointed to Annapolis, Graham financed his education by joining ROTC.

As a boy working in the bar and later the adjacent pool hall, he no doubt learned early that ugliness existed, and would be immediately redirected towards anyone who didn’t conform. I rather suspect he faced his share of hazing by both the mill kids and the scions of the local Baptist and Methodist middle class who looked down on tradesmen, especially those who trafficked in sin.

The sad thing is that Graham’s life’s experiences have reinforced the values of a closed, rigidly stratified society. If he had drawn different lessons from his own life, he might have seen Sonia Sotomayor as a kindred spirit: a single person committed to the law who managed to earn a law degree from a prestigious school despite losing a father.

Instead, Melissa Harris-Lacewell suggested, he joined the crowd that harassed her evoking images of the adults screaming at Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock in 1957 when Graham was two. He remains the nice boy who was isolated in that mill town and is still trying to prove he’s one of the gang.

Note:
Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," The Nation website, 17 July 2009.