But the question is legitimately raised: Does the Republican leader in the Senate pine for the days when black men were required to use toilet facilities marked COLORED? One doubts that the specifically Jim Crow features of the old world in the South are those that Trent Lott pines for. When Sen. Richard Russell joined most Southern senators in the late '50s to plead the cause of "interposition," they were asking that the Supreme Court be denied the authority it was arrogating to be the agent of social change.
Randall Jarrell, in his novel "Pictures From an Institution," frames the idea of the nostalgia of one professor with great wit: "He had diabetes and used to get an injection of insulin every day, but I don't believe he ever got one without wishing it was Galen giving it to him. There were two things he was crazy about, the 13th century and Greek; if the 13th century had spoken Greek I believe it would have killed him not to have been alive in it."
It should not be supposed that someone who pined for the days of Rome, or pines for the days of Washington and Jefferson, pines for the restoration of slavery. But Senator Lott will probably have to face it, that whatever else is to be said about the Old South, segregation was an ugly feature of it, and that to think back poignantly about how it was in those golden days requires, if you are a public figure doing the nostalgia, the reiterated expulsion of features of that life. Not the kind of thing that goes well with birthday-cake festivities, but Lott got into this mess, and has now to get out of it.