About a month ago, Shaun Kenney stirred up quite a bit of controversy here on Bearing Drift with his essay about Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Support Anti-Immigration Laws. Among other fine points that Kenney made was his assertion that Americans, conservatives in particular, might not be so resistant to immigrants if they weren’t Hispanic.
While opposition to illegal immigration does not equate with racism, there’s no denying that for many Americans the desire is to keep “them” out.
So I was baffled to see this headline in the Washington Post: Immigrant detention center in Va. would be mid-Atlantic’s largest.
It’s not so much that the center is coming to Virginia. But, it’s going to be built in Prince Edward County.
Prince. Edward. County.
Does no one read history any more?
Prince Edward County was the location of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County a case associated with Brown v. Board of Education which led to the implementation of Massive Resistance. Such were the effects of Massive Resistance that schools in Prince Edward County remained closed from 1959 until 1964. Massive Resistance was a policy promoted by the Democrat Byrd Organization led by former Virginia Democrat governor and U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Modern day Virginia has long fought to make amends for the ugly history of slavery and segregation. In 1985, Virginia elected the nation’s first African American Governor. In 2008, for the first time in decades, Virginia voted for the Democrat, sending the nation’s first African American to the Oval Office. Then Governor, and now DNC Chair Tim Kaine said that “Ol’ Virginny is Dead.”
Well true, Tim, you and Mark Warner before you tried to mortally wound the Commonwealth on many occasions. But, I digress.
It just seems to me that someone wasn’t thinking when they decided to place a new immigrant detention center in the former home of the “segregation academies.”
