Trump Pardons Arpaio!

[Rev. Rye]

A racist fuck like Adolf will never get over having had a black man in the white house.

It's a shame, then, that he's over a century too late to have done anything about it. Fun fact: shortly after gaining the Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner. Many racists did not take it well, with Senator Benjamin Tillman (D-SC) saying: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."

And this anonymous poem might actually be the crowning achievement in racists losing their goddam minds over a President inviting a (remarkably moderate) black man over for dinner:

This was reprinted in multiple newspapers (without the pithy typewritten remark) over the next few years, and, incredibly, resurfaced in June 1929 when Lou Hoover invited the wife of Oscar DePriest, the only black man in Congress at the time, for tea, along with several other Congressman's wives. The South lost their minds once again, and Tillman's eventual successor Coleman Livingston Blease would not only put the poem into a resolution condemning the tea, but read it aloud during a session of Congress. It would be stricken from the Congressional record, after Hiram Bingham (R-CT) protested. Blease would eventually withdraw his resolution, saying he did so only "because it gave offense to his friend, Senator Bingham and not because it might give any offense to the Negro race"

Well, the poet did get one thing right: eventually, there was a Dinah Washington. No relation to Booker (she was named by Lionel Hampton), and none of her seven husbands even shared a first name with any of TR's four sons, and to the best of my knowledge, she never performed before an American president. At least they got the name right.