Our beloved country might still have slavery if the Democrats in the South had won the Civil War. And what would Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, Jerrold Nadler, Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy be doing now?
Republican “white privilege” saved the Union, freed our Black brethren and, since the Civil War (which was anything but civil), the Democrats have tried to hold their former slaves back. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan because they wanted to get rid of Blacks, Jews and Catholics.
Democrats passed Jim Crow laws (look it up).
Even after voting rights were passed, with many Republican votes and over opposition by Southern Democrats, Democrats in the South put restrictions on Black people trying to vote, including poll taxes. Even after World War II, Southern Democrats enforced segregated schools and it took President Dwight Eisenhower (another Republican) and the National Guard to desegregate them.
So when we celebrate Juneteenth, let everyone remember which political party made this happen (the Republicans) and let everyone thank a Republican, if not every day, at least on Juneteenth (the 19th day of June) — the new U.S. national holiday.
MARCELLA LOGUE
Enfield
A recent syndicated column by Eugene Robinson, published in the Valley News, suggests that resistance to critical race theory is a “cynical ploy” by Republicans (“GOP’s critical race theory fit is a cynical ploy,” June 30). In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth.
Critical race theory is a theory rooted in Marxism, where everyone is either an “oppressor” or “oppressed,” or, in the language of critical race theory, “a victim of systematic racism.” If you are white, you are automatically a racist. If you are Black, you are automatically “a victim of systematic racism.”
The only remedy to this oppression, according to author and historian Ibram X. Kendi, a major proponent of critical race theory, is, in his own words, anti-racist discrimination, present discrimination and future discrimination. In other words, you solve racism with more racism. How disgusting. How un-American.
It is Republicans and independents who are fighting the Democrats’ cynical ploy, a favorite tactic of theirs in which they divide Americans by race, gender, income, etc. Shameful!
JAMES NEWCOMB
North Haverhill
I always got a chuckle out of a linguistic artifact that persisted through the years that students operated Dartmouth radio (“Dartmouth ends the Big Green age of radio,” June 27). To the newsreaders, that town across the river you know as Norwich was “Nor-rich.”
Is that the old English pronunciation, I wonder, that was carried up here from Connecticut along with the town name itself in the 1760s? Maybe that font of Northern New England history, Dartmouth Professor Emeritus Jere Daniell, can tell us.
DICK MACKAY
Hanover
A photograph accompanying the “A Life” story about Verna Dunn (“ ‘She was quite gifted at connecting,’ ” June 28), was captioned: “Dunn’s grandfather sharpens his saw while she is nearby about a century ago.”
Actually, he is sharpening the blade of the cutter bar of a mowing machine. It is impossible to sharpen a saw on a grindstone. It’s an easy mistake to make if you aren’t familiar with saws or mowing machines.
RICHARD ANDREWS
Springfield, Vt.