Click here for linkYesterday’s New York Times published an A-section article actually highlighting that, about 50 years before Rick Perry’s birth, his alma mater, Texas A&M, had Klansmen on campus: “In 1968, Mr. Perry left home for Texas A&M, a deeply conservative university whose yearbooks early in the century included Ku Klux Klan-robed students.” This wasn’t just an interesting historical tidbit, mind you, or evidence of how far Texas has come in the intervening century.
Rather, it followed closely on the heels of the article’s opening sentence: “Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who often waxes nostalgic about his small-town roots, grew up in an almost all-white rural area where many referred to slingshots as ‘niggershooters.’”
The Times did, however, add, “After leaving for Texas A&M, Mr. Perry found himself on a socially conservative campus where the dominant force was the all-male, almost all-white Corps of Cadets, which he joined, later coming to embody ‘Aggie’ spirit as a ‘yell leader.’” Later on, the story notes that in the intervening decades, the number of black students at A&M “has inched up now to 3.4 percent of the student body.”
In other words, during his time at A&M, Perry would have been hard-pressed to find a group to join that wasn’t “almost all-white.” Perhaps the Times thinks the more virtuous course would have been for Perry to have abstained from involvement in any on-campus extracurricular activities whatsoever — or, perhaps better yet, not to have gone to college in his home state in the first place.
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