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"He said, Joe, I wanted to tell you something then that I’m going to tell you now. You are going to..."

By only

Saturday August 23, 2008

“He said, Joe, I wanted to tell you something then that I’m going to tell you now. You are going to take my office, aren’t you? And I said, Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman. And he ran his hand back and forth across that mahogany table in a loving way, and he said, You see this table, Joe? This is the God’s truth. He said, You see this table? And I said, Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman. He said, This table was the flagship of the Confederacy from 1954 to 1968. He said, We sat here, most of us from the Deep South, the old Confederacy, and we planned the demise of the civil rights movement. Then he looked at me and said, And now it’s time, it’s time that this table go from the possession of a man against civil rights to a man who is for civil rights. And I was stunned. And he said, One more thing, Joe, he said. The civil rights movement did more to free the white man than the black man. And I looked at him, I didn’t know what he meant, and he said in only John Stennis fashion, he said, It freed my soul, it freed my soul.”

- Joe Biden on John Stennis at Strom Thurmond’s funeral. (via lizistwentythree:langer)