They were there to get negro spirituals.
"It's so important to get Negroes registered to vote in large numbers in the South," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told Mr. Johnson two months after the election, predicting it would be "this coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that will really make the new South".
"We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968," he said, "so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are".
(As one character tells Roosevelt, "You a Negro.... I'm a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God's creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got blindeyetis.... A Negro don't know he's a Negro. He thinks he's a white man. It's Negroes like you who hold us back").
Paige was there mainly to accrue pension time that he never got in the Negro leagues and to throw a few pitches before games.
But if Odom wants another chance with the Clippers, he'll need to contact the guy in charge of team personnel, the guy who got Vinny Del Negro fired and Doc Rivers hired: Chris Paul.
He said that his goal was to "show not only the Negroes but also white people that Negroes got married, had beauty contests, gave parties, ran successful businesses, and did all the other normal things of life".
A lot of middle-class Negroes got out of here, too.
His accuser is the poor-but-truthful Sterling, who tells him: "Negroes got blindeyetis.
"He said he lived down in Albany, and he asked me, 'With all this trouble down there, how do you explain that I've got a hundred and sixty Negroes working for me, and they're just as happy as can be?
