Wednesday, June 6, 2007

New Uses for the Race Card

A black elected official who demanded at the last minute to ride in a peach festival parade in Delaware is now calling her placement at the back of the parade racist, according to The News Journal.

Members of the Middleton Historical Society say they bent over backward to accommodate Diane Clark Streett, the Register of Wills, after she signed up late and didn't have her own car to ride in.

But Streett was not happy. In a letter to the society, she professed to be "extremely disappointed" at being placed at the end of the parade.

"I was not only segregated from the other elected officials but I was placed behind a dance school, tumblers and miniature ponies," she wrote. "I should have been positioned with other [Caucasian, male] county elected officers."

Organizers said Streett was near two of the biggest crowd favorites -- Little Miss Peach and the Middletown High School Marching Band -- and in the same spot that Republican state Rep. Richard C. Cathcart, R-Middletown was given last year.

(September 14, 2005 post on the old Tongue Tied blog. The new "Tongue Tied" blog is here)

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