Many, many years ago, almost all Southern newspapers were local newspapers, reflected local opinion, were locally owned and were very Southern.

Can you imagine any of that today? Can you imagine that?

Local newspapers.

Locally owned.

They reflected local opinion.

They were very Southern.

In our Day of Diversity, every one of those concepts is pure heresy.

Most of those hundreds of newspapers ran a little one-frame comic piece called “Hambone,” which is also unimaginable today.

“Hambone” was an old uneducated black man who always had something both funny and wise to say. It was written and drawn by a white man, but the question is, why would Southerners want to hear from an old black man?

We liked it because it expressed the wisdom all of us had heard from old, uneducated black men who looked at the world from a friendly but cynical point of view, a common sense point of view that put things in a way we had never quite looked at it before.

Hambone was funny, but he often said important things an educated white man would not have said.

The one I remember was when Hambone was looking a bit angry. He said,

“I is heared a heap about civil rights, but ain’t nobody very CIVIL when they talks about ‘em.”

Very true of those of us on both sides. But it was something only Hambone would have noticed. He didn’t know what it was everybody was talking about, but he wished they would just TALK about it and not be so mean.