In the eyes of Scott’s Democratic critics, a black Republican is an outrageous anomaly — and fair game for racist abuse.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
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ne of the less famous figures of the civil-rights movement was Lincoln Ragsdale, a veteran Tuskegee Airman who was instrumental in desegregation efforts in Arizona, where his work was supported financially and politically by his friend Barry Goldwater, at that time a prominent businessman with growing political ambitions. When Ragsdale and his wife, Eleanor, moved into a previously all-white neighborhood in Phoenix, cowardly vandals, operating under cover of darkness, painted the word “ni****” in two-foot-high letters on the front of his house. His neighbors, both sympathetic and embarrassed, offered to repair the damage, but Ragsdale refused to paint over the …