When I heard Mitt Romney say in his anti-atheist speech that "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King, my first reaction was, "whaaat?" And, indeed, apparently it's not true, and Romney has now been forced to resort to a defense that even I invoke only as a last resort: "I was an English major": "'I'm an English literature major,' he insisted at one point. 'When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn't necessarily mean you were there.' (He meant the Super Bowl, of course.)" But after first hearing Romney make the claim, I started googling and pulling down some books, and while the specific claim isn't true, in fact Governor George Romney had an extremely impressive civil rights record, and is a reminder of what that moderate wing of the Republican Party represented, in those years before Nixon's Southern Strategy: He created the first state civil rights commission, he led a march in Grosse Pointe and a 100,000-person civil rights march in Detroit, and he protested Western Michigan University's invitation to Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, after which the university invited King to speak. So I'll cut Mitt Romney some slack regarding the details about his father. A better question is this: Is there the slightest reason to believe that in the same position as his father, as it was becoming clear that the Republicans' path to the presidency ran through the South (Goldwater secured the nomination in 1964 in part by opposing the Civil Rights Act, and Strom Thurmond switched parties that year), he would have shown similar courage? Mitt Romney's shape-shifting adaptation to whatever the Republican prejudice of the moment is (anti-immigration rhetoric, or denouncing the kind of health plan he enacted as "socialized medicine") suggests that he wouldn't have been doing any marching. -- Mark Schmitt
