The Butler Saw It, and the Court Should, Too

You can know something intellectually but not emotionally and, therefore, not know it at all.

That’s what I realized after viewing “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” I’ve read Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil-rights era and watched old news clips of the burning of the church in Birmingham, Alabama. But seeing on film how brutally blacks were treated -- as second-, if not third-class citizens -- is to feel the humiliation and pain. That’s why I wish Chief Justice John Roberts and four of his Supreme Court colleagues would see it, too. Maybe it will help them understand how wrong they got it when they recently decided that we are so far past Jim Crow that we can dispense with a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I’ll buy the popcorn.