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out to me, just as Al Smith had laid out to me years previous just what the New York City vote meant in regard to the State of New York - “as you come up to the Bronx line there are 4,000,000 plurality.” “The Southern states are yours,” said Black. “They belong to the Democratic party and they will vote Democratic, but you see how they compare every Democratic candidate - they're bound to - with Robert E. Lee. That's what we have as the ideal in our minds. It's very hard to sell a man like Al Smith to people who are thinking of Robert E. Lee in the background.”

I got a very real political lesson out of that. I learned something that I had never known before about the South, about the Democratic vote in the South, about the Solid South. They were not for slavery. They weren't pining around wishing for slavery back. They were modern, sophisticated people. They knew the plantation system had broken down of its own weight. Black owned a newspaper in Baltimore, either the Baltimore Sun, or some other paper. He was a very politically wise person. I learned a lot from him in just that one evening. He pointed out things to me that other people were too polite to point out.

He'd come to like me because I knew about his horse. He had confidence in me right away, because I had heard about his horse and knew all about it, knowing what the horse had