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June 20, 2007
Did you read the news today? Nine firefighters were killed yesterday while battling a blaze in a furniture warehouse in Charleston, SC, the most killed in the course of duty since six died in a fire in Worcester, Mass., in 1999. (Of course, that does not include the hundreds that died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.)
My newspaper, The Providence Journal, ran headshots of all nine and arranged them as though in a high school graduation album. What was striking to me were the two black faces - firefighters James Drayton and Melven Champaign - among the nine.
To me it was a sign of changing times in the Southeast, home to NASCAR. But of the 47 drivers currently battling it out in the Nextel Cup Series, none are black. Indeed, the last black driver to win a major NASCAR race - Wendell Scott - did it 44 years ago.
On Dec. 1, 1963, Scott won a Grand National (now Nextel Cup) race in Jacksonville, Fla. and remains the only black driver to have won a major race in NASCAR's 58-year history.
You gotta believe that NASCAR, which, like the NFL, has a highly sophisticated marketing arm, is aware of this and would love to have a black star among its drivers. And now that Formula I has its version of Tiger Woods - Brit Lewis Hamilton who, after wins in Montreal and Indianapolis, cemented his lead in the drivers' championship - NASCAR must be green with envy.
NASCAR may have its roots in the southeast, which is traditionally Good Ol' Boy Country, but as the racial roster of felled firefighters from yesterday's tragic fire in South Carolina shows, the South, it is a-changin'.
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