On the eve of Juneteenth—the annual commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved blacks in Texas—former vice president and current Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden offered fond remembrances of segregationist senators and looked back on the Dixiecrat era with nostalgia. At a fundraiser at the ritzy Carlyle hotel in New York on Tuesday, Biden remarked, "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me 'boy.' He always called me 'son.'"

As Gene Demby wrote at NPR's Code Switch, calling black men "boy" was a Jim Crow-era tool to emasculate and dehumanize them: "If manhood was the precondition for the actualization of rights, 'boy' denied that status even to other men who might lay claim to it. In a region steeped in manners and terms of deference, no black man was ever old enough to age out of 'boy'; no white person was ever too young to toss it in his direction."

The late Eastland, a former Mississippi senator who opposed to civil rights and integration, often spoke of blacks as "an inferior race" and complained about the "mongrelization" of races, according to his New York Times obituary. And he called racial segregation "the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony."

At that same fundraiser, Biden also praised his relationship with former Georgia senator Herman Talmadge, another late staunch segregationist who opposed civil rights. Biden called him "one of the meanest guys I ever knew," but, he added, "at least there was some civility...We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done." Talmadge later became governor of Georgia and tried to close public schools rather than integrate them.

Besides the proximity to Juneteenth, Biden—the vice president to the first black president in America—offered his memories of these segregationists on the same day that House Democrats announced that they would consider a committee on reparations for slavery. Also on that day, ahead of Donald Trump's first official 2020 campaign rally in Orlando, the Proud Boys, a violent far-right "Western Chauvinist" group, marched through the city streets making the "okay" hand gesture, which has been coopted as a white-power symbol by white supremacists. Perhaps a reminder that much of the Jim Crow era is not as far behind this country as some would like to believe.