JM, the Protestant ethic, the Bible's injunctions, St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians etc supported notions of slavery that bothered masters of entire economic systems and societies not at all. It was the way of the world. Where people were cast as sub-humans with beasts of burden, what difference blacks or mules?

We had our liberty, our pursuit of happiness, our natural rights. The president of a white college in Georgia told me 50 years ago he taught from St. Paul that slaves were to obey their masters. I asked his students if they could accept federal injunctions to obey the law. No, they said, but they could accept their children doing so.

If these "natural" rights Greg refers to came from the Creator, it's a safe bet that they were rooted in an earlier Christianity. I heard it from the pulpits of the American South. Queen Elizabeth referred last week in America to how the Empire changed in this respect and lauded Virginia as the first state to apologize to blacks.

In Atlanta, in MLK's home, I asked where he got his physique. He looked soft but he wasn't soft, believe me. He could manhandle six-foot-one former-boxer me. "In the pool, the YMCA," he said. "The black YMCA." Jackie Robinson, who got his first break in Montreal, couldn't eat with his Dodger teammates. Few demurred.

Branch Rickey is one of my heroes.