cotton curtain
n.— «Cotton Curtain. Five thousand miles apart, two men speaking different languages were last week discussing “free voting.” Said one: “I will arrest any man who is against us…on election day….” Said the other: “Let a handful vote this year and two handfuls will vote next year. You will be justified in going to any extreme on election day…to keep them from voting.” The first man was Colonel Moczar, chief of Security Police of Communist-run Lodz in Poland. He was trying to keep followers of the Polish Peasant Party’s Stanislaw Mikolajczyk from voting (see FOREIGN NEWS). The second was Theodore C. (“The Man”) Bilbo, inciting fellow Mississippians to “take care of” any Negroes who might want to vote in his state’s primaries.» —“Cotton Curtain” Time July 8, 1946. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
The edge of the Grand Canyon. A remote mountaintop. A medieval cathedral. Some places are so mystical you feel like you’re close to another dimension of space and time. There’s a term for such locales: thin places. And: did you ever go...
Wilson in Charleston, South Carolina, stopped using the term conversate after being told it’s not a real word. On the contrary, conversate is well-established in Black English as a verb that suggests speaking in a register that’s warmer...