Did You Know?

I did not know that Harold Ickes, Hillary's adviser, was beaten during Freedom Summer by a gang of racist whites, so badly that he lost a kidney.

Joe Conason, salon.com: Democrats, put down your swords

The Clintons, along with many of the activists closest to them, are veterans of the civil rights struggle, notably Harold Ickes, the hard-bitten lawyer and advisor who was nearly beaten to death by a racist gang in Mississippi more than 40 years ago while trying to register black voters. What Obama represents is a future for which they fought valiantly before he was born. It is ironic, of course, that the price of that triumph has turned out to be so high for them personally.

time.com: Clinton's Superdelegate Hunter

[T]he younger Ickes was raised in the Washington bubble of his time--but he migrated West, worked as a cowboy on a ranch in Northern California and harbored little interest in the kind of work done by his father, who died when the boy was 12. That changed in the summer of 1964, after graduating from college, when Ickes headed south to work for the civil rights movement. The next year, he was beaten so severely by a gang of whites in Louisiana that he lost a kidney. Ickes has been a practicing political operative ever since.