Haley Barbour is one of those politicians who is inexplicably popular with press. Despite his many years as a DC lobbyist, his 2 terms as governor of the state of Mississippi make him an automatic GOP contender. He really stepped in it this weekend when he did an interview with the Weekly Standard and said segregation wasn’t that bad and praised the Citizen’s Council as helping with integration.
Here’s some of the remarks that got him so much attention:
Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.
“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
Many people have already taken apart this nonsense. The Citizen’s Councils were just the kinder, gentler versions of the KKK. See this reference and this reference (warning PDF) tell more about the history of the Citizen’s Councils.
The most brain dead defense of Barbour award goes to Jim Gerghaty of the National Review who tells us that pointing out racism is the real problem.
Working against Barbour is that he is a distinctly Southern in his drawl and mannerisms, and Southern politicians have a higher bar to clear when it comes to accusations of racism. Because of the experience of slavery and segregation, the South is associated with racism in the minds of a significant chunk of the electorate. The perception may be outdated, false, unfair, and hypocritical, but it is out there. Still, we’ve hit a new low when an interview in which the subject recalls attending a Martin Luther King Jr. speech is the trigger for the accusation of racial animosity.
I’m still not quite sure how the argument against Barbour gets summarized quickly; I think it will be something like, “he fondly remembers the racist Citizens Councils” or something. Of course, all Barbour said was that the Citizens Councils kept the Klan out of the town, and that the business community didn’t want to see violence in response to the integration of schools. Members of the Citizens Councils undoubtedly held reprehensible views, but is anything Barbour said untrue? Is Haley Barbour to be smeared as a racist, once the single most damaging accusation in our society, over this? This comment outweighs everything else he’s done with his life?
Of course, Haley Barbour is not just a one time offender. He recently expressed that he didn’t understand the big deal with celebrating the Confederacy – it didn’t amount to diddly. He also said that one of his aides would be punished by turning into a watermelon.
Of course that doesn’t mean that Haley hasn’t learned to be sensitive about questions of race. Ben Smith noted Barbour’s sensitivity to race in item about an old campaign of the Nit Diddler from years ago:
But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be ‘’coons’’ at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.
Then as now, the real crime was that a reporter heard the remark.