Barbour Exposes Himself As Racist

It looks like the field for the Republican nomination for president has just been reduced by one -- unless the Republicans want to drop any pretense of not being the party of racists.   The governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour (pictured), jammed his own foot all the way down his throat a couple of days ago when he wrote an article for the conservative Weekly Standard.   Barbour, who has been making noises like he wanted to run for president (and has been amassing a huge campaign fund for the effort) probably killed any chance he had at the nomination by revealing himself in the article as a racist.

Speaking of the civil rights struggle in the South during the sixties, Barbour said,   "I just don't remember it as being that bad."   He either has a terrible memory, or he just thinks civil rights workers being beaten and killed,  and hoses and dogs being loosed on African-American women and children is really not a bad thing.   I have news for him.   The rest of us Americans who lived through that time know it was very bad, and it wasn't a secret -- all anyone had to do was look, because much of it was on TV.

That would have been bad enough, but he had to take it further and try to defend the White Citizens Councils that were organized in the South in response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court.   The only purpose of these Citizens Councils was to discriminate against African-American citizens, but Barbour tried to gloss over that and differentiate them from the KKK.   Frankly, if there was a difference it was only in their tactics, because their goals were identical.   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.”

The saddest part is that he didn't even realize the racism he displayed with that ridiculous statement.   It took a firestorm of criticism to wake him up and make him realize how stupid he sounded.   Yesterday he tried to back up and do some damage control, saying:

“When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.”

It's pretty bad that it had to be pointed out to Barbour that he was defending racism.   The truth of the matter is that the Citizens Councils were racist organizations.   About the only difference between the KKK and the Council members were a little money and some more education (for all the good it did).   Racism Review points out the difference between the KKK and the Citizens Councils (and it wasn't much).   Here's what they had to say:

"In fact, the Citizens’ Council did see themselves as ‘better than’ the KKK.  While Barbour’s absolutely wrong that the Citizens’ Council was just “an organization of town leaders,” in fact, they were as committed to racial inequality as any robe-wearing Klansman.   What’s true is that there were divisions among whites during the civil rights struggle.   Barbour reveals more here about his class standing that perhaps he intends to, but it the Citizens’ Council was the refuge of upper-middle class racists while the KKK drew more from the working class.   This move – distinguishing the ‘good (supposedly) non-racist whites’ from the ‘bad (obviously) racist ones’ is always the way that upper-middle class whites let themselves off the hook when it comes to racism.  It was true in 1954, and it’s true today."  

The upshot of all of this is that Barbour's run for the presidency is probably over.   That is, unless the Republican Party wants to admit what many Americans already know -- that they became the de facto home for racists after Democrat Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Acts passed, and still offer a haven for those racists.