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Barbour's Feeble Attempt to Justify His Controversial Remarks

After coming under fire for praising the racist White Citizens Council, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour issued the following statement to "clarify" his earlier remarks:

"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."

According to some people, this statement should be enough.  We should just move on.  You know, forgive and forget. 

Hell no! First of all, his brief statement is not an apology.  It is merely a feeble attempt to justify his earlier remarks. Obviously, he issued the statement to protect his career and presidential aspirations. 

Also, his earlier statement is a part of a disturbing pattern.  Remember, this is the same man who had no problem with the State of Virginia omitting any references to slavery from its ridiculous proclamation recognizing Confederate History Month. According to him, that controversy did not amount to diddly.

Barbour is either racist or completely oblivious to issues impacting African Americans. For him, the historical suffering of black people is simply an afterthought. As far as he is concerned, black people are virtually invisible. Someone like him should not be a governor or the head of the Republican Governors Association.

 

Haley Barbour Defends a White Supremacist Group

Mississippi's soil is soaking wet with the blood of hundreds of lynched black people.  Many nameless and faceless black bodies rest at the bottom of the Mississippi River.  Mississippi is where Emmett Till was beaten beyond recognition, "shot in the head and thrown in the Tallahatchie River with a 70 pound cotton gin tied around his neck." Mississippi is where civil rights leader Medger Evers was shot and killed by white supremacists. Mississippi is where civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered.  In his book The Autobiography of Medger Evers, Manning Marable writes:

"Between 1882 and 1927, 517 African Americans were lynched in the state of Mississippi, the highest number in the nation for any state during this period."

Against that brutal historical backdrop, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) recently attempted to revise history by claiming that the White Citizens Council was a group of town leaders who kept the Ku Klux Klan out of town. That is similar to other revisionists depicting the Confederate Secession as a glorious and heroic event.

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According to the Huffington Post, when asked why his hometown of Yazoo City was purportedly the only municipality to integrate its schools without violence, Barbour told the Weekly Standard that:

"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 fact, the White Citizens Council was nothing but a clean cut, corporate, white collar version of the KKK.  Both organizations supported segregation and white supremacy.  They simply used different tactics to enforce their racist ideology.

In the Huffington Post article, University of Michigan professor Robert Mickey states:

"This was an organization that spread very quickly across the South, directly in response to Brown v. Board of Education," said Mickey in an interview with The Huffington Post Monday. "Usually they were against violence because of its harm to economic development; firms wouldn't want to relocate to places that had a lot of violence. So their tools of slowing down the South's democratization was to use economic intimidation. ... They intimidated black parents from signing petitions demanding that school districts be desegregated, sometimes by printing the signatories in local newspapers, which oftentimes led to the signatures being recanted because the parents understood and feared the consequences of being publicly outed like that. So Barbour's right -- on one hand, they often helped out on the Klan, and a lot of times they were interested in deterring white mob violence. But Northerners are right that it's like the Klan."

This story is significant because Barbour is not just your average, ignorant racist.  As Governor of Mississippi, Barbour is shaping government policy in Mississippi.  As the Chairman of Republican Governors Association,  he is extremely influential.  Many consider him to be a serious, potential U.S. presidential candidate.  In the unlikely and frightening event that he is elected President, Barbour would shape U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Imagine what type of judges he would nominate to the United States Supreme Court and other federal courts. Imagine what type of legislation he would propose.

It is not surprising to see someone like Haley Barbour rise through the ranks of the Republican Party.  After all, the Republican Party did resort to the Southern Strategy to persuade racist Southerners to join.  It is the party that opposes affirmative action and immigrant rights. 

Confederacy Controversy "Does Not Amount to Diddly"

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (R) made the controversial decision to recognize April 2010 as Confederate History Month and initially omitted any reference to slavery. Appearing on CNN's State of the Union on April 11, 2010, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) said that controversy is making "a big deal out of something that does not amount to diddly." What do you think?