Profiling Mississippi Governor ("and likely presidential candidate") Haley Barbour in The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson asked Barbour why Barbour beleived that Yazoo City, Mississippi "was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence." Barbour's response:
"Because the business community wouldn't stand for it. 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." (Note how Barbour did not give the full title of the Citizens Councils: they were "White Citizens Councils." As Diane McWhorter writes at page 98 of her book Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001), the White Citizens Council was "a resistance group started in the summer of 1954 in Mississippi by an Ole Miss football star turned plantation manager as a discreet alternative to the Ku Klux Klan. Its purpose was to mobilize the middle class behind the fight against the Brown decision. Its basic strategy was summed up by the Selma lawyer who had organized the first Alabama chapter: 'We intend to make it impossible for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage.")
On growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, Barbour said: "I just don't remember it as being that bad. 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." (The following year Medgar Evers was assassinated by KKK member Byron De La Beckwith in Jackson, Mississippi.)
Ferguson also notes that Barbour's two sons were educated at the Manchester Academy, a private K-12 school built (in the words of Harold Kelly, Barbour's high school football coach and former principal of Yazoo High) "for people who didn't want their children to go to public schools after integration."
Called on his apologia for the White Citizens Council, Barbour isued the following statement:
"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." Um . . . OK (not). Now maybe he can explain what he meant in the early 1980s when he warned a staffer who commented about "coons" at campaign rallies that if the aide "persisted in racial remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."
No comments:
Post a Comment