Barbour Swims Upstream Towards a Bridge Too Far
I played with the children of my grandmother’s “colored” maid and still remember my own young soul’s recoil over “separate but equal” schools. It took neither a genius nor a saint to fully understand a systematic wrong occurring every single day right under one’s nose.
Those “Citizens Councils,” to which Governor Barbour gave such mitigating virtue in his Weekly Standard interview, were in fact the upper class version of the Klan. No, the Citizens Councils did not resort to cross-burning, lynching, threats of lynching, or even public anger to keep life as it had always been in the South — segregated.
Instead, the Citizens Councils relied on the same type of financial and public-pressure machinations regularly now employed by Democrat race-hustlers and their NGO friends in the community-organizing outfits, like ACORN. The fact that racialists of a new variety have replaced the ones of old doesn’t change the nature of the beast at all or the immorality of their actions.
But if Haley Barbour thinks for even one minute that asserting the two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right mantra will save him from the consequences of his truly egregious comments on the race issue, then he needs a long vacation, not a presidential campaign.
That there is indisputably a double-standard on racial issues between Democrats and Republicans ought to be apparent to any ninny with a working set of eyes and ears. If a Republican had said of candidate Barack Obama that, of course, he was an appealing candidate as the first “articulate, clean-cut African-American” to run, that man would not now be vice president but would have been consigned to the farthest corner of social oblivion.
If a Republican had said that Barack Obama had the advantage of having no “negro dialect,” but that he could put one on any time he wanted to, that man would not still be on the White House guest list, even if he was the Senate majority leader.
If a Republican former president had said of candidate Obama that in former years he “would have been fetchin’ us coffee,” that man would not have been invited to take over a White House press conference but would never have been heard from again.
Haley Barbour may be a fine governor of Mississippi. He may be the best good ole boy lobbyist that the inside-beltway folks have ever heard spin a good yarn for his clients or constituents. And all of that may be just wonderful for the citizens of Mississippi, the Republican governors, and the whole Grand Old Party. But taking those assets onto center national stage in prime time, carrying the baggage of Jim Crow and an obviously muted understanding of its legacy in the minds and hearts of all who lived through it — both black and white alike — is a bridge beyond too far.
Only someone who habitually denies reality, in my humble opinion, could possibly think otherwise.
The only thing I heard Governor Barbour say is that the White Citizens Council in Yazoo City would not permit the KKK to use violence to block federally ordered school integration, and that’s why the schools in Yazoo City were integrated swiftly and without violence after the federal order came out in 1969.
Don’t know if that’s accurate or not (although the part about the successful integration in Yazoo City appears to be correct as far as I can tell). Don’t see anything wrong with saying it, if it is.
Now, if Mr. Barbour suggested that we return to a Democrat Party enforced Jim Crow system, I’d be more than a little distressed…but, he didn’t say that.
Yes, that is accurate that is exactly what Gov. Barbour said despite the multiple attacks of people trying to change his comments. He also explained that in Yazoo City where he lived it was a group of businessmen.
I believe that regardless of what Mr Barbour would have said the author would have taken offense. Obviously she is only open to the I am white so I am guilty of ALL of societies evils mind set. I was born in South Carolina in 1957, I attended segregated schools but I never saw a person associated with the Klan. To compare the Citizens Council with ACORN is a stretch, I do not recall them being a proud supporter of the Democratic Party but I do remember my great aunt mentioning that they produced a form of justice for white wife beaters and drunks who refused to provide for their families, a much needed social service of the 1950s. I can see why people would prefer the label of “coward” for not discussing race. If your recollection of historyis not in line with the author’s narrative, then you must be a racist.
What Barbour said in describing the pre-civil rights era was: “I just don’t remember it being that bad.” That statement could only come from someone who didn’t really see black people AS people. White people had all rights, black people had none – NONE – and everyone, of both races, knew it.
What Barbour’s statements show is a fundamental lack of respect not only for every southern black person, all of whom lived in constant indignity, subservience and fear toward any and all whites, but for whites — like Shriver and myself (and I’m several years younger than she is, and not even from the deep south) — who even as children could see that this entire system was deeply, morally wrong. Only a racist could possibly think that being black in the south under Jim Crow “just wasn’t that bad”.
Isn’t Texas governor Rick Perry the Chairman of the Republican Governors Association?
Who cares any more about any of this racial grievance b.s.? I’ve had the compensatory treatment view forced so far down my throat that I now find such a feature *attractive* in a candidate. What’s worse? Injustice committed centuries or decades ago, or injustice that’s being committed right now (whose ultimate goal is to completely destroy our constitutional republic). I wonder how many others feel the way I do?
I agree with you, David.
“Like Governor Barbour, I am as Southern as they come, born and bred in Atlanta a mere two generations removed from a plantation in Mississippi.”
Sister, I hate to burst your bubble but Atlanta is not “the south.” Mississippi is a whole other thing believe me. We lived there for 14 years, and in all that time we never saw another governor that was better equipped and better qualified to be President than Haley Barbour. If he handles the Presidency like he did Mississippi post Katrina, he will be a fantastic President. I am doing all I can to see that he gets a decent run at it ahead of such losers as Gingrich, McCain, Huckabee, etc.
Well bless your little heart. I hate to burst your bubble, honey, but back in the 1950s and 60s, when I was brought up here, Atlanta was most certainly not only the South, it was the absolute cultural center of THE SOUTH. That Atlanta is now a cosmopolitan city with more Yankees and foreigners than most other places in the country does not change what our city was prior to the fall of Jim Crow and the complete change in the power structure of our politics.
I rarely meet another Atlanta native today in my suburban enclave. While growing up here, everyone was either an Atlanta native, had strong Southern roots from a neighboring state or stayed so far outside the mainstream of social life that he was a non-entity. And that’s a fact, honey.
Yes, Atlanta was very southern back in the 50′s and 60′s. Ok, we get it.
That doesn’t change the fact that Barbour didn’t say anything racist or derogatory in his comments about the citizens councils. If he had, I would be one of the first ones siding with you. The problem is that Conservatives eat their own far too quickly. It’s good that we are willing to turn on our own party when it does wrong, but that doesn’t excuse you for helping to slander Barbour based on a lie.
I haven’t decided who to support for President in 2012, but an out of context quote certainly isn’t going to decide for me.
Um, the date is Dec. 23, 2010, not 1950 or ’60. And all of this doesn’t pertain to the subject at hand. Governor Barbour is not a racist and made no racist remark. This writer had to screw her head on backwards and look over her shoulder to make a racist remark out of what he said.
I second your sentiments, Kyle-Anne. Atlanta has greatly benefited from infusions of new blood from both foreigners as well as Americans from the Northeast and other parts of the country. These infusions have lifted Atlanta up culturally from its nadir of the Jim Crow years. It’s truly a world class city now, as are Austin and the Carolina Research Triangle, which have benefited from similar migration patterns.
My parents are old school New Englanders, and they (unfortunately) raised me with prejudices about Southerners. Atlanta was my first direct experience of the South. Within ten minutes of stepping beyond Hartsfield’s doors, all of the prejudices instilled in me by mom and dad were largely dispelled. Atlanta’s cosmopolitanism is truly spellbinding. Its exotic mix of New World multiculturalism and classical southern gentility is charming almost beyond belief. It’s like Seattle or Portland (OR), except the people are friendly and unpretentious.
Mr.Thompson,
Due to the past injustices, the ‘victims’ have a blank check forever. The only thing they have to do – and are doing – is to bring up the old stuff on daily / weekly basis.
It works.
Merry Christmas.
The guilt balance is running low and will eventually run out, though. Then the blank checks will start bouncing. Then what?
You are correct that the guilt tank is getting low but with the repeal of DADT it will be full in no time!
Dear Tim, and if the victims don’t bring it up daily/weekly, the news media will do it for them.
Nobody ever said it better!
Barbour shouldn’t run because he failed to see malice where there was none.
But Oscambo should run because he is a certifiable sociopath.
Lady, take locic 101 again,(if you ever did), and this time, PAY ATTENTION!
My comment is a reply to David Thompson, God bless him!
So Governor Barbour is disqualified because his memories of growing up in a small town in Mississippi is different than your experiences in 400 miles away in Atlanta? That’s it?
I’m shocked your pathetic thesis earned an article earned here – I’m there are lots of left-wing sites looking for hit pieces.
Old Soldier wrote:
“So Governor Barbour is disqualified because his memories of growing up in a small town in Mississippi is different than your experiences in 400 miles away in Atlanta? That’s it? ”
Um, no. Try reading it again.
Read it again and still not getting it. I read a woman who grew up in Atlanta calling a man who grew up in a small town 400 miles away a liar because he claims to have had a different experience.
I grew up 50 miles west of Boston (want to talk about a racist city?) during the whole bussing conflict. Never heard adults discuss it all – it wasn’t far away but it just didn’t affect us.
You must be kidding. How old are you? I was in Middletown, RI. It was on the news in the evening. To me it was very frightening. My parents certainly discussed it. They reassured me that it was isolated. I was Black and lived in an integrated community (well my family a two others made it integrated). The busing and the movie roots made middle school very interesting for me.
I am going to go out on limb an assume you are white. What happened in Boston was very raw. It was an embrassment for everyone in New England. Those poor white people were scapegoated and no one really cared. It only truly hurt the children (black and white) in those schools. They were not busing Black children to Beacon Hill. Were I lived and in most of New England everyone else was going to their neighborhood school. But, in Boston they were busing and it looked bad if you paid attention. It made the virtual capital of New England look like some town in Mississippi. That was not supposed to happen, we have been integrated since the 1700s.
Old Soldier: This latest brouhaha is (by my count) Barbour’s third racial controversey in the past three years. A year ago he idiotically defended Bob McDonnell’s Confederate History faux paux by saying that it did not “amount to diddily” (and thus compounding one faux paux with another).
Back in 2007 we news consumers learned that Barbour has had a lengthy association with the Council of Conservative Citizens, for which even Peggy Noonan thought he should be disqualified from holding national office.
And now, with Barbour’s latest mispronouncement on the race issue, I think it’s safe for everyone to concede the obvious: he’s a bigot. His dog whistles are getting progressively louder, and harder to ignore.
I was with you until you called him bigot.
Kyle Anne, you are one of my favorite writers. I would have appreciated exact quotes from Haley Barbour and your comments on those instead of your “guilt ridden memories”.
I have a manufacturing plant in the middle of an “economically disadvantaged neighborhood”. I almost went broke in 2009 continuing to pay my workforce of minorities and Arkansas hillbillies (their name, not mine!).
Since 2009, I have had over 20 thefts or break ins of my plant to which the police blame the neighborhood and it’s occupants.. The police are really too busy to do anything because they are over burdened with shootings, domestic violence and larger thefts that are more important than mine. In fact, one detective told me to move since I am almost the last employer in the area except for the really big boys who can afford on site security.
Where do I go for justice? Where do I go for fairness?
Your article impugns a possible candidacy for Barbour based on memories and statements from 50 years ago. What about the current situation of a vast population of minority populations that steal for their drug problems, single Mothers who are underage and the vast majority of minority workers who work for cash while drawing all kinds of federal, state and local government checks?
Again, I haven’t read Mr. Barbours exact statements but I will when I get time but I know this…the state of Mississippi had no riots, no group of people during Katrina who acted inappropriately and with his leadership, they started digging themselves out with no hand wringing or complaining like LA still continues to do. The state of Mississippi is growing, pays it’s bills and is in a heck of a lot better shape than NY, CA or Illinois where our esteemed President is from.
Why don’t you judge Mr. Barbour by his actions much more than his words? If more writers of articles did that, we might not have the most Socialist government of all times.
You are a good writer and I support you but Haley Barbour is not the enemy of a successful Republican Presidential candidacy or of the African American population of Mississippi. Writers who wax on about their feelings instead of the facts can do more damage.
I’ve looked at a lot of Citizens Council archives, and even though I agree that Barbour was answering a question and has been taken out of context, and some CCC’s probably did play the role of tamping down the overt violence of the Klan (and some may have exercised more positive roles), Kyle-Anne Shiver’s remembrance here — and her conclusion — are compelling.
It’s a shame that contemporary race peddlers have made it difficult to simply learn about these things and talk about them without blanket projections of blame for events that occurred in the past, or whitewashing of other facts, or descent into preening, selective outrage. It’s rare that someone is able to shrug off the fraught politics and simply explain something.
And one of the most insidious ways we misremember the Jim Crow era is telling or inventing stories that blame poor whites for everything, while creating these clean-handed, upper-class white heroes who trot in and save the day. It sells in Hollywood, of course.
So although I think Barbour is getting a bit of a raw deal (and to actually revisit the history he’s talking about would be interesting), the fact that the other side plays dirty doesn’t justify lowering one’s own standards. I personally believe that anybody who has ever been associated with Al Sharpton, for example, has no business holding elected office. Of course, that would eviscerate the DNC, but at least they could take comfort in knowing that Pat Robertson couldn’t be president either.
Having read the article Ms. Shriver links to, one is somewhat confused. It is a Politico column by Ben Smith, containing a quote from a story that appeared in the New York Times in 1982. It purports that Senate candidate Barbour, upon hearing an aide make an insensitive remark within earshot of the NYT reporter, then makes another insensitive remark, specifically:
“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.”
Huh? What? Does that makes sense? The wording of Babour’s alleged remark is at the least awkward. Is it supposed to be a direct quote? Would Barbour compound the error committed by an aide by doing the same thing?
Seems somewhat vague to me. But, vague is good when it comes to mud-slinging.
Unfortunately the article is archived behind a pay wall, so I could not (would not-give the NYT a nickel? Not me!) read the whole thing. It apprently is not a direct quote. Neither Ben Smith at Politico or Shriver give any expansion of the circumstances either.
Who was the reporter? One Howell Raines. Later as executive editor of the NYT, Raines encouraged the career of one Jason Blair. Blair was the notorious creator of fake stories and other deceptions published by the NYT for a couple of years.
From Wikipedia: “On May 14, 2003, while he was still Times executive editor, Howell Raines acknowledged at a massive meeting of Times news staffers, managers, and its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., that Blair had gotten the breaks he had enjoyed because of his race.”
Perhaps the issue of race was something that affected Mr. Raines’ perception in more ways than one. The NYT refers to Raines’ story in an editorial on 12/21/10, but again, no direct quote. They do call Barbour’s remark ‘indefensible’.
Did Raines hear the remarks personally? The quote in Politico doesn’t say, but fron the wording, my guess is Raines got it second hand, at least. In other words, maybe it ain’t even true, y’all.
I do not write to defend Barbour. Mr Barnour’s presence in the political arena merely serves a greater purpose, as does everyone else’s.
To attempt to discourage anyone because of what a biased media may say merely does their work for them.
Thanks Maximus for putting a little more truth behind the circumstance and flavor of these remarks.
If someone does something wrong, I am all for pointing it out. But the time for faux apologies based on biased or outright, unfair reporting is over. Clearly, the Left will continue to do all they can to create situations that put Conservative leaders in negative positions. After they come up with a lie, then the MSM will talk about it so much that most people will think something unfair, or most likely racist, did happen and have to disqualify a person and their achievements because of a left manufactured situation that isn’t even true.
I am upset with Kyle Anne because she falls into their trap.
Poll ANY gathering of Democrat voters and ask them who it was that said, “I can see Russia from my kitchen window!” Something like 95% of them will answer “Sarah Palin,” when it wasn’t her statement at all. It was a statement made in a skit intended to demean her done on Saturday Night Live by Tina Fey. Yet the leftist press repeated it so often that most Democrats (and not a few “Independents” and Republicans) believe that Sarah Palin really did utter those words. It’s a perfect illustration of how a lie can take on the trappings of truth simply by repetition.
I am a southerner by birth and a 20-year resident of Mississippi and I’m damned glad to have had Haley Barbour as my governor. Probably he would make a good president but I can’t see him overcoming the prejudice so widespread in the rest of the country.
The White Citizens’ Councils certainly had a bad reputation and probably in general justified but she offered no facts to refute Haley’s claim about Yazoo City. The results there seem to argue against her.
All that drivel she related to build her bona fieds nearly made me puke. Even if it’s true, it still sounded like she cut/pasted it out of some cheap paperback novel. She probably subscribes to the Atlanta Constitution newspaper.
Gulfport, Miss.
Actually, dear readers, a good deal of what I wrote was edited out of this column. The result is that I appear somewhat confused and less up on the current totally lopsided and egregious state of racial double-standards that now exist. In my original article, I took pains to say that Barbour’s anticipated run for the presidency ought to be put into its proper current context, i.e., Barbour would be running to unseat America’s first black president (Hello?), from Mississippi (!!!) no less and with a long record of completely (and erroneously) misstating the arduous and very painful fight for equal rights that occurred right in his (and my) backyards.
Anyone — and I mean anyone! — who thinks that this would not be the gift that keeps on giving 24/7 from a racialist, pro-anything-black media is either on some heavy dope or brain dead. If even I — slightly to the right of Ann Coulter — find Barbour’s past and current remarks on the Civil Rights Movement and the Jim Crow laws that spawned it objectionable, then just imagine how any black man or woman (and every white liberal and INDEPENDENT) must think of it.
It’s one thing to clamor that affirmative action, racial quota systems, reparation scams like Pigford, ACORN, Holder’s refusal to prosecute the Black Panthers and all the rest have switched the racial discrimination positions of blacks and whites. I agree they have. And anyone who reads a single biography of Lyndon Johnson will understand that the guy was just a condescending racist with a political opportunist’s streak a mile wide. Regarding him as a saint, the way Democrats (especially blacks) do, requires the same blindness exhibited by those who deny that the South fought mightily to keep segregation in place forever.
There is really still no moral equivalency between all the reverse-racism of the past 40 years and Jim Crow. Those things are still all small change in historical terms and will never amount to the same degree of actual harm that was done to blacks because of Jim Crow. And anyone who glosses over the actual threats given and carried out by Citizens Councils all across the South during the civil rights movement — not to mention the real beatings and arson and fire hoses employed (all by Democrats, it should be remembered) — is not only willingly distorting the truth, but making himself UNELECTABLE.
Barbour is probably one of the best good ole boys that ever wiled his way to both fantastic riches and political success on the strength of a silver tongue, but that will not erase his sins in the eyes of a general public historically attuned to rhetorically lynch him the minute that Southern drawl hits the national-focus airwaves.
And, no, I certainly do not accept the false guilt applied to every white person — especially Southerners — for the past 50 years. But by the same token, I do actually remember segregation and the whole Civil Rights movement and it would take a complete ninny to think it was no big deal or that horrible injustices on a massive scale did not actually happen. If you research some of Haley Barbour’s past comments on the matter, as I have, you would be hard pressed to think he was dealing with reality on the subject.
This is beginning to be a new and very bad joke. “UNELECTABLE!”
“And anyone who…[said, does, wishes, has, might, starts to, insists that, etc.]“…makes…himself UNELECTABLE.”
Ron Radosh, among others, has unelectabled Palin, but Ron is published here, and now Kyle adds Barbour to the list. They are able to see what we other poor mortals have no special eyes to see, i.e., the future. These worthies have their fingers on the pulse of the nation. They know what we don’t want and they know better than the rest of us what we will do and won’t do. But can’t everybody play? As far as my poor judgment goes, Romney is unelectable. (Why vote for a librul R when there are so many librul Ds available, and one already ensconced in that big white house?) I’m sure a lot of readers here would point to other Repubs as being unelectable. Oh well, opinions are like you-know-whats.
Fred: Thanks for saying better what I would have said. You are absolutely right. Our candidates will be picked off one by one until the MSM has chosen the correct candidate for us. And they will be aided by those on “our” side, just as happened 2008. With friends like these….
So we just give in to the media. Exactly how is that a winning strategy?
To be blunt, I’m tired of erstwhile conservatives conceding the entire language battlefield to the left for every issue. How about we fight backon our own terms for a chang? How about we counter this on our terms?
And conservatives wonder why we keep losing the long term battles.
You say,
History does go back quite a bit further than this suggests and I have perhaps unrealistic hopes that this may be changing for the better. I rather like a “southern drawl” but prefer the perhaps more dignified Virginia accent to which I am accustomed.
Should he not be unduly discouraged by this sort of thinking — he should not be — and seek the nomination I guess we will see. I very much like Governor Palin and would like to see her run; however, I am well aware of Bill Buckley’s maxim about nominating the most electable conservative available. Still, if she does not seek the nomination and he gets it he might have a decent chance of winning the general election — particularly against President Obama. Against Secretary Clinton, I don’t know.
I’m older than EITHER of you and grew up in a State that early in the 20th Century had the highest per-capita membership in the KKK than ANY other State…including BOTH Georgia and Mississippi. That State, by the way, was Indiana. Still, I attended integrated public schools as early as 1948. I was never so shocked as I was to see “Whites Only” signs at the restrooms and drinking fountains at the Nashville, TN, Greyhound station in 1960. In short, I lived and grew up surrounded by those with some ties to the KKK–even if tenuous–but was unaware of Jim Crow until I first heard the term used on TV news at around the time the Civil Rights Act was being debated in 1964. I have a black foster son and daughter-in-law, three black grandchildren, one of whom is currently playing pro basketball in The Netherlands, and three black great-grandchildren, plus a half-black great-grandson by my white step-granddaughter and her now-absent black boyfriend. I can hardly be classified as a racist, but I’m getting sick and tired of being accused of “racial insensitivity” or being classified as racist because I oppose the politics of a black man who happens to be currently occupying the White House. I suspect that Mr. Barbour feels much the same way. We simply CANNOT continue to be held responsible for our ancestor’s “sins”–or even our parents’.
The time must be over for us to continue to allow the left to set our narrative.
Haley Barbour is most definitely less racist than Obama and company. Barbour is definitely someone who loves this country, who is efficient and made his state a better place, unlike Obama who does not appear to like this country and who is making this country a worse place than he found it. My candidate at the moment is still Palin, but everyone tells me she is not electable. Why do they assume that? Because the left media have convinced them of that. Well, isn’t that special? So the left defines things for us to suit their purposes and then we cower because we know that the public will swallow the propaganda of the left and therefore so and so does not have a chance.
This must stop. The Tea Party has begun the process of picking candidates and changing congress despite the noise of the left media and the gullible public, of which I am sorry to say Miss Shiver is a now a bona fide member.
From this moment on we on the right must make a pledge not to allow the left to define our narrative and especially not to fear to put up good candidates because they will be skewered by the left and don’t stand a chance.
The only reason Palin “is not electable” is because people have become Shiverized. I do not shiver. I brazenly say that whoever would get traction as a candidate, even a quiet non threatening person, whoever it would be, the left would make mincemeat out of. We must not choose the candidate the left wants us to choose. Enough. If Haley Barbour wants to run, or Sarah Palin, or whoever, let each make his case and may the best one win, not the best the left chooses for us, but the best conservative.
Here, here, well said. What we are witnessing, is a well organized effort by the left, to eliminate any Republican candidate who has a chance to remove Comrade Obama from the White House. Republicans/Conservatives better wake up and stop eating their own.
I don’t believe that Mr. Barbour has any racist tendencies or any segregationist skeletons in the closet. Nonetheless, the lamestream media would create a straw man to beat all strongmen if he somehow got the nomination. This is especially true if he ran against the current president. I wish I had enough faith in the electorate that they could see through the lies and subterfuge of the leftist media jackals, but I don’t. I can see it now. “Join us Tuesday night at 7:30 as Katie Couric at her perkiest attempts to force her way into the antebellum Barbour plantation house to find those elusive sheets in the closet….” A Barbour candidacy probably has about as much hope as I would have as a reformed drug abuser.
On the 1980′s Barbour quote putting “watermelon” and “blacks” in the same sentence: You probably need to be Southern to understand Barbour’s meaning, but I can tell you it makes perfect sense. I can just hear him saying it, actually. And no, it’s not flattering to black people.
The inference is that when it comes to watermelon, blacks devour it with such unbridled, fanatical relish that a person being “reincarnated as a watermelon and put at the mercy of blacks” would be akin to assigning said person a tortuous death at the hands of a flesh-eating mob of mongrels.
It’s quite disgusting. It would be the kind of sick joke no gentleman would ever make in front of a lady down South. And for Barbour to have said it — even in private in the 1980′s — shows a quite disgusting view of not only black people, but a morally-challenged personal conscience, in my opinion.
I was personally revolted by the comment — and I’m white, for crying out loud. And if my husband made such a comment in my presence, he would know in a split second how I felt about it.
The question is whether he actually said that. He may have but considering the second hand New York Times provenance I have major doubts.
This is also another case of letting the left set the playing field but you may be right because the left have won the propaganda war.
And Irish folk might hear the same about a bottle of whiskey? So what? Stereotypes abound for all people on this planet and none have longevity if they’re not based on some truth. There is such a consensus on typical food that our most favored identity group likes that there’s a name for it: soul food.
I think they need to grow up and get over it.
Aside from the fact that you protest too much, the problem here, Ms. Shriver, is the awkwardness of the “quote’-it simply doesn’t sound verbatim. It appears paraphrased-not first-hand. I’ve gotten around enough to be familiar with idiom and am something of a student of our language and its history.
I’m sure Barbour said something, I’m just not sure Howell Raines got it right, or cared. You are pinning your whole argument on that, and are giving the left exactly the reaction they want.
I worked in politics in Chicago and California for nearly 40 years and I know BS when I see it. I’ve peddled some myself, heh. I look at a story like this and I know something isn’t kosher. There’s some facts mssing. And probably not by accident. It sounds like something a liberal, self-loathing southerner on the make at the New York Times would want to hear-and print.
As to your somewhat arrogant attempts at put-downs; Take a look in the mirror and try to understand the consequences of your own fear-based thinking. The reality is your are communicating through a medium that is fast replacing the media you fear. The change was manifest this past November.
To paraphrase “Give’em hell” Harry,
If you can’t stand the heat, get back in the kitchen.
I researched the comment, too. I was weary of the source, also. No, I do not think Howell Raines an impartial observer. On the other hand, I could find no reference to Haley Barbour’s disputing the quote and that quote makes Barbour look so callous, unrefined and downright bigoted that I would think he would have raised a mighty stink and produced a witness to corroborate him if the quote were inaccurate. And since the quote sounded perfectly Southern to me and very much like something good ole boys I’ve known could have said, I gave the quote due notice.
If that quote was made up, then Mr. Barbour should have sued the paper for libel and produced witnesses to clear his good name. He didn’t. And as far as I could find, he didn’t publicly dispute it either. If someone has evidence that I’m wrong on this, please produce it and I’ll gladly apologize.
As you well know, politicians never sue for libel in this country. It’s one reason the media can get away with such thorough character assassinations.
You have mentioned the “black” “watermelon” quote twice without stating the quote, or providing a link. Sorry, but bringing up something without so much as a source just isn’t good enough.
You are outraged, and that’s fine, just make sure you know why you’re outraged. To me, it looks like you fallen for the character assassination hook, line, and sinker.
I’m weary of journalists who can’t use the English language properly; e.g., using “decimate” to mean, “nearly obliterate”, saying “graduated high school” instead of “graduated FROM high school”, “weary” instead of “wary”, etc.
The dumbing down of America continues unabated, but not unabetted.
“It’s quite disgusting.” “I was personally revolted by the comment…”
“It would be the kind of sick joke no gentleman would ever make in front of a lady down South…” “…shows a quite disgusting view of not only black people, but a morally-challenged personal conscience…”
Holy crap! I live in Dixie and we tend to reserve those kinds of adjectives for the ravings of mass murderers. So I guess, Kyle, you never heard the one about the mick, litvak, dago, kraut, rosary-shaker, Yankee and rug muncher who walked into a Chicago bar one night and…
Oh, I forgot the redneck, he went into the bar too.
Here is a Power Line article on the Haley Barbour controversy. It observes,
I think the words I emphasized in the quote highlight one of our larger problems: to survive politically it is deemed necessary to distort history to make it somehow “fit” into current perceptions of morality. If the phrase “an honest discussion of race,” which Attorney General Holder mouthed and and then said we are too cowardly to have, is to have any legitimate meaning then such distortions have no place other than to confirm our cowardice.
Lest we forget, there has been a history of racism in the North as well, but somehow we find it chard to remember that — think Senator Robert Byrd.
One of the most egregious racists operating at this very moment is Al Sharpton. Except for a few stalwarts on the Right, who takes him to task? God forbid anyone should call him what he is, a racist.
And remember the fictitious N-words (18 of them) hurled at John Lewis (D-GA) not too long ago. The allegedly racist Tea Partiers were to blame for that non-event.
This has all the markings of scraping a molehill together and labeling it a mountain.
Barbour was quoted as saying Yazoo City didn’t have a problem with the Clan – this during his youth. My childhood background was one of poverty but I saw my life then as normal. Perhaps Barbour’s early memories are similarly colored? (no pun intended).
This article smacks of early ‘weeding’ the prospects in the GOP to encourage growth elsewhere.
I find your disgust a bit disingenuous. Especially when you see fit to post and embellish on a quote that originated with the NYT. One it seems that can’t be substantiated. Keep scraping the molehill together if you must – but your outrage at a quote that can’t even be verified does not convince me – even if you can imagine Barbour saying the words.
I can imagine a lot of things but that doesn’t make them real.
And what about that Abraham Lincoln guy? Personally, I’m not willing to set aside my disgust at racism of any sort to give him a pass either. Sure, he might have done a thing or two that might have done some good for slaves, but I know, because I grew up in Illinois, what was really in his heart. We racial warriors just know. And don’t pretend that any so called “contrition” late in his life makes up for his early years either. One racist word is enough to brand a man as a racist for eternity. That’s what tolerance is all about.
And don’t even get me started on MLK. When it comes to sexism, that guy took the prize.
“On the 1980′s Barbour quote putting “watermelon” and “blacks” in the same sentence…”
Oh, spare me, it’s no more offensive than linking Americans and cheeseburgers, New Englanders and clam chowder, or Japanese and yakitori.
If you say: don’t stand between an American and a cheeseburger, because you might get trampled in the stampede, that’s not one bit offensive.
Whether you like it or not, various groups of folks have their traditional foods, and getting all bent out of shape about somebody mentioning it is absolutely asinine.
I disagree with the Power Line assessment. Any Southerner who claims that he or she was not — even as a young child — exposed to the heated conversations of adults on the matter of integration is either lying outright or has the memory capability of a rock. Back in those days, children were still considered non entities in social situations, to be seen but never heard, and as such were exposed to adult conversations on a regular basis as though they were not even in the room. One simply could not hear that much angry talk by every adult you knew and not be curious enough to be aware that something very big was afoot. To claim otherwise stretches credibility beyond the possible.
During the entire 1960s, it was virtually impossible to be an aware human being without near-constant exposure to the topic of segregation/integration, whether at one’s own dinner table, at the ladies luncheons, at the garden clubs, the junior leagues, the Sunday school classes, the Rotary Clubs, the VFWs, the country clubs, etc. How to fight off the overbearing reach of the federal government in racial matters was the absolute topic du jour no matter where one went or what station in life one had — if one was white. It was the same in black families — only in reverse.
Heck, I was only 9 years old when Martin Luther King was arrested in the Magnolia Room of Rich’s department store and I still remember quite vividly how upset my grandmother was. I still remember my grandmother and her lady friends talking about that episode for years afterward. I still remember my own mother being terrified when they locked King up in my home county. Those days were so momentous, so unsettling, so earth-shaking to those who had never known another way of life that to claim ignorance or say it wasn’t “that bad” seems just incredible.
Any teenager at that time (as Barbour was) would have to have been an utter moron not to be seeing — almost daily — the front page pictures of civil rights marches, sit-ins, police encounters, etc. In fact, those stories were the topics of every civics class current events studies the entire time I was in middle and high school. To claim not to have thought things were “that bad,” one would have had to be playing hooky all the way through school. Puh-lease.
None of this negates the fact that Northerners embraced and overtly indulged the same views. None of this negates the real facts of reverse racism today, nor the horrible debacles of forced busing, welfare, the destruction of educational standards due to racial machinations or any of the rest of it.
And yes, Jimmy Carter was much worse in reality. The only way he got around his Southern heritage was to go to the opposite extreme on race. Who would advise such a dishonest and stupid course for a conservative Southerner?
Any Republican who honestly believes that there hasn’t been a double standard of immutable proportion on the race issue, since Lyndon Johnson opportunistically changed the color of the Democrat racist beast’s spots, would seem to be doing nothing more than whistling Dixie at this point. None of this could happen without complete complicity by a leftist media, but that still does not change reality.
When the Country is on the line, as it is now, does not seem to be the time to go waving a red flag in front of an angry bull, which is what a Barbour run would amount to, in my opinion.
Political suicide, anyone? There is such a thing as being very qualified at the WRONG time in history.
Many southern children were not involved in “heated” discussions concerning race, I guess that only happened in the poorest sections of the south. In my area of the south it would have been considered inappropriate to have such a discussion in front of children. But then again I only live in small town Alabama NOT LARGE CITY Atlanta-which by the way is more Northern than southern in many ways & has been since the late 40s-but you have chosen to overlook that. Let’s see lived in Selma & Montgomery both & can’t recall a single riot-of course I am not as old as you are, but I do have a degree in history. Guess I missed all those riots in Houston, Dallas, Nashville, Jackson, Tupelo in the 50s too.
This may come as a surprise to you, but many teenagers didn’t give a flip about civil rights, they were more interested in Friday night football & the opposite sex, going fishing or swimming. Sorry, hon your own white guilt which is JUST WHAT elected Obama but never will again is showing. This seems like your personal issues that you need to address.
Which one is paying you Palin, Romney or Huck?
The truth is that a very high percentage of the population in the 50′s through the 80′s grew up in an environment where disparaging other races was routine. In the South the % was certainly over 90%, and in other areas of the country, not much better. There was simply a casual acceptance of racism.
So the plain facts are that anybody over 50 (perhaps younger) can be painted as a racist. Not hard to do at all. Even if you can’t find direct quotes, you can certainly find a friend or associate to attest that the target was complicit in racial language or attitudes.
So pick your target. If your fondest desire is to be an anti-racist warrior, you won’t have a problem finding millions of victims to vent your spleen on. Join the liberal vendetta if you don’t want to do the research yourself.
But personally, I don’t know any saints. Even mom had some faults.
The target I see is people who hypocritically choose to turn everything into a racial issue, which usually seems to pretty much coincide with whatever their other agendas are. That is why it is so disappointing to see somebody like Kyle-Anne jump on the bandwagon. I had great respect for her until she chose to fall for the trap and acquiesce to the beating drums of the never satisfied left.
When is enough enough? Apparently never for a southern white man, unless of course the man chooses to lie through his teeth, bow down to the new racists and shout out with abandon the redemptive code phrases du jour, as the despicable liars Jimmy Carter and Robert Byrd did to acquire and retain power. And even then, unless the man is a hard-core leftist, it won’t be enough.
It doesn’t do any good to deny racism. That’s like begging a barbarian with an axe not to swing it at you. It doesn’t do any good to point out that the people screaming racist the loudest are the real racists. That’s like accusing the North Korean maniacs of being crazy. It doesn’t do any good to say that 60 years of leading a good life ought to redeem a person for casual acceptance of wrongs 50 years ago either. Once the knives are drawn, it’s all over, unless of course, you are a leftist.
So don’t deny, don’t apologize, and don’t agree. Ignoring them is the only path.
And yes, Barbour is dead politically. They want him to struggle so they can trill to the skewereing and pat themselves on the back for once again changing the topic from the monstrous evils of leftism. But Mr. Barbour is pretty shrewd and certainly knew this would happen. It is highly unlikely that he ever imagained that a white male from Mississippi had the remotest chance of becoming president.
“Any Southerner who claims that he or she was not — even as a young child — exposed to the heated conversations of adults on the matter of integration is either lying outright or has the memory capability of a rock.”
That is one hell of a broad brush. Here’s some more:
All Irish kids grow up with drunk parents. Italian kids grow up in the Mafia, and Black kids have chicken and watermelon every night.
Exactly how much of your youth did you spend in Yazoo City? It’s right down the street 400 miles from your hometown of Atlanta. I grew up in Massachusetts. By your logic, I shared all the same experiences as kids in Virginia, Ohio and Ottawa.
A Southern Man is a bad man – just ask Canadian Neil Young. Perhaps he’ll move back to Canada and write “Muslim Man” and go straight to jail for hate speech. Maybe a nice lyric like “You’ve got to turn on evil, When it’s coming after you,”.
Oh, that’s right – he did that already on “Let’s Roll”, about being on a 9/11 plane. Good thing he’s rockin’ in the free world rather than fending off charges in George Orwells’s Canada.
Well, we always have “Lady Antebellum”, who should change their name to the less controversial “Lady Internment Camp”.
I realize that the time I am about to discuss predates your observations as you related them but I nevertheless consider that time relevant to the overall situation.
I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1941 and aside from the WWII years lived in northern Virginia until I left for college in 1959; Washington was then very much a “southern town.” Elementary and high schools in Virginia when I attended were segregated and I too remember the “colored” water fountains, presumably for the janitorial staff since there were no others to use them. We sang “Carry me back to ole Virginny” daily; I think it was the state anthem. Here is a version sung by Marion Anderson in 1945. I had some “little colored friends” and when I was a child in elementary school they visited my home to play and I visited their home.
My maternal grandparents lived in a small town in the rural mountains of south-western Virginia and we visited them fairly often over the years. Some of my ancestors had owned slaves and had fought for the Confederacy; they had not much liked Reconstruction, carpetbaggers or Yankees in general. Most blacks there were indeed considered inferior, a perception apparently shared by blacks and whites. A black male close to the family was “Unca (not Uncle) Willy” and a black female was “Aunt (short rather than broad A) Sally.” The black maid who came occasionally to clean my grandparents’ house knew to enter through the back door; had she been white she would have been expected to do the same. Walking down the narrow sidewalk to my grandfather’s law office, a black man approaching would step off the sidewalk, remove his hat and say “Good mornin’, Miss Margaret.” She would respond, “Mornin’, Willy” or “Mornin’, Unca Willy” depending on the warmth and duration of the family friendship. When blacks attended a funeral or wedding at a white church, they sat in the back; when whites attended a funeral or wedding at a black church, they sat in the back. It was considered the proper thing to do and I doubt seriously that anyone thought of doing otherwise. I do not recall even once hearing hate expressed there by white toward black or black toward white in a racial context. My memories are of a pleasant and happy place and time.
I do recall going to a beach in, I think, Delaware or New Jersey in the 1950s. There was, horror of horrors, a black family on the beach and a local white woman made disparaging remarks about their presence. My mother expressed displeasure at her remarks, something to the effect that “that’s just the way those Yankees are.”
Attitudes in the South probably changed with the advent of desegregation, to what extent based on “racism” and to what extent based on an identification with a state than with the federal government I do not know. There was and still seems to be strong sentiment in favor of states’ rights. However some of the old notions probably did not change much.
I do not for a moment suggest a return to the “good old days;” it would in any event be impossible. I do, however, suggest that based at least on my own observations blacks and whites in the part of the rural south with which I was familiar were generally happier and better off than in the northern cities to which many had migrated. From what I have seen, many people regardless of race are happier in a rural environment than in a city; I certainly am. I can’t provide personal perceptions of the present situation in the United States since I have not been back to rural south-western Virginia for about forty years or even to the United States for about five years. Based on what I have read, however, it strikes me that in general the happiness of lower social and economic status blacks (and for that matter many whites) is no greater in northern cities.
I just looked up Yazoo City on Wiki. It has 14,000 residents and is the county seat. I am not sure the discussion in a large city is quite the same as one might have had in a rural town.
OMG this is totally absurd. I am about as southern as they get bred, born, raised & STILL live in the south. For most normal people it was not all that traumatic. Pardon me but to this very day there is MUCH more racism & always has been in the north than in the south. I am totally disgusted to find so called Conservatives talking about Gov. Barbour’s southern accent. Let’s be honest the real problem is Gov Barbour has a good track record, he is a successful Governor, he is can’t be bullied & won’t run-that is what the real issue is-he won’t kiss anyone’s butt-Republican, Democrat, Conservative or Progressive. Most of you need a lesson in American history. Where were the worst RIOTS in the country-IN THE NORTH & WEST COAST. Following the Civil War which BTW was NOT fought over slavery but states rights-slavery was just an aspect of the issues the hypocritical north was the ones that hated blacks & were threatened by them moving to the north to take their jobs. Please do not go there about Reconstruction & the KKK-remember the South was occupied land-Southerners were not in charge northerners were & they created the majority of the issues. Even today where are the highest crime rates, unemployment, the most dangerous housing projects? In the north not the south. yes, some of our big cities have some areas that are dangerous but not the majority of them. Everyone needs to get over it, I don’t care if your conservative or progressive you are RESPONSIBLE today for your actions & life not me or my great great great grandparens.
Has anyone seen these maps of U.S. cities color coded by race?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315078/Race-maps-America.html
Ironically, the two Texas cities seem to show somewhat less segregation than the North.
I forget who it was who said it, but I like the quote, “The definition of a racist is a conservative who is winning arguments.”
“…there is MUCH more racism & always has been in the north than in the south.”
And, that statement is just as asinine as what Kyle-Anne is saying, just in the other direction.
Ms. Shriver, you protest too much. If all this controversey about race gives you and yourn the vapors, take this paraphrasing of Harry Truman’s advice:
If you can’t stand the heat, get back in the kitchen.
Kyle-Anne, because I adore you and my instincts will always be to stand between you and any attack, I am a bit betwixt and between here.
I understand what you are saying. And, I believe your heart is pure here.
My background could not be more different than yours, having grown up in Chicagoland. In fact, my own history is extraordinarily unusual for folks our age. (I’m two years your junior). During the late fifties and into the late sixties, the intense feeling of racial distrust and animosity was as deep and ingrained as any southern town.
Moreover, I saw bigotry against Jews as appalling and grotesque as one could imagine on a very frequent basis.
Yet, my schooling, my neighborhood, my upbringing…all were completely and wholly integrated. At a time and in an area where this was so different from the rest of the country as to be …well, an oddity.
If you see pictures of me on the football, baseball, or other school activities, you will see a sea of African-American, Jewish, Hispanic, East Indian or Pakistani, Arab, and Scandinavian faces…along with western and Eastern European descendants.
Haley Barbour did not grow up in my neighborhood. Not participating…being silently against atrocious acts and going to hear Martin Luther King speak, even on the outskirts of such an event, would render a far different response in his neighborhood than it would in mine. And, it would take a different level of conviction to do so openly.
That’s neither right nor wrong in my response here, it simply is.
However, I myself was rewarded with many an epithet…for where I lived, for the friends I loved, for my own background….real and perceived.
I endured those slings and arrows and never forgot them. But I hold responsible only those who harbored them, uttered them, and displayed them…not the “group” to which I would have to stereotype all “others” who belonged by birth or neighborhood or religion.
I stood and fought (literally and figuratively) against blind hatred of my friends, my family and myself. Therefore, my instinct is not only to protect you from attack, but also anyone else who is being treated unfairly because of blind hatred.
I think Southern, white, males (and religious Christians in concert with these other traits or as a stand alone group) get the raw end of the deal and knee jerk hyper-reflexive distrust…that sure looks to my eye to be a close relative of the very bigotry that inspires the behavior in the first place.
You are making a sound point, that this very prejudice, this blind hatred, this knee-jerk reaction would invalidate a lifetime of not participating in racial hatred…and a mere clumsy statement would be fodder for a bonfire for a reputation for human decency.
Haley Barbour could have been an entirely different man, he had every opportunity and every ounce of surroundings to make him so. There were certainly plenty of opportunities to take a different path in Chicagoland as well for those who fell into that cesspool or were brought up by relatives who injected it on a daily basis.
I have known black racists, up close and personally. They hate whites blindly. I have known Jews who hate blacks, and some who hate Christians…blindly.
I have known Mexicans who hated Puerto Ricans. I have known Italians who hated Sicilians. I have known Irish who hated the English.
There is no “innocent” group. And there is no ethnic, major religious, regional or neighborhood group so guilty, that all of its members should be automatically disqualified from leading us as a people. Nor should their actions be so scrutinized that an innocent comment define their entire lives.
Until someone shows me a little more compelling than two rather flimsy examples of prejudice, years apart and requiring layers of peeling to get to the “bad” stuff…Haley Barbour is being treated unfairly here.
If it takes an electron microscope to get down to it…it doesn’t deserve this level of opprobrium. And, the blind hatred coming from the left is much more open and notorious. If we are to stand against it, then we should stand against it, no matter from whence it stems.
You are a doll, Kyle-Anne. I believe you will understand where I am coming from here. In fact, I know you will.
Dear Mr. Bleachers, I appreciate every word you’ve written here. I, too, am a fan of your writing. And everything you say here about different groups hating other groups is so, so true. It is simply ingrained in our human nature, I’m afraid, and something which we must work mightily to combat always.
I do admit that I have been personally somewhat hurt by the comments here today. Perhaps, I’m not accustomed to having so many find so much askance in my published opinions. Maybe I was just wearing my feelings on my sleeve as my mama used to tell me not to do. I do tend to be a very sensitive person, as you seem to be, and perhaps I felt more keenly the things I observed being done to black citizens in my childhood.
And maybe it’s hard to believe by those who don’t think about such things or take too much notice, but I can honestly remember being very upset as a child the first time I was taught about the “white” and “colored” water fountains. I had a good black friend, albeit the daughter of my grandmother’s maid, and all I could think of even at 5 was how horrible she felt over this — something I later came to think of as a societal obscenity.
I’ve also done years of research on the Civil Rights movement, the Civil War, slavery, Jim Crow, both the old and the new South and many of the politicians during those eras. I still think it an act of amazing cunning that the Democrat Party, under the leadership of LBJ, was able to literally reverse the color of the stripes on the Democrat racist beast and come out of it the way they have. It was an amazing act of political jujitsu, which will take a hundred years after I’m gone to understand. Leaving so many black communities worse off than before the Civil Rights Movement and still being hailed as the party of the black voter, is quite the stuff of Machiavellian delight.
It really isn’t that I think Governor Barbour is a racist. I don’t think that at all. But surely anyone has to admit that not to know better than to say the kinds of things he has bespeaks a very shallow kind of insensitivity to say the least. I’m sorry that things are the way they are now, tilted in some respects against white males, especially Southerners. My husband is a white, male Southerner; so is my son. But life is not fair; it never has been fair.
I sincerely don’t believe that Haley Barbour could overcome the current double-standard on race, especially running against the first black president. And I’m sorry if seems harsh for me to say so, but how many black men during Jim Crow — for 100 years after the Civil War — might have liked to have had the same opportunities for advancement and success as their white counterparts had? A great many, I would assume. Life is never fair. And there will always be someone or some group at a social disadvantage.
But any impartial reader of the true history has got to be able to make the moral distinction between the evils of slavery and systematic, legalized segregation, and the reverse-racism, race hustling of today. Systematic wrongs, upheld by the law of one’s land, tend to bring about more than a single generation of reactionary favoritism against the formerly offending group. The sins of the fathers visited upon the children for what? 4 generations? As long as there are people still alive who suffered the harsh indignities and physical sufferings at the hands of segregationists, this reversal of fortunes is going to exist — at least in national politics.
Thanks, Mr. Bleachers, for the vote of confidence. Even if you disagree somewhat, you seem to know my heart is in the right place. I’ll try hard to keep it there so as not to disappoint you in the future.
Kyle-Anne
It seems to me that you are more interested in the intellectual and emotional edifice that protects you from your own history as someone with roots in pre-Civil Rights Mississippi than you are in addressing Barbour’s case or the racial double standard that the Left has created in this country. My history is almost identical to yours but I view the associations that you fear as mythological beings created by Marxist political strategists. Barbour’s past is peanuts compared to the fact that our current president attended a racist church for twenty years and continues to cultivate people who are racists, marxists, and anti-American. But we cannot defeat the double standard, you say. OK, throw Barbour overboard and select someone else, but keep in mind that they too will face the same double standard. Fortunately, someone has defeated the racism charge already. Sarah Palin is totally clean from charges of racism. Given that the racism canard cannot be used against her, then she should stand head and shoulders among her competitors for the nomination.
Don’t you worry, I’m sure Katie Couric and the liberal media have plenty of ambush questions for Palin about civil rights and the South and Jim Crow and with one hand behind their backs ready to slap on that ol’ Hitler mustache they used for Bush.
Man, what a disappointment. And to think until now, I thought you Kyle-Anne perhaps the best one going here at PJM. Barbour’s comment should no more should eliminate Haley Barbour from potential candidate than Freaknik eliminated Barack Obama as President in 2008.
So what if its fodder for the media? They’ll make things up to create strife, if need be. Need I remind you of these words in advertisement ten years ago?
A pickup truck with a chain dragging across a dirt road. The voice-over of the daughter of James Byrd, a black man dragged to his death chained to a pickup in Jasper, TX. “It was like my father was killed all over again.”
How long are you, a part of the established media, going to be complicit in letting the glaring double standards in dialogue go on? Do you not recognize just how tired most of us white, conservative male voters are fed up the duplicity?
Should this comment have removed Barack Obama from contention in 2008?
So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Now you tell me which comment is more egregious. Haley Barbour’s or our sitting President saying that?
What’s the point of writing something here if it’s not posted in a timely manner? Kind of makes it pointless to respond to someone’s comment.
In early 1969 I was a 17-year-old from Merrick, L.I., who traveled to Yazoo City, MS., in a Volkswagen beetle with yellow pinstripes and NY plates (and two Jewish boys, one of whom was Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s fame) to see a southern belle whose friend happened to be the daughter of Haley Barbour’s uncle’s law partner. (We had a memorable encounter with a gendarme and member of the unofficial Mississippi border patrol late one night in tiny Forest, not far from Philadelphia, MS.) The belle in question, Ruth Campbell Williams, and I wrote a memoir about the multi-decade intercultural voyage that ensued called “Younger Than That Now — A Shared Passage From the Sixties” (Bantam 2000 and 2001). In it, Ruth provides specific information about the very tense situation in Yazoo City and Mississippi in 1969 — information much at odds with Haley Barbour’s sanitized recollections. Much of that information was contained in letters we wrote to each other at the time that eventually became the basis of our book (and which we still have, if anyone wants to check sources).
I would also recommend Willie Morris’s “Yazoo” for an in-depth look at integration in Yazoo City, his hometown, and Unita Blackwell’s and JoAnne Prichard Morris’s “Barefootin’” for an account of the struggle for voting rights for blacks in the Delta and Mississippi generally. JoAnne Prichard Morris was a teacher at Yazoo City High School in 1969, btw.
My own perspective on Barbour is that he has been a good governor for Mississippi and almost certainly would be better for everyone — particularly blacks, who tend to suffer the most in a bad economy — as president than the current left-winger in the White House. However, he probably was unelectable before his remarks came out in The Weekly Standard and has blown himself up now, no matter how much he backpedals.
A word about racism — it’s real among members of all races, but it also has become a kind of third rail very useful for electrocuting one’s political enemies (or oneself). The greatest single act of racism by an American president over the last 100 years was that committed by FDR when he interned Japanese-Americans during WWII, but he’s certainly not remembered as a racist.
Jeff writes: “The greatest single act of racism by an American president over the last 100 years was that committed by FDR when he interned Japanese-Americans during WWII, but he’s certainly not remembered as a racist.”
I am not fond of FDR because he was a stone leftist and stateist. However, “…he interned[compelled a group to live in a certain area] Japanese-Americans during WWII…” is not exactly correct because it is an over-simplification. So is Jeff’s statement that the internment was an act of racism. It was more an act of national security. Even the ACLU didn’t oppose it, according to Winston Groom.
If you will read “1942 THE YEAR THAT TRIED MEN’S SOULS” by Groom (Atlantic Monthly Press, pages 158-160) you will learn that the internment was rather at core a voluntary choice of the interned. You will also learn much more about Executive Order #9066 that established it and about the war environment that allowed it to be implemented.
I’m hoping Jeff has not over-simplified his point about Barbour here.
Well, my great-grandfather decided in 1863 that he could be an oysterman just as easily on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as he could on the Northern Neck of Virginia. My S.F. Bay Area birthplace had tensions and fights between the different colors of Southern transplants who came to work in the shipyard. I agree with all the comments about Northern racism (and about “Reconstruction”), and I agree that a vigorous defense could be put up against the inevitable racism-baiting Governor Barbour would face.
I also agree that this is about perception, not reality, and that Barbour would face an uphill battle in which the MSM would misconstrue the kitchen sink to make him into a “cracker” stereotype. If anyone intends to fight that battle, in, say, the early primaries or leading up to them, please so do ruthlessly. If the lefties and race-baiters can’t be put on the defensive, not just in our words but in their words and actions, Governor Barbour would suffer an early death by a thousand cuts akin to John McCain’s getting set up to take the fall for the porkulus bill of 2008.
I know these people. They fight dirty. Resolve to utterly kick their rear ends, and don’t be polite about it. Otherwise, you’ll be handing them weapons they’ll pick up with glee.
Oh, and I’ve been accused of being a racist for having made a comment about Watermelon Greens (green on the outside, red on the inside). Yes, it’s that bad! Be ready!
Great series of posts. Thank you.
I am older than Ms. Shiver, younger than Haley.
I grew up on the fringes of Chicago.
My Mom was born and raised just outside of Charlotte NC.
Of course we used to go visit her folks whenever possible
when I was a child (1950s and 1960s).
While racism existed in the north back then,
it was nothing compared to what was going on in the south.
The north’s version was similar to what exists today –
occasional individual misbehavior and mostly voluntary exclusion.
Ex: I’m white, we attend a church of roughly 1,200 people.
We’ve never been able to get more than a handful of blacks to
attend our services and we’ve tried hard to attract them.
The black churches I’ve visited include painfully few whites.
Even in very integrated neighborhoods.
Is this racism? It is according to some in our government and on the left.
I’ve come to believe it’s just the way folks naturally behave.
Anyway, it’s been going on for awhile.
I don’t remember ever seeing any overt segregation like what I saw commonly in the south.
In my opinion, the riots in the north were about economics, not racism.
Haley Barbour is unelectable and not just because of anything that happened decades ago.
He is just too old and physically unattractive to beat Obama (with all due respect Mr. Barbour).
Running anyone even close in age to a baby boomer will mean almost certain defeat.
To win in 2012 the republicans need someone relatively young and definitely fresh.
NOT someone my age who is hauling a load of baggage behind him that fills an 18 wheeler.
Harley Barbour has the same chances of winning the presidency as Obama winning Texas.
When you write about the “same degree of actual harm that was done to blacks because of Jim Crow.”, it should be noted that there was never any Jim Crow in Brazil and yet blacks there, who constitute half the country, occupy much the same space as do American blacks. Also, Jews came out of death camps following 1,000 to 2,000 years of on again off again bigotry in Europe and made a country in a sea of Islam against considerable opposition and with the help of no one in only 3 years so let’s not go crazy with the generational hangover nonsense which black Americans are so in love with to explain away their own failures. As Jim Crow and white baseball leagues recede ever further into the past, the idea that whites are still oppressive and endemic racists does not; at some point reality must intrude itself and you cannot keep a good man down and Israel is proof of that.
Barbour suffers from the same fantasies that many black Americans do in more or less equal proportion: one wishes to portray an America where Jim Crow wasn’t all that oppressive and the other to make it seem like Jim Crow was worse than it was; the truth lies perhaps somewhere in between. There were no restrictions on blacks immigrating out of the U.S. so one can argue how bad could it have been, especially in light of the much greater percentage of black Americans behind bars today than during Jim Crow. Illegal Latino immigrants risk all, leaving behind family, friends and culture for reasons much less harsh than black Americans claim under Jim Crow.
On the Greek island of Karpathos there is a matriarchal society today in a small village because the men many decades ago left just in search of work as far away as America and without any otherwise socially oppressive imperatives black folks claim under Jim Crow.
On the other hand the memory of slavery followed by second class citizenship stings hard and has a lasting effect of grievance and resentment; white folks in Vicksburg had less reasons to feel ill will than blacks when it comes to Grant’s 1863 siege and yet wouldn’t celebrate the Fourth of July til 1943.
The truth lies in between and so you have reverse racism and reverse reverse racism and it’s all idiotic behavior based on shallow skin tones and the all too human propensity to not see or want to see the flaws in one’s own culture. Barbour can go suck on a pine cone and so can Rev. Jeremiah Wright; their real skill would be perhaps as writers of historicalfantasy because in my estimation, they both resemble Clark Ashton Smith’s “forbidden piece of human mechanism”.
James, the missing pieces in your puzzle is economic opportunity and generational poverty, something which will explain why you see Blacks in Brazil as occupying the same space as those in the U.S. On the other hand, I would like to see more evidence of how you came to such an interesting conclusion. I just hope that you aren’t attempting an angle explaining Blacks as a “failed race”. That may be taking it too far, but that’s where this road is taking us.
Haley Barbour will only be allowed to advance as far as the Republicans allow him to. If they see his remarks as a glaring liability that can’t be cleaned up or repressed with media coverage, he won’t get far.
…and Atlanta was a better place in the 60′s than it is today like most places. If you don’t belive me, just look at the televised, Atlanta City Councel meetings, and you will see exactly what is leading that city today. Calling it a retard convention would be being optimistic.
“Those “Citizens Councils,” to which Governor Barbour gave such mitigating virtue in his Weekly Standard interview, were in fact the upper class version of the Klan.”
This appears to be the entire crux of why the author is impugning Barbour. The problem is she has cited no evidence whatsoever for the above statement. Are we to assume “Citizens Councils” in every town were controlled by the Klan? Does the author have personal knowledge of the council in Barbour’s home town? Does she have any proof whatsoever that Barbour’s account is inaccurate? Not that I can see. It isn’t her job to tell anyone who is qualified to run on the Republican ticket, we are smart enough to make up our own minds on this matter.
“Those “Citizens Councils,” to which Governor Barbour gave such mitigating virtue in his Weekly Standard interview, were in fact the upper class version of the Klan.”
“Are we to assume “Citizens Councils” in every town were controlled by the Klan?
You seem a little dense. The author did not imply that the citizens councils were controlled by the Klan. She implied that the Klan were low-class racist, and the citizens councils were upper-class racist. She implied they had similar goals, but different methods. Kinda like agreeing to intergrate schools, and then closing your public schools and opening private white-only schools. I don’t know what Yazoo City did; I don’t care.
I read a lady write that if Haley Barbour was her husband she would advise him not to run. I would do the same. Right now he has a fine reputation. If he choses to run, he will not even recognize himself. I watched what the media did to Georga Allen with a made-up word.
Haley Barbour is a man. He does not apologize for the South. Americans like their Southerns to be ashamed. Men of the South who do not come offering alms for our collective past are called bigots and racist.
“It isn’t her job to tell anyone who is qualified to run on the Republican ticket, we are smart enough to make up our own minds on this matter.”
She did not write that Haley Barbour is not qualified. She wrote that if Haley Barbour were her husband she would advise him not to run. I think Haley Barbour would make an excellent President, but I do not think enough white people would be comfortable replacing President Obama with a Southern man.
Say what you want, but I was shocked that so many white people would vote for such an unqualified man as Barrack Obama just to assuage their guilt. Haley Barbour would allow those wimps an excuse to do the same thing again.
At this moment, Hodding Carter III is on NPR ripping new ***holes for all members of the 1954 Citizens Council of Yazoo City and, by association, Haley Barbour. All this stuff, including the historical reporting, is carried on at the level of media hype. I was there. I was born in 1948. I started out in the rural South and grew to maturity in Atlanta. In 1968, my boss was African-American as was his boss and his boss. All three were princes and treated me as a prince. Never have I met a person who expressed racial hatred or showed any tendency toward racism. On the ground, this stuff just did not exist. The culprit is the media grabbing every opportunity to transform a rare wrong into the condemnation of a society. Of course, there grew a professional class of race baiters and they continue to make a good living from the hysterical MSM.
I like Barbour but he is definitely NOT the one to put against Obama.
Is the GOP still the STUPID PARTY?
Think people, imagine Barbour campaigning in Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire and Colorado.
Get it yet?
Barbour has every right to run, but he can’t win in the primary or the general.
However, if I’m Mitt Romney, I would try to convince Haley to run to split the socon vote with Palin so I can win. Then I make him my Veep to pay him back. Of course that would cause open rebellion by most Tea Partiers and Palin Nation would mostly sit out the election. This could lead to a third-party.
Let him run if he wants. If Sarah runs, Haley does not have a chance in Hell.
By the way, it is interesting to see some posters here getting upset at people who say he is unelectable to POTUS. Some said the same thing about Palin.
Interesting.
This is so unlike you Kyle~Anne. Are you sure it’s you?
All I know is that ever since Obama became president the patients I nurse to have become more black and white not less. It used to be that I actually had to stop and think what race they were at the end of my shift. All I focused on was the person and the diagnosis. That has changed. Let us not play their card. We are better than that. Merry Christmas.
My husband says Haley’s wife should listen to you and Haley should listen to his wife. ‘He’d be stupid to run. Kyle~Anne’s right.’
He also says Romney doesn’t have a chance because of Romneycare. Palin doesn’t have a chance because too many people hate her. He’s always right. Lord have mercy.
Tho I pray he is wrong about Palin. ILOVETHISWOMAN. You betcha:)
One comment above(and there have been numerous thoughtful..even poignant comments)..November 2010 was about or enabled by the Internet…’floggings’ and denigration of law abiding Tea Partiers went viral….the contempt of the ruling class and the legacy media toward the Tea Party(middle America) was palpable..and graphic…..yes, Hannity, Limbaugh et al goaded us but PICTURES, You Tube’s links from Drudge…the PICTURES were too much…the November election backlash against the open betrayal of the body politic…was Internet driven–a visual, viral retribution …
So, now we raise , or lower , Haley Barbour to the internet(Pajmas Media is not a cable star–yet)….the allegations of what he said , how he said it, Ms Shiver’s laboured,( I would also say divined) ‘reasoning’ to lower/discard Mr Barbour has…the flavour of a mercy killing…–ie to put him down gently before his weight, his age, his gender, his RACE do more harm than our Republic can endure.
God help us.
Your article is a total flop. How old was Haley Barbour when he “witnessed” the supposedly brilliant words MLK? 12 or 16 depending on whatever. Not exactly a whole lot of wisdom in a teeniebopper.
“American Thinker” or “American Stinker”? Enjoy you moment of fame.
The media’s cheerleading helped bring us Obama. This is not working out very well….
Haley Barbour IS nothing more than an “insider political hack” of the new era GOP since the 60′s and 70′s who has aided the selling out of the traditional GOP platform and american values. He has all the “slick” rhetoric but absolutley no [record] to support any of it. Katrina is irrelevant to his GOP ideological corruption from early on in his youthful beginnings in national politics and lobbying.
Kyle-Anne Shiver writes:
“During the entire 1960s, it was virtually impossible to be an aware human being without near-constant exposure to the topic of segregation/integration, whether at one’s own dinner table, at the ladies luncheons, at the garden clubs, the junior leagues, the Sunday school classes, the Rotary Clubs, the VFWs, the country clubs, etc. How to fight off the overbearing reach of the federal government in racial matters was the absolute topic du jour no matter where one went or what station in life one had — if one was white. It was the same in black families — only in reverse.”
Can you not gain some perspective on your own history? Notice that none of the situations that you describe are in the workplace, at university, or in the street. From what you say above, one can only infer that you were so incredibly sheltered that you never came face to face with an African-American stranger. By contrast, I worked with African-Americans at General Motors in Atlanta and later Lockheed. I attended Georgia State University which is in downtown Atlanta near five-points. Along with many other students and interested persons of whatever race, I hung out in Andrew Young’s campaign headquarters which was next door to GSU’s favorite sandwich shop. There was no racial tension in any of these places. I was in Rich’s in 1969 when some African-American ladies put on a rather vigorous but controlled protest. No one became hysterical. We all knew that they were drawing attention to the fact that Rich’s hired too few African-American employees. We did not see them as “other.” We talked to them afterwards. What was on our minds at that time? Simple. We dreamed of getting some rest because all of us of whatever race were working fulltime at DRAINING jobs and going to school fulltime.
Kyle-Anne Shiver writes:
“Heck, I was only 9 years old when Martin Luther King was arrested in the Magnolia Room of Rich’s department store and I still remember quite vividly how upset my grandmother was. I still remember my grandmother and her lady friends talking about that episode for years afterward. I still remember my own mother being terrified when they locked King up in my home county. Those days were so momentous, so unsettling, so earth-shaking to those who had never known another way of life that to claim ignorance or say it wasn’t “that bad” seems just incredible.”
You have no perspective. You are taking one event and treating it the way the MSM would treat it. Your description of the event strikes me as darn near hysterical. If I had cared about the event as you seem to, I would have made a point of meeting some of the participants. They would have been so glad to see you. And you would have something from your experience that you could write about.
Kyle-Anne Shiver writes:
“Any teenager at that time (as Barbour was) would have to have been an utter moron not to be seeing — almost daily — the front page pictures of civil rights marches, sit-ins, police encounters, etc. In fact, those stories were the topics of every civics class current events studies the entire time I was in middle and high school. To claim not to have thought things were “that bad,” one would have had to be playing hooky all the way through school. Puh-lease.”
Look at what you are writing about: newspapers and civics classes. The guys and gals at work and school, of whatever race, never bothered to look at the front page as they found the sports page or the good sales. We didn’t need to. We were downtown everyday. We attended all the rallies. They might be for Civil Rights for African-Americans, Civil Rights for women, or relief for the poor. In the street, there was not fear or hatred. There was congeniality. Yes, that’s the right word. Amazing, isn’t it?
I am a fan of yours. You have done some very good writing at this blog and elsewhere. But I must say that you have done a great disservice to yourself through your article and your responses. Apparently, “you had a lot on your chest that you needed to get off,” as we say in the vernacular. But what you have said is not related to Haley Barbour, his problem, or the similar problems of people similarly situated. Frankly, I must say that you have convinced me that you do not have the first-hand experience necessary to be a credible witness to the matters that you discuss. And I am greatly puzzled as to why you do not have that experience. It was there for the taking and you did not have to be brave to take it.
Cripes Kyle-Anne,
Who needs liberal thought police when we’ve got you doing the job for free? Mr. Barbour might or might not make a good president. If he gets the Republican nomination I’ll vote for him, just as I’ve voted for every Republican since Reagan in 1980 when I was 20. The day Earl Butz lost his job for making an (actually fairly humorous) ethnic joke was a dark day for our country. Unless we conservatives grow some balls and stop internalizing the PC nonsense, we’ll never get anywhere.
Growing up a hundred miles north of Atlanta, finishing high school in 1965, I am amazed that Ms. Shiver knows what was discussed in my house back in the day, and that I was standing in the room taking notes on what the adults were discussing (which wasn’t how they could keep the blacks down I’m quite sure). I am also amazed that so much is made of a man commenting on what his teenage memory of political and social events were. I know I didn’t give it much thought at the time; I was busy being a school boy and a teenager. It seems to me, Ms Shiver wants/needs to be offended, even if she has to borrow one to get her pity party going. Would someone give her an umbrella for Christmas? She really is raining on the parade. Unelectable? Let’s hold a few primaries first.
Ms. Shiver: Okay so what was your motive in writing the commentary? Did you think doing the job of eating our own conservatives that the left does an erstwhile proposition? Did you think it will grant you bona fides from the left? Did you think it would help Mr. Barbour?
Seems to me that you are falling in line with other “so called” GOPers like Krauthammer, Parker, Frum, Brooks et al who seek the acclaim of the left rather than fight for the right.
Growing up in a poor neighborhood in the mid 50s I was introduced to many different people – whites – Native Americans – - Jewish – Hawaiian – and a couple of black kids the same ages as myself and my younger brother in a medium sized western Washington mill town. The ‘projects’ were a hodge-podge of humanity with a revolving door. Seems like everyone ‘got out’ except for my family. Perhaps I should have been introduced to racism in this atmosphere – at least according to Kyle Ann and some others here. I wasn’t. My brother and I and Brad and Junior became fast friends for the time they lived there – maybe 6 months. We went everywhere together – tried smoking for the first time together – and got very sick! Made forts in the woods down the road and just did stuff kids did in the 1950s.
My mother never said a word about the friendships that evolved in our neighborhood over the ~10 years we lived there. I can honestly say my mother was the most race neutral person I’ve ever known in my life. My Dad was a gambler and drinker so his involvement at that period of my life was limited – he wasn’t home much – and was the reason we lived where we did.
Looking back on it now I remember that when we were out playing with Brad and Junior very few other kids joined in with us. I didn’t see color when I looked at either of them – I just saw two kids – two friends. This is the approach I’ve taken all my life – something my mother DIDN’T teach. And that is the key to racism. Teach about it and you draw attention to it. Leave it alone – shut up about it already!!! – and you get kids that play together and take no notice of the differences. Until I joined the USN skin color was no more different than hair color – something different but no big deal.
Their Dad was in the Air Force and stationed at the nearby base. He was gone more than he was home. I recall their Mom’s face the first few times my brother and I went over to their house to see if the could come out to play. They were from N. Carolina and I suppose white kids just didn’t do that kind of thing in N. Carolina. I didn’t understand that look for many years. I do now and it makes me sad when I think of it.
The party of Lincoln, Everett Dirksen and Jackie Robinson is racist, and the party of Dred Scott, Jim Crow and the KKK is not. Get it straight people.
Republican Haley Barbour has a bucolic view of his childhood while bad things were going on across town = racist. Mormon (but Democrat, so its OK) Harry Reid says Obama is clean and articulate (with the undeniable implication that it is rare in a black person) = progressive. Don’t you guys read the papers?
“I do admit that I have been personally somewhat hurt by the comments here today.”
It’s nothing personal. You’re just unfairly criticizing Governor Barbour.
If I say that Communists and Democrats helped to defeat the Nazis in WWII (which they obviously did) and you start criticing me because I didn’t mention every bad thing Communists and Democrats have done when I said that, that’s simply a ridiculous criticism, and that’s exactly what you’re doing to Governor Barbour when it comes to his remarks about the White Citizens Council In Yazoo City.
He didn’t say they were a bunch of swells, he just said they weren’t like the KKK, and didn’t permit Klan violence in Yazoo City when the feds ordered an end to school segregation. I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but if it is, there’s nothing wrong with saying so.
It would behoove folks to become more educated in the factual background leading up to the 1960′s and 70′s South from the Freedmen era, the Great Exodus era, etc. Factually, it is not a pretty history and especially for Mississippi and its “motives” to retain blacks from the exodus movements….["On May 7, 1879, a colored convention assembled in the city of Nashville - Resolved, That it is the sense of this conference that the colored people should emigrate to those States and Territories where they can enjoy all the rights which are guaranteed by the laws and constitution of the United States, and enforced by the executive departments of such States and Territories; and we ask of the United States an appropriation of $500,000 to aid in the removal of our people from the South."]
["The excitement among the colored people at this time with the consequent disorganization of labor, threatened disaster to the Southern crops, and planters' conventions were held, to devise means to induce the laborers to "sustain their reputation for honesty and fair dealing, by preserving intact until the completion of contracts for labor-leasing which have already been made."]
["On May 5, there was a large attendance of planters and representative colored men at a labor convention which met at Vicksburg "to adopt such measures as will allay the excitement prevailing, or will enable them to supply the places of those laborers who have gone, or who may hereafter go to the Western States." Among others, the following resolution was adopted: Resolved, That this convention call upon the colored people here present, to contradict the false reports circulated among, and impressed upon, the more ignorant and credulous and to instruct them that no lands, mules or money await them in Kansas or elsewhere, without money or price, and report to the civil authorities all persons disseminating such reports."]
Mississippi was a leader among the “South” to prevent the Freedman Great Exodus (and it should be noted that there were some Black leaders allied in dissent of the Exodus) and preserve its former labor resources. Their success in retention of the “Freedmen” resulted in an ongoing slavery mentality through the 1960′s and 70′s era.
The issue of the “KKK” is actually irrelevant to this discussion and the issue of “Citizens Councils” absolutely relevant…representing an ongoing mentality of the previous nearly 100 years!
The polished political Haley Barbour [should] have been acutely aware of the underlying factual history of the previous “Planter’s Conventions” mentality that evolutionized into the “Citizens Councils”.
Self serving revisionist history on the part of either side of an issue does not serve justice nor the nation good. After 81 years a “true” Southerner, I think it high time we become better educated of the facts, whatever they may be, and move on for a better common cause for America’s future. Barbours’ comments in ignorance or denial did not serve our nations people with a great cause of good.
It would behoove folks to become more educated in the factual background leading up to the 1960′s and 70′s South from the Freedmen era, the Great Exodus era, etc. Factually, it is not a pretty history and especially for Mississippi and its “motives” to retain blacks from the exodus movements….["On May 7, 1879, a colored convention assembled in the city of Nashville - Resolved, That it is the sense of this conference that the colored people should emigrate to those States and Territories where they can enjoy all the rights which are guaranteed by the laws and constitution of the United States, and enforced by the executive departments of such States and Territories; and we ask of the United States an appropriation of $500,000 to aid in the removal of our people from the South."]
["The excitement among the colored people at this time with the consequent disorganization of labor, threatened disaster to the Southern crops, and planters' conventions were held, to devise means to induce the laborers to "sustain their reputation for honesty and fair dealing, by preserving intact until the completion of contracts for labor-leasing which have already been made."]
["On May 5, there was a large attendance of planters and representative colored men at a labor convention which met at Vicksburg "to adopt such measures as will allay the excitement prevailing, or will enable them to supply the places of those laborers who have gone, or who may hereafter go to the Western States." Among others, the following resolution was adopted: Resolved, That this convention call upon the colored people here present, to contradict the false reports circulated among, and impressed upon, the more ignorant and credulous and to instruct them that no lands, mules or money await them in Kansas or elsewhere, without money or price, and report to the civil authorities all persons disseminating such reports."]
Mississippi was a leader among the “South” to prevent the Freedman Great Exodus (and it should be noted that there were some Black leaders allied in dissent of the Exodus) and preserve its former labor resources. Their success in retention of the “Freedmen” resulted in an ongoing slavery mentality through the 1960′s and 70′s era.
The issue of the “KKK” is actually irrelevant to this discussion and the issue of “Citizens Councils” absolutely relevant…representing an ongoing mentality of the previous nearly 100 years!
The polished political Haley Barbour [should] have been acutely aware of the underlying factual history of the previous “Planter’s Conventions” mentality that evolutionized into the “Citizens Councils”.
Self serving revisionist history on the part of either side of an issue does not serve justice nor the nation good. After 81 years a “true” Southerner, I think it high time we become better educated of the facts, whatever they may be, and move on for a better common cause for America’s future. Barbours’ comments in ignorance or denial did not serve our nations people with a great cause of good.
Robert Byrd was eligible to be a Senator, Ms Shriver.
I think the voters ought to decide who is eligible to be president, as long as that person meets the qualifications for office as enumerated in the Constitution. I don’t know much about Barbour, but I’ve learned something about your propensity to rush to judgement. If you find that comment offensive, we’re even.
I have had enough of this politically-correct double standard. Political correctness, racial guilt-tripping, affirmative action, and the endless posturing of the lamestream media has brought us the Obama Administration – the very worst administration ever.
The Obama Administration has destroyed the American economy, most likely beyond repair.
The Obama Administration has left many Americans without hope.
I would vote for Haley Barbour in a heartbeat, and so should every US citizen who has any functioning synapses.
I suggest everyone actually read the Wkly Standard piece. The people who are flaring their notstrils over this non-event are the same ones who think southern accents make you stupid, that Palin in unqualified and that the No Labels people “make some good points.” They probably also admire Obama’s “comeback.”
Barbour said that Yazoo City avoided racial strife during integration because they kept the Klan from having any influence. Period. And those of us old enough to remember those difficult days can tell you point bland that towns in the Deep South have done a far better job of undoing their racial past than have stupid liberals in NY who send their kids to all-white private schools “because we can afford to.” Right.
Now that the vicious jackals in the “holier-than-thou” crowd have sunk their bloody beaks into this story, I know full well that they won’t let go until the host is dead. But I’m here to tell you that your day has passed. You just don’t know it yet.
So the ultimate truth comes out. YOU feel, not think, that Barbour is too insensitive to be president. To be president, according to you, one must always water down all he says so as NEVER to utter a word which MIGHT offend someone; a serial killer, for example. Is that what you have done?
You have libelled an honorable man out of hormonic petulance, sideways mental fluctuations and, not to put too fine a point on it, because you are a Dingbat. Stifle yourself!
I have been waiting for a good number of comments to accumulate, before I read them and Ms shiver’s article. I am 10 years older than the other commenters. The politicians need to study this article and the response it has compiled through number 52. Pajamas Media has my commendation for leaving it up. How is that for cowardice, Mr. Holder ?
I decided to read the links several times before posting a comment. I am glad I did. And for the sake of argument, I won’t even discuss the dubious authenticity of the Politico quote. Let’s say it is real.
If those comments, as debatable as they are, disqualify Barbour it is difficult to see how any man or woman could run for president. If Barbour or another Southerner or any Republican presidential candidate, for that matter, is to be painted as racist due to similar remarks, here is my advice to the GOP: offer millions of dollars to anyone with footage of Barack Obama nodding to the rantings of Jeremiah Wright. Run the “bitter clingers” comment ad nauseum, and look for audio of the many more slights I am sure exist. Troll the public parks in Hawaii where Obama scored cocaine and ask if someone heard him say nasty things about the Japanese. Dirty the man up with the same faux racism claims. What Barbour said, even given the worst possible context, pales by comparison to many remarks made by this president and his entourage. I don’t believe even the Yazoo City heritage levels that field. So if this is where the Left wants to take this campaign, let’s get in the manure with them. This article certainly implies this will be the direction of the campaign so let’s go there.
I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt and possibly even agree with you, Ms. Shiver, but I cannot. It seems you have presented Barbour through a left-wing prism here, and this is just short of the long dead you-must-be-a-racist-if-you-don’t-like-Obama banality.
Barbour won’t be the best candidate just because he has been victimized, of course. The same applies to Palin and anyone else. I agree we want the best candidate just so this country can be spared four more years of an unqualified and incompetent buffoon as president. But I cannot agree that Barbour is not the best candidate based on the case you presented here. As a matter of fact, the only question I have is how you intellectually reached such a conclusion. Instead, all I get is a bunch of raw emotion as rationale, which is what I would expect from a left-winger rather than from a moderate or conservative.