Haley Barbour: I don't remember the civil rights era being that bad
The Fix called attention this morning to Haley Barbour's defense of his experience as a GOP lobbyist in the Weekly Standard's new profile of the Mississippi governor and potential 2012 candidate.
But buried toward the end of the piece, the 63-year-old Barbour makes some more-eyebrow-raising comments in describing his home town of Yazoo City, Miss., during the civil rights era.
Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.
"Because the business community wouldn't stand for it," he said. "You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.
In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."
In interviews Barbour doesn't have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. "I just don't remember it as being that bad," he said. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white."
Barbour said he went to the King speech, but couldn't hear very well and "paid more attention to the girls than to King."
While others have held up Yazoo City's experience as a model for school integration, Barbour's critics have jumped on his assertion that he doesn't recall race relations in Mississippi in the early 1960s as being "that bad," as well as his praise for Citizens Councils.
This isn't the first time Barbour has come under fire for his recollection of the civil rights era. During a recent interview with the conservative magazine Human Events, Barbour suggested that segregation was over by the time he went to college at Ole Miss in the mid-1960s and that the South's shift from Democratic to Republican dominance was not related to desegregation -- an assertion that Post columnist Eugene Robinson called the "biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I've ever heard."
Barbour spokesman Dan Turner has responded to the uproar over the governor's comments in a fairly combative interview with TPM's Eric Kleefeld.
"You're trying to paint the governor as a racist," [Turner] said. "And nothing could be further from the truth." [...]
So, I asked Turner, does Barbour have any comment on the Citizen Council movement's basis in white supremacy, and its work of launching economic boycotts to cut off employment and business for African-Americans who became active for civil rights -- including that notable occasion in Yazoo City?
"Gov. Barbour did not comment on the Citizens Council movement's history," Turner responded. "He commented on the business community in Yazoo City, Mississippi."
David Halberstam wrote about the Citizens Council movement for Commentary in 1956, including this anecdote about the Yazoo City Citizens Council:
"Look," said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, "if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don't want him working for you -- of course you don't."
In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the "offenders"); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.
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