Today in the media is let’s play with Haley Barbour day. And why not. It is so occasional that Republicans tip their hands and tell it like it is. And the way it is . . . is that this is, still to some extent, a country loaded with racial bias. History is key to its origins and continuing pull. The GOP (to me, the FUP) is alive because of its understanding and capitalizing on it in the most skillful ways. But usually under the radar. “Southern strategy” is one of the many code words to describe it. When someone, especially a man who claims to remember civil rights history serves it hot and wrong, we have to play.
And so Haley Barbour In a profile published Monday in The Weekly Standard, talked about the White Citizens’ Councils of the late 1960s, which opposed racial integration. Mr. Barbour, a teenager and young adult during the 1960s, said that in his town, they were a positive force, praising them as “an organization of town leaders” who refused to tolerate the racist attitudes of the Ku Klux Klan.
“In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan” would be “run out of town,” Mr. Barbour said. “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.”
Maybe he didn’t have a problem with the Klan.
He didn’t have a problem with MLK coming to speak either.
“We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do,” Mr. Barbour said, recalling the visit, in 1962, when he was about 15. “We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
We remember those guys on the cars shouting and gesturing or worse at the civil rights marchers. They topic went off of girls from time to time.
The age of Fox effectively blocks news. So, I suspect, we will see more of this as the racist, brain dead right can just hear each other and drink their own tea. So we have to have a day for them when they do. And call racism out when and where we see it. Because silence kills.
