1 Boring Old Man

Haley Barbour’s racist civil rights era revisionism
The Daily Kos
by Joan McCarter
December 20, 2010

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a strategy for beating Sarah Palin to the teabaggers’ support in the 2012 primaries. Digby calls it his "Southern Strategy," consisting of a the dogwhistle message that "racism in America was always overblown with the implication being that those who complain about it have always been whiners." That includes telling The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson that the White Supremacist Citizens’ Council was actually a force for good in the Civil Rights fight.

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.”

That would be news to the African American citizens of Yazoo City. Via Atrios, here’s a 1956 article from David Halberstam.

"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.

Intimidating blacks and their white employers and supporters seems to have been the real business of the Yazoo City Citizens’ Council…

Back in the summer of 66, my young wife and I took a camping trip down the Mississippi Delta from Memphis where I was finishing Medical School. We wanted to take some Jim Crow pictures to preserve what it had been like there – thinking that we were finally on the downhill leg of the Civil Rights Movement, and people might try to forget. We saw a sign to Ruleville Mississippi – a place we’d heard of from watching the Democratic Convention when the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party tried to be seated. Their most eloquent spokesperson was Fannie Lou Hamer from Ruleville, a tiny town in the heart of the cotton fields that covered the Delta in those days.

As we drove into town, we knew we were in the right place for our photographs. There was a Dairy Queen with a strange addition built onto the front of it with a large picture window. On the back wall was a huge Confederate Battle Flag tacked up on the wall. The sign outside said, White Citizens Council Annex, Private Club. So we drove through town, photographing the "white" and "colored" signs that had defined the segregated South of our childhood. My wife was driving as I clicked away. She circled back, determined to get a picture of the White Citizens Council Dairy Queen. We parked nearby, but I noticed that the same two-tone blue 1956 Ford that had been behind us earlier pulled up right behind. I also notice that there was a shotgun mounted vertically between the two guys in the front seat.

So we drove on, forgoing our photo-op, followed by the two-tone blue Ford. When we reached the Sunflower County Line, it mercifully turned around. When we finally stopped for gas and gathered some composure, we started wondering how they knew we were "foreigners." There, on the rear bumper of my car was the answer – a black and white A.C.L.U. bumper sticker that said, "JUSTICE." Our pictures didn’t survive the 50 years in between, but the memories sure did.