The race hounds at the New York Times, who
don’t miss a thing, have nabbed Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour
trying cross the border into Presidential territory posing as an
ordinary citizen.
Barbour is the subject of a
cover story by Andy Ferguson in this week’s Weekly
Standard. The story was not on the newsstands one day before,
according to Times reporter Michael
D. Shear, “Media Matters, a liberal organization, sent e-mail
messages to reporters Monday urging coverage of the comments.” So
naturally, the Times had to comply. “Derrick Johnson,
president of the Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. told Huffington Post, ‘It’s
beyond disturbing — it’s offensive that he would take that
approach to the history of the state,’” he reports.
Here’s what Barbour did. Talking about his boyhood in
Yazoo City during the Civil Rights Era, Barbour recalled that the
White Citizens Council — a feared source of violence in other
parts of the state — played an entirely different role in his
hometown.
“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.”
“I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” Barbour
remarks, obviously referring to his hometown experience, not the
general condition of African-Americans across the state. He recalls
that race relations were so relaxed that when Martin Luther King
came to give a speech in 1962, both whites and blacks turned out to
hear him. Here is Ferguson’s report:
Did you go? I asked.
“Sure, I was there with some of my friends.”
I asked him why he went out.
“We wanted to hear him speak.”
I asked what King had said that day.
“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear
very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat
on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We
paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
Well, it’s obvious what’s going on here, right?
Barbour is a racist! (He was 15
at the time.) After all, there are no innocent bystanders in
politics, right? If you weren’t standing on the front lines, arms
crossed, singing “We Shall Overcome,” then you are as guilty as
anyone.
I was in Mississippi as a volunteer during the “Freedom
Summer” of 1964. (A play I’ve written about that summer was
produced this fall in Nyack, N.Y.) At the orientation, Bob Moses,
the great civil right pioneer, told us there were three types of
towns in the state: 1) places where there was very little violence,
2) places where the authorities could “turn the violence on and
off,” and 3) places where no one could control the violence. Yazoo
City was obviously a place where the establishment could not only
turn the violence on and off but run it out of town as well. As
Ferguson reports, Yazoo City’s school integration in 1970 was
probably the smoothest in the state. “The national reporters
presented the city to the world as a model of how integration at
its best could work,” says Ferguson. Willie Morris, the revered
editor of Harper’s and another son of Yazoo
City, reported at the time, “By the middle of the day, it was quite
apparent that Yazoo City had indeed integrated its schools calmly
and deliberately.”
All this is no reflection on Barbour, who was off at
college when it all happened. But it does show that there were good
people and bad people in Mississippi and for the most part the good
people eventually prevailed. Only liberals intent on keeping the
nation perpetually divided over race would conclude any
different.
