WASHINGTON — After facing intense criticism Monday over his comments about civil rights and the White Citizens Council, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has released a follow-up statement condemning the segregationist group.
When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the “Citizens Council,” is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.
Read more here
Too Late, Barbour! When evil gets to rockin,’ KARMA come a knockin. You have stepped in it now. Your own words have come back to bite you in the ass.
Keep in mind folks…these are the things Haley Barbour stated was not so bad during the 1960’s.
Hat tip Rikyrah @ JJP
Barbour wrong on Yazoo history
Haley Barbour was my best friend growing up in Yazoo City.
While he can say that Yazoo missed the violence other towns experienced during the Civil Rights movement, the White Citizens Council did do its part to terrorize those who did not agree with its agenda.
My parents, both physicians, protested attempts by the White Citizens Council and other doctors to turn a federally funded Hill-Burton “separate-but-equal” hospital into a whites only facility in 1955.
Threatening phone calls, dead cats on the lawn and other acts of intimidation combined to run my father out of town for two years.
He lost all of his white patients; my mother, the only pediatrician in town, lost more than half of her white patients.
Yazoo City’s blacks continued to die on the nearly hour-long ambulance drive to Jackson, where they could get hospital and trauma care. Blacks with gunshot and knife wounds, burns from kerosene stoves and children with convulsions continued to come to our house for emergency care, and some died because the city fathers on the White Citizens Council didn’t want an integrated hospital.
To say, as Haley did, that the White Citizens Council was better than the KKK, is a disingenuous comparison that has more to do with costume than terrorism and organized bullying.
Steve Mangold
San Jose, Calif.
I repeat:
Threats, intimidation, and refusal of basic care and jobs are just as dangerous than burning crossing.
The White Citizens Council is NO better than the KKK. Call RACIST BIGOTS RACIST BIGOTS.
Remember the early brouhaha with the Governor of Virginia and forgetting about SLAVERY when celebrating the Civil War..
what did Haley say about that?
It (SLAVERY) doesn’t mean DIDDLY.
that wasn’t said 5 years ago.
or 10 years ago.
or 15 years ago.
that was said IN THE LAST 6 MONTHS.
So, G-T-F-O-H that Boss Hogg isn’t anything other than what he appears to be:
a Pure-D RACIST.
plain and simple.
A racist CAC!
From Brown Man Thinking Hard:
Making the case for why this fool bet not even think about making a freaking race speech.
Why Haley Barbour Needs To Quit Mulling Over Race Speech
Mr. Barbour, you need to stop payment on the last check you wrote to your political consultants if this is the kind advice you have been getting.
Maybe its about time you hired a firm like Blacksheep Political Consulting. We can help you turn some of that ridiculous PR strategy you’ve been engaging in lately around.
But before we will consider taking you on as a client, you’ve got to accept some hard truths.
Hard truth #1: White Southerners, especially those like you, who were oblivious to the civil rights turmoil that saturated the atmosphere in your home state in the 50’s and 60’s, cannot lay claim to being on the right side of history after the fact.
Hard truth #2: Unless you registered black voters in the 60’s, or advocated publicly and openly for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, you have no moral capital to lean on when it comes to even thinking about making a speech
on race.
Hard truth #3: You look like a good ole boy. You sound like a good ole boy. Simply repeating phrases you’ve heard on PBS documentaries, even with a tear dripping from the corner of your eye won’t be believable.
Hard truth #4: The best you can do with a speech like this, if it is the kind of speech that is heartfelt and earnest and sprinkles in some of your personal shortcomings in the way the political pundits like to see the kinds of things, is alienate your base. And if you screw it up, you will get the added bonus of having no one else believe you anyway.
http://simplifythepositive.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-haley-barbour-needs-to-quit-mulling.html
Good Post, Brown Man!
Has Barbour lost his fking mind? Barbour Mulling A “Race Speech”? GTFOOH, Barbour! He’d better take that idea and shove it deep. Lying CAC!
The end!
This MOFO is TOAST! Everyone’s taking his fat ass to the wood shed.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2010/12/barbours_written_statement_isn.html
Posted at 8:30 AM ET, 12/22/2010
Haley Barbour’s written statement isn’t going to cut it
By Jennifer Rubin
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour issued this statement in an effort to quell the firestorm over his comments in the Weekly Standard:
When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.”
.
Is this sufficient to revive Barbour’s chances as a presidential candidate in 2012? Oh, puleez. Those who believe, with a fair amount of justification, that he simply doesn’t get it on matters of race are hardly going to be mollified by a written statement after more than 24 hours of horrid press coverage.
In the next interview he gives, and in many after that, he will be grilled on this and his other questionable comments. And what GOP staffers would want to join a campaign in which days, if not weeks, will be filled fielding questions on this issue? What donors, prominent men and women in their communities, want to take on the burden of defending all this and trying to pry donations out of friends and colleagues? It will be a very crowded field of candidates, so it’s hard to imagine that Republicans, who are desperate to win back the White House, would say, “Well, there just isn’t anybody but the guy with the trail of racially insensitive comments!”
In short, Republican voters, activists, staffers and donors will have many choices in 2012. It’s hard to conceive of a situation in which they would prefer Barbour, as solid a governor as he has been, over every other candidate, each of whom will have flaws that seem minor in comparison
Haley Barbour: Racist to the core
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/37225
Haley Barbour says the poor Ku Klux Klan is a just a misunderstood group of good old boys who got together from time to to time to do good things for the community.
Of course, the action of this civic action group including bombing black churches, hanging black men, raping black girls and castrating black men.
But wait. Haley says he remembers the Klan as a “Citizens Council” as a group that tried to do good things for his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi.
Barbour provided his nostalgic memories in a recent profile for the Weekly Standard magaine. As expected,his overt racism sparked outcries from one end of the country to the other. Even aging racists in Mississippi wondered what the hell he was up to.
So someone with an IQ of an average plant got to Barbour and said “hey, Haley, we’ know you’re dumb as a rug but this is too stupid even for you and it’s time for some damage control.
When you’re Haley Barbour and you’ve said things that eve makes the Klan blush it’s hard to come up with damage control, but he’s trying, now claiming the Citizen’s Counciil is “totally indefensible” along with the the “segregation” it supports.
The right-wing propabanda machine has gone into overtime, saying Barbour’s remarks wer “innocent nostalgia” and calling the uproar over the blatant racism just “a left-wing smear campaign.”
Oh, it was the left that took over Haley Barbour’s voice and hurled all those offensive remarks, eh? That red neck Barbour can go straight to hell & take Jeppi with him! CACS! The lot of them!
As far as any run for POTUS, Barbour is literally & figuratively MILK TOAST!
Haley Barbour now says racism is bad
http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2010/12/haley-barbour-now-says-racism-is-bad.html
Jim Crow Republican Haley Barbour now says those pro-segregation, white-supremacist Citizens Councils in the South, including in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi, were “indefensible”:
It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.
It was, to put it mildly, but you’ll excuse me if I don’t believe a word this racist blowhard says.
At Slate, David Weigel writes that “[t]he pattern revealed by his “gaffes,” though, is of a politician who thinks racism isn’t really a problem anymore, and that liberals get too much political leverage from the memory of the Civil Rights era.”
I think that’s understating, and somewhat misrepresenting, Barbour’s race “problem.” This is a man, after all — Barbour, not Weigel — who has a Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis in his office, a man who in 2003 attended a fundraiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a pro-segregation, white-supremacist group, a man with a long history of playing the race card to win white votes.
Is he an out-and-out racist? Maybe not — at least not anymore. But he’s certainly enough of a politician to know when to correct himself and to say what has to be said (particularly when eyeing a presidential run). Which he did. He just doesn’t have any credibility. You’d have to be a fool to believe him.
Gov. Barbour’s Dream World
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/opinion/22wed2.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
In Gov. Haley Barbour’s hazy, dream-coated South, the civil-rights era was an easy transition for his Mississippi hometown of Yazoo City. As he told the Weekly Standard recently, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an unmemorable speaker, and notorious White Citizens Councils protected the world from violent racists.
Perhaps Mr. Barbour, one of the most powerful men in the Republican Party and a potential presidential candidate, suffers from the faulty memory all too common among those who stood on the sidelines during one of the greatest social upheavals in history. It is more likely, though, that his recent remarks on the period fit a well-established pattern of racial insensitivity that raises increasing doubts about his fitness for national office.
In the magazine’s profile of the second-term governor, Mr. Barbour suggests that the 1960s — when people lost life and limb battling for equal rights for black citizens — were not a terribly big deal in Yazoo City. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. He heard Dr. King speak at the county fairgrounds in 1962 but can’t remember the speech. “We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do,” he said. “We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
And the Citizens Councils were simply right-minded business leaders trying to achieve integration without violence. Thanks to the councils, he said, “we didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
The councils, of course, arose in the South for a single and sinister purpose: to fight federal attempts at integration and to maintain the supremacy of white leaders in cities and states. Mississippi’s council, formed in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, was one of the most powerful political forces in the state, and later raised funds for the defense of the murderer of Medgar Evers. The council chapter in Yazoo City, so fondly remembered by Mr. Barbour, published the names of N.A.A.C.P. leaders who dared to demand the town’s schools be integrated in 1955. Those on the list systematically lost their jobs and their livelihoods, boycotted by white citizens.
Mr. Barbour hastily issued a statement on Tuesday describing the councils as “indefensible” and the era as “difficult and painful.” But this is the same man who in 1982 made an indefensible remark to an aide who complained that there would be “coons” at a campaign stop. If the aide persisted in racist remarks, Mr. Barbour said, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks. His campaign for the governor’s office was also racially tinged.
Reverend Al on The Ed Show- BARBOUR UNDER FIRE!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/40773056#40773056
WE know exactly what Haley Barbour stands for. Nothing new with his beliefs. He’s thought and felt this way forever. If he thinks he’s getting into the White House with that mindset in the 21st century… He really thinks white people are invinciable.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-white-citizens-councils-br-respectable-means-for-unrespectable-ends-2460
If he thinks he’s getting into the White House with that mindset in the 21st century…….
Watch your ass, Barbour! 3 Chics is gonna shut this muthafucka down!
Barbour ain’t getting nowhere near the White House. It’s a good thing he can’t keep his fat cracka ass cracka mouth shut. We need to hear how he really feels and think, even though we already know it.
If these fuckers think black folks don’t know what the hell STATES RIGHTS means, they’re dumber than a bag of rocks.
STATES RIGHTS= Segregation, Jim Crow, White only… discrimination against POC, othewise anyone other than whites…..
Tell the truth, SG2. We ain’t gonna let Haley Barbour or anyone else revise the atrocities of the 50s, 60s and anytime in between. HELL NAW!!!!!!!!!
Shut these mofos down, talking about this lying bullshit.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss) defended Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s omission of slavery from his “Confederate History Month” proclamation.
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Barber said that the firestorm of controversy raised by McDonnell’s proclamation is “just a nit”. “It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly,” Barbour claimed.
And we definitely see the MSM parading all the black folks around to speak on this shit. How is it that these fools don’t get the white folks on to to address this racist shit?
Just preaching to the choir here. I was born 1 year after Rev. Al. I know what happen; I lived through segregation for a period.
These cable shows are all the same. Call on the black folks to address the racism, when it is the white folks who are RACIST!!!!
Tell it, Ametia!
I am so damn tired of the MSM bullshit. Real journalism has gone to hell in a handbasket. Why not get some of their brethern to call out this racist bullshit?
Nothing gets resolved regarding race in this country, because WHITE folks donot want to OWN their racism.
It’s a vicious circle….. racist behavior, cries of racism by victim, white media parade blacks on tee vee to speak about it, (bandaid) , things get quiet, until the next round of racist behaviors, wash, rinse, repeat….
Remember anything is possible in America. Afterall Palin is still being propped up by the media, even though she sabotages herself with her complete and utter ignorance. Trying to pit her against POTUS & FLOTUS like that bitch is somebody. She ain’t shit!
Great post, SG2.
These images are hauntingly raw and very real., Haley Barbour. You and the rest of your white citizens council don’t get to rewrite these atrocities. NEVER!
The images are horrific. We won’t stand for anyone’s bullshit by trying to re-write these monumental atrocities our people suffered & pretend it didn’t happen. Not on this earth!