Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

So many bastards, so little time.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

This blog will pay for itself.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

No Justins, No Peace

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

We still have time to mess this up!

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Fables Of The Reconstruction / A History Lesson for Haley…

A History Lesson for Haley…

by | 19 Comments

This post is in: ,

That old Nit Diddler, Governor Haley Barbour, has had another day of folks reacting to his false memories of his life and times.

It seems that old Southern white guys can still pay a small price for whitewashing their personal history and downplaying the reaction by their fellow Southern white guys to the Civil Rights movement. Haley tried to walk it back today by saying that he now thinks the White Citizens’ Councils were “indefensible”. And Pravda on the Potomac is reporting that the Nit Diddler may give his own “Race Speech”. If this happens you can expect a symphony of dog whistles designed as a white counterpoint to Obama’s 2008 speech and fresh white victim-hood talking points for the 2012 campaign. I expect the press will lap that gruel up.

Still, I could be surprised.

What Haley needs is a history lesson.

TPM had one that explained how the WCC drove out the KKK because they did not want the competition for organizing white resistance.

But if Haley wants to remember or learn what his Yazoo City was really doing
during the Civil Rights era he could get a quick lessen from Cynic over at TNC’s place. This explains how the target of Yazoo’s white business leaders wasn’t the KKK but the NAACP and black folks trying to exercise their right to vote and get their children a decent education:

If Barbour wants to praise the good people of Yazoo City for their extraordinary restraint in not employing violence as they hounded from their community those black parents brave enough to demand a decent education for their children; to laud their public disavowal of the local Klan even as they turned a blind eye to its activities; or to extol their grudging cession of the inevitability of court-ordered integration after fifteen years of stalling, for its absence of lynchings or riots, that’s his prerogative. For the rest of us, though, Yazoo City should serve as a poignant reminder that the civil rights struggle really was “that bad.”

For context and a deeper understanding, Haley should read Ta-Nehisi Coates as he prepares for any ‘race speech’. He should memorize this post. I encourage you to read it as well. This snip gives one a brief idea of why:

He still proudly displays the flag of that cause, the same flag that authored the death of more American soldiers than Vietnam, World War I and World War II combined, the death of Lincoln, and the deaths of countless freedmen and descendants of freedman. In short, Barbour embraces the flag of America’s most prodigious white supremacists, and foremost home-grown terrorists. Of all the United States, Mississippi has the highest percentage of African-Americans. Haley Barbour, evidently, knows very little of their history. Indeed, there may not be a governor more ignorant of his constituents in all this great land.

This should encourage anybody to dig for the truth–even the old Nit Diddler himself. And if you dig, you find that Barbour if full of shit. He fondly remembers his days in Yazoo as being great. Of course he does, but it is a false memory. The real reason life in old Yazoo was good for Haley was–in the words of one J. Cole–“BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING WHITE, ASSHOLE.”

Cheers

dengre

ps, it looks like some folks pissed on last night’s Celebration of Treason. Good for them.

Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    Chris

    TPM had one that explained how the WCC drove out the KKK because they did not want the competition for organizing white resistance.

    That is lovely.

    Conservatives often claim that fascism is a leftwing phenomenon and that the reason they threw socialists and communists in jail is that they just didn’t want competition. They should appreciate having the argument thrown back at them. (In, y’know, factual context).

  2. 2.

    Keith G

    One needs a fairly complex table with cross tabs to keep up with the various self inflicted wounds suffered by GOP presidential hopefuls.

  3. 3.

    Redshift

    ps, it looks like some folks pissed on last night’s Celebration of Treason. Good for them.

    Yes, indeed. I’m particularly tickled at the quote from a Union reenactor in South Carolina.

    I also recommend the Rude Pundit:

    Truly, one of the funnest things you can do when you’re in the South is get into an argument over why the Confederate states seceded from the United States.

  4. 4.

    Mike in NC

    Simpson said organizers are merely honoring their ancestors.

    “All of us are descendants of Confederate Nazi soldiers,” he said. “We honor the men who wore the gray swastika. We can understand what animated them to defend their homes exterminate the subhumans.”

  5. 5.

    Justin

    Why does anyone think this whole episode was some sort of a problem for the Nit Diddler? The dog whistle got blown really hard, and walking it back after a liberal freakout just puts a nice petina of persecution by the left wing media on it.

  6. 6.

    El Cid

    One can also examine such exotic, hard-to-access sources of information as Time magazine’s website, which can access its entire archive back to the 1920s, but it does require you to type in search terms.

    From December 20th, 1954.

    At a mass meeting of white adults in Linden, Ala. last week, State Senator Walter C. Givhan spoke on one of his favorite topics: the campaign of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to end segregation in the schools.
    __
    What, he cried, is the real purpose of the campaign? “To open the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men.”
    __
    “And what will happen if the campaign succeeds? The Negroes will see to it that the nation gets a Negro vice president, “and after that happens, what would prevent them from assassinating the President and making the Negro President?” Roared the senator: “You say it can’t happen here, but I say it can and will unless we stand up and fight.” The crowd, obviously in agreement, promptly voted to set up a white Citizens Council to stop desegregation before it even begins.
    __
    By last week the white Citizens Councils that began last summer in Mississippi had spread to at least four Alabama counties. Their purpose, said Lawyer Alston Keith, chairman of the council in Alabama’s Dallas County, is “to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit or renew a mortgage.” So far, the council’s bark has been worse than its bite, but the bite is taking effect. Examples :
    __
    ¶ In Indianola, Miss., members of the Citizens Council have been buttonholing patients of Negro Physician Clinton Battle, [and they] have warned them that they will lose their jobs if they continue to consult him. Reason: Battle, the first Negro in Sunflower County to register and vote, had been urging other Negroes to follow suit. The council’s campaign has been so successful that at the last election not a single Negro—including Dr. Battle—appeared at the polls.
    __
    ¶In Belzoni, Miss., the Citizens Council learned that Negro Undertaker T. B. Johnson is a member of the pro-integration Regional Council of Negro Leadership, warned him that he had better not take the job of being chairman of the local Negro Boy Scouts. If he did, said his white townsmen, he would never get a penny of credit in Belzoni again. Told that he might also be run out of town, Johnson gave in.
    __
    ¶In Columbus, Miss., the Bank of Commerce told Negro Dentist Emmett Stringer, ex-president of the state N.A.A.C.P., that though it had lent him money in the past, it would not do so in the future.
    __
    Other citizens have taken up the practice of calling Stringer’s mother up in the middle of the night to report: “Dr. Stringer has been killed.” Added one imaginative caller: “Do you have his body yet?”

    I don’t remember the civil rights struggle as being particularly ornery, though; it was really more like a gentlemen’s parlour game.

  7. 7.

    Mike in NC

    April 2011 is still a ways off but I’m already sick of our fucking media giving a forum to Confederate apologists like Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich, and George Allen to spin their “Lost Cause” bullshit.

    Next up: a TIME magazine cover with a portrait of Robert E. Lee with the caption “Saint or Sinner?”

  8. 8.

    Dee Loralei

    Dennis, I urge you to seek and find any of Willie Morris’s reporting from that period. He’ll tell you from a white mans perspective what he saw growing up in Ms during that period. I think he was from Yazoo City and of Barbour’s generation. Willie was my favorite Southern writer, even more than Eudora Welty. You might know him from “My Dog Skip,” but he wrote some amzingly poignant novels of growing up in MS as a young child during WWII and in the post war years. He also wrote many non-fiction books and articles, my fav is “The Courtship of Marcus Dupree,” which starts out with the murders of Schwerner and Cheney and Lowe in Philadelphia, Ms. And ends with Marcus leaving Oklahoma’s football program.

    Willie grew up in MS, went to Texas for college and then went to NYC, I think he wrote for The Atlantic and edited it, and then went back to MS where he died way too young. He was honest, perspicacious,thoughtful and elegant in his writings, if you don’t know him, you need to.

    Oh, and he almost always made me cry… every damned story he told had a dog or cat in it.

  10. 10.

    Chris

    I apologize, by the way. I don’t know what I did, but my comment was in moderation and for some reason it didn’t let me edit. Sorry for breaking the thread…

  11. 11.

    Comrade Luke

    First comment to this article:

    Anyone who believes the war was fought to preserve slavery has no common sense. The South did not create slavery in the world. The changes made to the constitution reflect why the war was fought – to end Northern economic hegemony (no earmarks, no riders, etc). Do you really think thousands of soldiers would have walked most of 2000 miles from Texas, leaving their families alone on a very dangerous frontier (read Wilbargers 1888 book, Indian Depredations in Texas – illustrated by O’Henry) and fight and die for 4 years for the 3% who owned slaves? Of course they would not. Clara Barton said the same thing in her diary in 1862 about soldiers from Mississippi. Pres. Eisenhower commemorated the 100 year anniversary 50 years ago as a way to come together. So should we now.

    So we were all wrong. The Civil War was about earmarks..

  13. 13.

    Andy K

    Reading through those comments in the linked article from The State, and I’ve gotta say I’m seeing just what I expected from the Confederate revisionists. Jebus, are they blockheads or what? They make B.O.B. seem…uhm…hmmm…

  14. 14.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Andy K: Yeah, don’t go there. No way to win down that road.

    I like the comment (and I’m paraphrasing), “We don’t note the race of the people buying the tickets, but there was at least one black guy!”

    What a bunch of shitheads. I am glad people protested. And, TNC and his crew have been lights-out on this subject. If Barbour runs for president, I don’t think his good ol’ boy shtick is going to go over well with, well, anyone but the Neo-Confederates.

  15. 15.

    Andy K

    @asiangrrlMN:

    I liked the guy who was trying to say that there were not only black slave owners, but that there were black signatories to the S.C. secession statement. He tried backing away from the latter.

    Ohhhh…Humans…

  16. 16.

    Suffern ACE

    In 1954, the NAACP determined to bring five test cases to force integration in the Mississippi public schools. Yazoo County exhibited some of the worst disparities in the state, spending $245.55 on every white child, but only $2.92 per black pupil. So the NAACP gathered fifty-three signatures of leading black citizens of Yazoo City, the county seat, on a petition calling for integration.

    I thought that quote from TNC’s blog should be posted again. I wonder what exactly the kids did in those $2.92 per pupil schools?

  17. 17.

    debbie

    I don’t see this kind of dissembling ending until after that generation dies off. Barbour is just the latest to not understand how offensive his remarks are precisely because racism has been so intrinsic to Southern culture.

    My grandmother was born in 1906 in Athens, GA, with a black mammy and everything else given to a privileged white back then. Her entire life, she was never rude to a single person of any color, but she never shook the attitudes of her time. She never said nice things while thinking racist things to herself, but those thoughts were still in her DNA.

    She and I used to argue (non-aggressively) about race pretty frequently, and she couldn’t understand how she could be seen as being hurtful since she didn’t say hurtful things out loud. The discussion always ended with, “Well, I can’t help it.” And I don’t think she could.

  18. 18.

    Svensker

    @El Cid:

    Reading this stuff, from only 50 years ago, is just unbelievable. Appalling. Yet what strikes me the most, somehow, is just the silly pettiness of it. Not that the effect on blacks was silly or petty, but just how small and sad the folks caught up in the hysteria were.

    Until a few years ago, I thought that kind of racism was truly a thing of the past, with just a few inbreds and codgers still holding on to the hate. Sadly, no. We have progressed a lot from the 50s, but not nearly as much as I believed.

Comments are closed.

Trackbacks