Haley Barbour’s Praise For Racist Group Gets Noticed
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is getting much more national attention than he usually does this week following a Weekly Standard profile in which the Republican with presidential aspirations lauds a group that was part of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s.
In the piece headlined, “The Boy from Yazoo City” by writer Andrew Barbour, the governor, a former Republican National Committee chair, has a fond memory of the Citizens’ Council in his hometown that dresses up the real history of such groups.
It’s this excerpt from the piece that has caused collective eye-brow raising:
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.”
NPR
12/21/10
