Barbour Shifts on Anti-Integration Groups
Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a potential Republican presidential candidate, said Tuesday that he didn’t condone the Citizens’ Councils known for opposing racial integration in the Deep South decades ago, softening remarks he made in a recent magazine interview.
Mr. Barbour released a written statement augmenting remarks that he had made in The Weekly Standard published Monday. When asked why his hometown had avoided the violence that accompanied public-school integration in other locales, Mr. Barbour had spoken well of the Citizens’ Council in Yazoo City.
“You heard of the Citizens’ Councils?” Mr. Barbour said in the magazine interview. “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.”
WSJ
12/22/10
Magnolia Tribune
