Maine Gov. Paul LePage suggested Tuesday that Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) “thank” Republican presidents including Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant for what he said was their role in fighting slavery and Jim Crow laws.
“How about John Lewis last week?” LePage said of the civil rights icon in an interview on local radio station WVOM, first flagged by CNN.
“Criticizing the president. You know, I will just say this. John Lewis ought to look at history,” he continued. “It was Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves. It was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant that fought against Jim Crow laws. A simple ‘thank you’ would suffice.”
Lewis said in a preview released Friday of his appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he did not consider Trump a “legitimate” president. He cited evidence the U.S. intelligence community presented to members of Congress that Russia had bolstered Trump’s campaign and hurt Hillary Clinton’s.
Lewis said he would not attend the presidential inauguration, making him part of a group which now contains more than 40 Democratic members of Congress.
While Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the first major step towards ending slavery in the United States, and Ulysses S. Grant sided with Radical Republicans in Congress to combat white supremacist groups, Jim Crow laws spread across the South during Hayes’ presidency. Those laws stayed in place in large part through the 1960s, when Lewis and others in the Civil Rights Movement were instrumental in combatting many of them.
LePage accused those Democrats not attending the inauguration of trying to “bully us out of our Constitution.”
“This election followed the Constitution,” he said. “We have had for 235 years a general election followed by an Electoral College followed by the acceptance of Congress, and it’s been peaceful transition for 235 years. For some reason, the left has become so hateful and so bullying, they’re trying to bully us out of our constitution.”
Later, LePage tried to clarify his remarks in an impromptu interview with the Portland Press Herald.
“The blacks, the NAACP (paint) all white people with one brush,” LePage said, as quoted by the publication, without specifying what he was referring to. “To say that every white American is a racist is an insult. The NAACP should apologize to the white people, to the people from the north for fighting their battle.”
“In 1964 when we were desegregating schools there were a lot of people from the North who went down to the South, were killed for trying to help the blacks,” he continued. “And now they paint one brush and say all whites are racists. I’m sorry, we’re not. Some of us are abolitionists. I’m a strong abolitionist, I’m a strong Lincoln supporter, I’m a strong Grant supporter, I’m a strong Dwight D. Eisenhower supporter, I think LBJ did the right thing – I’m all in.”
This post has been updated.
