Did you catch John McCain’s rant about DADT just before the weekend vote? Watch.
Most folks familiar with the history of the last half century know the ‘White Citizen’s Council’ movement as the pro-segregationist para-government movement dedicated to preserving white supremacy as federal laws began forcing school integration and an end to racial discrimination in the South.
But in his new profile in the Weekly Standard Haley Barbour says they were just some good Americans organizing together to help preserve racial harmony.
Just by way of background, in the last decade or so there’s been controversy about a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor group to Citizen’s Councils. In other words, the CCC group was an organizational attempt to cleanse the reputation of the earlier group or rather shed some of its more explicit connection to white supremacy and legal racial discrimination. But even those folks were and are so retrograde that the mainstream right would have nothing to do with them. David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union — sponsor of the annual CPAC conference — said almost a decade ago: “We kicked [them] out of CPAC because they are racists.”
So folks like Keene won’t have anything to do with the cleaned up, scrubbed down version of the group. But Barbour thinks the genuine article operating as the rearguard during the Civil Rights Era was just great.
In the Weekly Standard piece that came out today, Gov. Barbour 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 the interview our reporter just did with Barbour’s spokesperson Dan Turner, Turner insisted that …
“Gov. Barbour did not comment on the Citizens Council movement’s history,” Turner responded. “He commented on the business community in Yazoo City, Mississippi.”
That doesn’t seem to square. The larger point of course is that the Citizens Councils were basically the voice of ‘respectable’ white supremacy in the South, aiming to keep segregations and legal discrimination in place while generally stopping short of lynching and paramilitary violence.
I mentioned earlier that Haley Barbour is in a brouhaha today over praise for the Whites Citizens Councils that sprung up in the South during the Civil Rights Era. And the succesor organization to the Citizens Council movement is the Council of Conservative Citizens, one of the groups that got Trent Lott in trouble.
We just checked up on them and apparently their latest crusade is a boycott of the new Marvel Studios movie Thor because Marvel cast a black actor, Idris Elba.
As the CCC says, “It seems that Marvel Studios believes that white people should have nothing that is unique to themselves.”
Read some selections from a Citizens Council newspaper from Jackson, Mississippi back in the mid-1950s. Gives some context for the Barbour remarks.
President Obama will sign the DADT repeal bill at 9:15 AM Wednesday morning.
It hasn’t gotten much play over the last few weeks since there’s been so much actual legislation going on. But there’s some really weird stuff going on at the House Ethics Committee over the last month — including attempted firings of key investigators, the Republican ranking member apparently calling in the Sargent at Arms to lock down the committees offices and now the chief counsel stepping down. Our Ryan Reilly brings us up to date on the whole story. We’ll be hearing more about this.