Mississippi Governor and potential GOP presidential candidate Haley Barbour got himself in hot water recently when he came out in favor of the Citizens' Council, a pro-segregation group, and said that racism in the South before the civil rights movement "wasn't that bad."
Now, Barbour has backtracked on that sentiment, saying in a statement (H/TTalking Points Memo):
When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.
Today the Citizen's Council is "indefensible," but in a recent Weekly Standardprofile, Barbour called the group's members "town leaders":
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.
The backtracking might not do enough, as Barbour's presidential hopes are widely considered to be over.
By Lauren Kelley | Sourced from AlterNet
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