HALEY BARBOUR'S RACIST CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST

Back in the day when a story died it was buried forever. Now with the internet, give it time. It will come back when you least expect it. We honestly did not expect Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to actually give the White Citizen’s Councils props this week, especially since everyone let him slide on the fact that he was attending functions of the group they morphed into, the Council of Conservative Citizens. If you are a regular to this site you may know this story. Back in 2003, the usual suspects on the right noticed that in the recall election for California Governor, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante was beating Arnold Schwarzenegger, so they started attacking him for his associations with National Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a student organization that fights for Chicano rights. Of course to the likes of David Horowitz (who makes literature from white supremacists available for download from his website), Michele “The World’s Darkest White Supremacist” Malkin (who contributes to VDARE, and anti-immigration website run by white supremacist Peter Brimelow) and Sean Hannity (who aside from being a one time friend of incarcerated white supremacist Hal Turner, made a passing reference during a discussion around this time to Schwarzenegger’s father Gustav, a member of the Nazi paramilitary unit, Sturmabteilung (SA) as being merely a “Nazi sympathizer”) MEChA was a racist organization and anyone associated with them is not fit to be a Governor. Meanwhile, they ignored Barbour participating in events and rallies put on by the CCC. Well seven years after Bustamante lost that election and Barbour won his, as Barbour nears the end of his tenure eyeing a presidential campaign, it all comes back. See? We even post the picture of him hanging out with his CCC buds, some of them possibly showing up at the American Renaissance conference in Charlotte, NC in February! Those aforementioned presidential aspirations may be dashed now, and with anyone looking at their comical, self-serving, publicity seeking antic of trying to boycott the movie Thor because there’s a black guy in it, the CCC looks like the wrong group for anyone to associate with. Which means another presidential contender, Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, might want to discuss why he gave the group a videotaped address for one of their conferences while he was Lt. Governor…

Wall Street Journal

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.”

Liberal critics, many historians and some Republicans said Mr. Barbour’s characterization ignored the intent of the Citizens’ Councils. First organized in Mississippi Delta communities, the councils were made up of local business leaders who opposed integration by exerting economic pressure on black workers.

Mr. Barbour, 63 years old, was a teenager and young adult during the civil-rights protests of the 1960s. He and his supporters acknowledge that Mississippi’s civil rights history is sure to be an issue if he runs for president.

In his statement Tuesday, Mr. Barbour said he had meant to emphasize Yazoo City’s rejection of the Ku Klux Klan. “Nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either,” he said. “Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens’ Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation.”

Mr. Barbour’s remarks came on the heels of a successful year in politics.As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, a position he left recently, Mr. Barbour helped his party raise a record $85 million and capture Democratic governorships in important presidential-battleground states.

Mr. Barbour has said he would make a decision in the spring about whether to enter the 2012 presidential race.

McArthur Straughter, the mayor of Yazoo City, population 11,000, recalled racial tensions in the city during the period Mr. Barbour was discussing.

Mr. Straughter, a 68-year-old African-American, said he remembers being out with his brothers when they were falsely accused of waving a gun out a car window after being turned away from a soda shop. The brothers were arrested but later let go.

“Contrary to what people might think about certain parts of the South, we have come a long ways,” he said.

In a recent book, Joseph Crespino, a history professor at Atlanta’s Emory University, discussed a 1955 incident in Yazoo City in which the Citizens’ Council published the names of 53 black parents who had petitioned the school board to adopt a policy of integration. Of those, 51 lost their jobs and businesses and many were run out of town, Mr. Crespino’s book said.