GORDON L. BAUM, ROT IN HELL!

Sandwiched in between the DOJ’s Ferguson report slamming the police there for it’s racist practices and the anniversary of the Selma march, comes yet another example of how the ideas, practices and people of the past are going down the crapper of history. The co-founder and head of the Council of Conservative Citizens is kaput. 

One People’s Project

Gordon Lee Baum, one of the founders and CEO of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group that was formed out of the ashes of the old White Citizens Councils of the sixties and gain support from prominent elected officials, died Thursday of a long illness. He was 74.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), CCC member Kyle Rogers reported the news on the CCC website as well as on the white supremacist page Stormfront, but just as quickly removed all postings announcing the death. Stormfront owner, Don Black posted in a thread, however that he received the news from Canadian white supremacist Paul Fromm later that evening. “Gordon had been seriously ill for a long time, but it must have gotten really bad for him to miss the CofCC national conference last summer,” he said, further lamenting the fact that it is the SPLC who broke the story publicly. On Saturday, CCC Board Member James Edwards announced his death at the end of his Political Cesspool radio program, a show that he said Baum appeared on several times.

Born in 1940, Baum was a personal injury lawyer who joined the White Citizens’ Council and was it’s midwest field organizer starting in 1969. In 1985, he along with fellow conservatives from both major parties, including former and current elected officials started the CCC. At its peak the organization grew to over 15,000 members and politicians incumbents and otherwise prominently stood with them as well as conservative actors such as the late Charlton Heston. That began to change in 1998 when the public began to take notice of nature of the organization, particularly due to the broadcasting of its conferences on CSPAN at the time. When it was learned that former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr gave the keynote speech at the CCC’s national convention that year and that then Mississippi Senator and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had spoken to the group five times, both claimed they knew virtually nothing about the group. Lott’s close association with the group, particularly his honorary membership became even more a thing of scrutiny, when his remarks during a birthday celebration for Senator Strom Thurmond became a controversy, costing him his position as Senate Majority Leader in 2003.

By then, the CCC became even more open about it’s beliefs of racial seperation and promotion of eugenics, namely their belief that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Still, some prominent conservatives supported them. Right wing commentator Ann Coulter even defended the group in her book Guilty, writing, among other things, “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” even though the group’s Statement of Principles, found on it’s web page, say that they “oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind”. In recent years, the CCC prominence had dwindled to a level where the only major media it had been able to generate was a campaign to boycott the 2011 movie Thor, based on the comic book character, because Black actor Idris Elba was to play the Norse god Heimdall. The film ultimately was a box office success, becoming the 15^th biggest movie of 2011, spawning a sequel that was also successful with a third to be released in 2017.

In recent years, Baum had been suffering from blindness and rarely made public appearences. In a 2012 interview he refered to President Obama, the first African American U.S. President as “the worst president of my lifetime”. Ironically, Baum’s death came hours after President Obama’s Justice Department released a scathing report rebuking the racist practices of the police department in Ferguson, MO, a suburb of Baum’s home base of St. Louis.