It’s starting to appear that, over the next year or so, we in the black community may have to start paying a great deal more attention to what’s taking place in Yazoo City, and especially to the words of one of its most famous native sons, a glib, repackaged white-supremacist sympathizer named Haley Barbour.
Don’t pretend you never heard of Yazoo City … it’s only about an hour and a half’s drive from Philadelphia. No, not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, Mississippi.
For those who think Philadelphia, Pennsylvania could stand improvement, let me remind you that Philadelphia, Mississippi is a place where just 19.8 percent of the population has a high school diploma, where the per-capita income is $25,807, where there is just one commercial bank and where the population is 46.2 percent black and 48.1 percent white.
The town became forever infamous when three "Freedom Riders" – two, white and Jewish, and the other black, were murdered at the height of the Civil Rights era, right before their bodies were set on fire.
That happened just down the road from where Haley Barbour was born and raised. It was the case wherein FBI investigators, while looking for the hidden remains of the three murdered young men, uncovered the bodies of seven other black lynching victims, whose deaths hadn’t even been reported. That was the same case wherein officials in Mississippi refused to even prosecute the killers.
Just two years before that, a black Air Force veteran named James Meredith put his own life at risk and had to be escorted to class by federal marshals after winning a lawsuit to desegregate the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), a school whose history includes having its entire student body and many faculty members walk off the campus and enlist in the Confederate Army, during the Civil War.
“Ole Miss” is located in Oxford Mississippi, only about 116 miles from Haley Barbour's Yazoo City. At the time of the desegregation effort, Barbour, future Mississippi Governor, future chair of the Republican National Committee and, now, an extremely likely and loquacious candidate for President of the United States, in 2012, was 15 years old. At the time of the murder of the Civil Rights workers, Mr. Barbour was 17 years of age– certainly old enough to have a full comprehension of what was going on around him, certainly old enough to understand that much of the most violent and unrelenting resistance to Civil Rights and equal opportunity for blacks in the South had come from the Ku Klux Klan and from Mississippi’s own White Citizens' Council.
Barbour, until last month, seemed to have successfully re-made himself as a racially sensitive,"new Southerner." In an interview, in December, however, in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Barbour, whose company Barbour Griffin, and Rogers, was described by Fortune Magazine, in 2001, as the most powerful lobbying firm in America, mentioned that he “just (didn’t) remember (the Civil Rights struggle in Yahoo City) as being that bad." He then went on to say that, as he recalled it, rather than being protectors for “European-American heritage,” as was the Council’s expressed mission, the White Citizens' Council was simply “an organization of town leaders.”
What Barbour glossed over, or conveniently forgot, during his interview, is that, during those years, the White Citizens' Council functioned very much like the Ku Klux Klan, in his town and across his state, except that its members, many of whom were also Klan members, refrained from wearing hoods and robes in public. Even without hoods, they somehow, managed to aggressively resist integration, to create white-only private schools to blunt the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education, and to run, successfully, for numerous public offices.
Barbour also was a staunch supporter of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of Confederate History Month, last April, when McDonnell got all sentimental about the wonderfulness of the Confederacy without feeling the need to offer a single mention of the institution of slavery, whatsoever.
Bringing up slavery in a discussion about the Confederacy, presidential-hopeful Barbour said, at the time, was very much like trying to "make a big deal out of something that doesn’t amount to diddly."
"Diddly," Governor Barbour?
A conservatively estimated 11 million Africans shipped from their own continent to the West, resulting in loss of language, culture and their own economic resources, and contributing directly to the deaths of an also-conservatively-estimated 2.5 million of them, in the process--is that what you call “diddly?"
Barbour's comments have made it very clear that gross, racial insensitivity is not dead, yet, in America, even at the highest levels of government. His words and actions also constitute evidence that we need to step up our activities directed at supporting politicians who are actually committed to assisting us in achieving our reasonable political and economic objectives. His very existence on the political landscape is a sign that we really do need to elect and support politicians who reject, as we do, the long-held assumption that it is normal, in America, for blacks to have substantially higher unemployment levels, for us to suffer significant negative disparities with regard to health care, for us to be satisfied to have low, single-digit participation in the national economy, and for us to have substantially lower median household incomes and net worth levels.
These conditions used to make us angry – today, somehow, they no longer do. These conditions used to cause us to make demands of the private sector and of elected officials. In 2011, we seem strangely contented and satisfied to be “marginal” Americans” and, even, ashamed to bring such topics up, in public. As a consequence , other folks are "eating our lunches," taking jobs we formerly held, and winning the contracts in which we deserve to participate.
Despite the fact that Americans of European descent have routinely received more than 95 percent of contract dollars from local, state and federal governments, we don’t get upset when “Judas Goat” black elected officials chide us for not "making it on our own" as they inaccurately say white businesses do.
Hey, if we somehow,"flipped the script" and black-owned businesses began to win 95 percent of the contracts that comprise the country’s $3.8 trillion annual budget, and if our most successful business leaders and our largest corporations routinely got away with paying little or no taxes, with the full support of the government, as we've recently seen in the mainstream business community, then we, too, would be just fine, socially and economically.
It is an absolute fact that when local, state and federal governments, or the private sector buy paper clips, computers, vehicles, new construction or even agricultural products, they rarely, if ever, buy them from black suppliers, putting our community well behind the economic "eight ball." It's easy to understand why black businesses participate in less than one half of one percent of gross receipts in this country.
Here we are, faced with another two-year cycle of intensive campaigning for presidential office and, so far, neither party and none of the candidates, seem to be thinking, at all, about the things that could, and should, be done to finally make blacks in this country “full-fledged Americans,” with all the power, privilege, economic resources and authority related thereto. They do, however, want us to vote for them, anyway.
We’ve got our "friends" in the Democratic Party, on the one side, wanting us, for their own political advantage, to say nothing, at all, about what we need to bring about the inclusion we so sorely need.
And, on the other side, we’ve got an early Republican challenger, in an increasingly "Red" America, who has said, among other dubious things, that the White Citizens' Council's actions and the Civil Rights struggles “weren’t that bad,” and that slavery, as he recalls, wasn’t “diddly.”
Looks like, even in the midst of holding both major parties accountable, leading up to 2012, we're going to have to watch this guy, Haley Barbour, very closely. He seems dangerous.
He also may very well be...the next President of the United States.
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