For good or for bad, you’re judged by the company you keep, and that goes for the Republican Party and anyone else. But when the GOP is accused of cozying up to hate groups, they don’t seem to distance themselves from the alleged affiliations, they embrace them. Sometimes Republicans go out of their way to demonstrate their approval of racist and homophobic organizations that we should all find objectionable.
Case in point: Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi. Of the civil rights era, he said “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he told the Weekly Standard. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.” In Barbour’s world, the races lived side by side during Jim Crow segregation, and the White Citizens’ Council—known to many as the white collar Klan— was a force for good in his hometown of Yazoo City:
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 reality of these councils was far different, as neo-confederate expert Edward Sebesta documents in his Citizens’ Council newspaper historical website. The councils were established as a direct response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, to resist desegregation and maintain white supremacy in the South. An article in the October 1955 edition of The Citizens’ Council entitled, “Mississippi Citizens’ Councils Are Protecting Both Races” had this to say:
http://www.laprogressive.com/rankism/gop-strives-hate-groups-respectable/
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