Thanks to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, some truly ridiculous blather by Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a man whose name is bruited about as a potential Republican nomination for president, has been exposed for the noxious nonsense that it is. Barbour. who is 62, recently gave an interview for Human Events, a conservative magazine and Web site, in which he tried to sell the idea that Southern Republicans in the 1960s were enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement, and that he and his generation were the ones who left the racist Democratic party for the open-minded GOP.
As Robinson writes: “Barbour claimed that it was “my generation” that led the switch: “my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college — never thought twice about it.” The “old Democrats” fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but “by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.”‘
As Robinson and Maddow both showed, Barbour did not attend integrated primary or secondary schools, and attended an Ol’ Miss that was, during his attendance, integrated by the grace of no more than a score of black students. It is simply not credible that in this hotbed of civil rights activity, Barbour “never thought twice” about integration; even if his mind was entirely absorbed by football, beer and coeds, a man as intelligent as Barbour had to have some exposure. He couldn’t be that oblivious.
His reading of the south’s turn to Republicanism is also ridiculous. Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans pushed the civil rights agenda. The south began turning Republican when Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act; President Nixon‘s southern strategy was all about the building a strong Republican party on the basis of a cynical exploitation of the controversy over the fight for civil rights and full equality.
And I’d like to hear what Barbour means about having “changed the south”, given that he sent his own children to whites-only academies, and has campaigned before white supremacists organizations.
For some reason, some members of Barbour’s generation have trouble coming to grips with the experience of the sixties. Is it that they were wrong? Or that they were on the losing side of history?
I recently read Teaching the Pig to Dance, former Senator Fred Thompson‘s memoir of 
growing up in a small town in Tennessee in the fifties and sixties, and was struck by almost complete lack of mention of the great events of the era. Thompson was in high school and college during the Freedom Rider era; he went to school in Memphis close to the time of Martin Luther King‘s assassination. Yet his comments on events that took place so close to him go virtually unrecorded. In the one a paragraph where he discusses it, he says, “We didn’t realize a social transition was going on even though we were living right in the middle of it. I guess that is especially true if you are busy just growing up and think you have your own serious problems to worry about. My generation saw the complete changing of certain basic notions. I went from a time when almost everyone I knew thought that separation of the races was the natural order of things to a time when almost everyone I knew thought exactly the opposite. That’s quite a journey. And it’s one that thankfully my homefolks and I, along with a lot of other Americans, made together.”
How could he gloss over something like this? He acts like he was living in Brigadoon.
For about eight misguided months in 1976, I was a civil service worker at the Defense Department Personnel Service Center in south Philadelphia. This was part of the organization that bought uniforms for the military, and I was training to become a Quality Assurance Specialist in the division of hats and caps. I wasn’t a round peg in a square hole; I was a round peg in a void. But no matter. A lot of the manufacturers were located in the south, and one day, one of the manufacturers’ representatives visited. He was a middle aged in his thirties, a white man, and within an hour, he was telling this joke to me and another white colleague: “One two two blacks fellers bought a truck load of gravel. They put a tarp over the gravel to hold it down, but the tarp was loose and kept blowing off. One of the black fellers decided to go on the back and lie on top of the tarp to hold it down, and off he and the other feller went. They passed two good ol’ boys. One turned to the other and said “Look, somebody just throwed away a perfectly good nigger.”
The racism in those years was everywhere. The racism was assumed. Thompson’s blithe obliviousness is incredible. Barbour’s astonishing revisionism is sad, ludicrous, ignorant, despicable.