MISSISSIPPI GOVERNOR HALEY BARBOUR (in a recent edition of “Human Events”): [T]he people who led the change of parties in the South … was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college — never thought twice about it…[Segregationists were] old Democrats, [but] by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.
MICHAEL STEELE: “The Democrats were slaveholders, they were the ones who wanted to keep blacks in slavery. So the irony is that here we are today beholden to our slave masters, in effect.”
CONDI RICE: (at the 2000 Republican Convention): "The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."
Condi’s problem is that she has seemingly forgotten every day that has transpired since 1952.
By contrast, Haley Barbour is just making it up from selective memory and whole clothe.
Barbour probably knows this, and probably could care less.
Barbour proudly calls himself “a fat redneck with an accent.” According to Newsweek, Barbour “keeps a large portrait of the University Greys, the Confederate rifle company that suffered 100 percent casualties at Gettysburg, on a wall not far from a Stars and Bars Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis.” In 1982, while running for US Senate, Barbour was embarrassed by an aide's nasty remarks about "coons" at campaign rallies, but in reprimanding the aide, The New York Times says Barbour warned him that if he "persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."
Nonetheless, Republicans persists in repeating this sort of potted history, and from time to time it needs a reality check, so I thank Barbour for inspiring this one.
In the potted Republican history of Civil Rights, black voters have been living under a grand delusion that it has been the Democrats who have stood up for their rights and the Republicans who have stood in their way, when in actuality, it has been the other way around.
If we repealed the last half century and stipulated that it was now 1960, this argument would still be untrue, but far less so.
The Republican potted history usually cites the fact that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with the support of a far higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats, and that the most vehement opposition came almost entirely from southern Democrats.
All true.
The support from Republicans came not only from liberals like New York’s Jacob Javits and New Jersey’s Cliff Case, but from Main Street conservatives like Minority Leader Everett Dirksen.
But let’s keep things in perspective.
LBJ, also a southern Democrat, used every trick in his arsenal including bribery and flattery to induce Dirksen’s support. However, Dirksen was still smarting over nearly losing his last re-election to a Democrat who‘d attracted an overwhelming black vote. Undaunted, Johnson told Dirksen that if he would take the leadership in getting the bill passed, Illinois school children would thereafter know only two names to honor—Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.
Dirksen’s efforts were the high mark for Republicans in the modern Civil Rights Era, but let’s look at what came afterward.
Upon the bill’s passage, Johnson sagely observed: "There goes the South for a generation."
And almost immediately, the Republicans rejected moderates like Bill Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller to nominate for the Presidency the most prominent Republican Senate opponent of the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, in a campaign that is now almost universally acknowledged as the birth of the modern conservative movement.
The most ardent Southern Democratic opponent of Civil Rights, South Carolina’s J. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 Presidential candidate of the openly racist “State’s Rights Party” (whose non-civil rights platform planks were an eerie foreshadowing of the Tea Party Movement), almost immediately became a Republican and endorsed Goldwater for President. Goldwater carried the five most hidebound segregationist southern states, including Alabama and Mississippi. In Mississippi, the virtually all white electorate of the time (for why that was so, read on) gave Goldwater an astonishing 87% of the vote.
In 1968, Richard Nixon, a racial moderate who fought the toothless 1957 Civil Rights Act from the left, made a cynical decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners. With Thurmond literally by his side, he inaugurated what was known as “The Southern Strategy.”
It worked, and the realignment slowly begun in 1964 was now official party policy.
Given the south was a hidebound region, realignment took time. When arch-Segregationist William Colmer left his seat in Congress in 1972, he left it as a Democrat. When his top aide Trent Lott, assume the job after the election, he did so as a Republican.
As the new right wing influence transformed the Republicans, both Case and Javits were purged by their own parties. Today, Case and Javits would be in the Democratic Party’s left wing.
Perhaps the apotheosis of the transition occurred in 1980, when in his first public speech as the Republican nominee for President, Ronald Reagan traveled to Philadelphia Mississippi, and just down the road from the mud where three civil rights workers had been buried in 1964, he delivered the dog whistle heard round the Confederacy; a speech about “State’s Rights.”
Talk about the “Philadelphia Story.”
In 2008, white voters in Mississippi gave John McCain about 89% of their votes; the transformation begun by Goldwater was complete, right down to the margins of victory .
The Jefferson Davis/John Wilkes Booth wing of the Democratic Party embodied by the likes of Thurmond, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, are now all firmly ensconced within the Party of Lincoln. The results have been campaign after campaign based upon using black Americans as scapegoats and straw men.
Perhaps this history is better told by illustration. If so, one can probably not find a more repugnant example of a pre-Civil Rights Era southern Democratic politician than E.H. Hurst.
Hurst was a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives in the 1950 and 60s, and an arch-segregationist, but I repeat myself.
On September 25, 1961, Hurst shot and killed one Herbert Lee.
Herbert Lee, a fifty-two-year-old father of nine children, was, like Hurst, a dairy farmer. Lee lived across the road from Hurst. Hurst and Lee had grown up together. They were friends; people who knew both say "They broke bread together … their children played together."
But Herbert Lee was also an NAACP member involved in voter registration efforts led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The day before the murder, a witness named E.W. Steptoe had met with lawyers for the Justice Department and told them that Hurst had publicly threatened to kill him and Lee. Lee had attended voter-registration classes and had volunteered a few days before to attempt to register to vote. The last person to have done so had been beaten by Hurst’s son-in-law, who’d then been acquitted of assault charges by an all white jury.
E.H. Hurst invited Herbert Lee to see him down at the cotton gin. Witnesses say Herbert Lee drove up in his truck with a load of cotton. E. H. Hurst followed behind him in an empty truck. Hurst got out of his truck and came to the cab on the driver's side of Lee's truck and began arguing with Lee. He pulled out a gun which he had under his shirt and began threatening Lee with it. Hurst allegedly said "I'm not fooling around this time, I really mean business,” and Lee responded "Put the gun down. I won't talk to you unless you put the gun down."
Hurst put the gun back under his coat and then Lee slid out on the other side. As he got out, Hurst ran around the front of the cab, started cursing, took his gun out, pointed it at Lee and shot him.
E.H. Hurst had an unusual vision of the concept of constituent service.
There were about a dozen witnesses to the murder. Afterwards, Lee ‘s body laid for two hours in a pool of its own blood, swarmed over by insects until the coroner came. Meanwhile, the Sheriff came and whisked Hurst away.
A coroner’s inquest took place that very afternoon. Hurst testified that Lee owed him money and that when he had asked about it, Lee had “come at him with a tire iron.” Lee, he said, “had an ungovernable temper.” Hurst claimed he had walked around the front of the truck to meet Lee “I didn’t run…I got no rabbit in me.” Hurst explained the gun he was holding had “accidentally” discharged. “I must have pulled the trigger unconsciously,”
The coroner’s jury ruled the murder a “justifiable homicide.”
There had been several blacks who had witnessed the murder, but none was willing to tell a federal grand jury the truth. Five witnesses testified at the coroner’s jury, including Louis Allen.
Allen later told the Justice Department that he was told to testify that Lee had a tire iron in his hand and that he had threatened Hurst with it. At first, Allen said that he wouldn’t do it, but after the Sheriff and his deputies told Louis that they would kill his entire family if he didn’t cooperate, he changed his story. In a courtroom packed with armed white men, Louis Allen testified that Lee, who was about five feet four and 150 pounds, had tried to hit Hurst, who was about six feet three and 200 pounds, with a tire iron.
But Allen soon recanted his testimony, telling the Justice Department that he had had been intimidated by a Sheriff and his Deputy, and had lied to protect his family.
Word got out that Allen intended to tell the truth about Lee’s murder. Local whites boycotted Allen’s logging business. Allen began driving to Louisiana to buy gas. Before he could testify about the intimidation, the Deputy told Allen he knew he had contacted the Justice Department, and he broke Allen's jaw with a flashlight. On January 31, 1964, Allen was found dead on his front porch, murdered by a shot-gun blast.
Medgar Evers, the Mississippi leader of the NAACP, was one of the speakers at Herbert Lee's funeral. A few months later, in June of 1963, a white supremacist named Byron de la Beckwith shot and killed Evers by firing a single bullet through his back. Evers’ death was immortalized by Bob Dylan in a song called “Only a Pawn in Their Game.”
Nearly 50 years later, E.H. Hurst is sort of like the real story of civil rights in its Republican rendition; he is nearly erased from history.
One cannot find an account of E.H. Hurst’s death; one cannot find an account of his life, other than those relating to the murder of Herbert Lee. If E.H Hurst passed any great laws, or built any important farmer-to-market roads or other public works, it has been lost to history. One cannot even find out what were E.H. Hurst’s first and middle names.
At the top of the human garbage food chain that were segregationist politicians of the American South, excrement wrapped in skin like Strom Thurmond can excel to heights three heartbeats from the Presidency (as the US Senate’s President Pro Tempore), and attract praise such as this from the Majority Leader of the US Senate:
"I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of him. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
In Mississippi, Senator James Eastland, could call the disappearance of those three civil rights workers in Philadelphia a “publicity stunt,” and deny the existence of terrorists of the likes of his down-ballot running mate, E.H. Hurst, and still today attract the praises of the likes of Governor Barbour.
But those at the bottom of the political food chain like E.H. Hurst, who did the sort of dirty scutwork that held the society which produced likes of Eastland and Thurmond in place, are today forgotten, in a manner recalling the words Bob Dylan sang about Medgar Evers:
“Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.”
In fact, only two post-sixties traces of the legacy of E.H. Hurst survive today on the web:
The first indicates that the Hurst family’s revulsion against big government, and in favor of “State’s Rights” in the Thurmond/Regan sense, does not extend to the efforts of the US Department of Agriculture; E. H. Hurst’s descendants still collect their farm subsidy:
searches since
Nov. 29, 2004
E H HURST III
Analyses:
Farm Location(s)
USDA subsidy information for
E H Hurst III
Addresses on file with USDA for E H Hurst III
|
USDA county office from which subsidies were paid: |
Subsidy Payments |
Most recent address on file in USDA county office |
|
Amite County, Mississippi |
$17,190 |
E H Hurst III |
|
Total |
$17,190 |
If there’s any justice, maybe Herbert Lee’s descendants also receive such a subsidy (but if there were really any justice, neither family would).
Other than that, the only notes we have of E.H. Hurst’s political activities, subsequent to the murder of Herbert Lee come courtesy of the Federal Elections Commission:
1989 / 1990 Contributions:
Mr. E H HURST (DAIRYMAN), (Zip code: 39645) $500 to NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORIAL COMMITTEE – CONTRIBUTIONS * on 02/10/89
1987 / 1988 Contributions:
Mr. E H HURST, (Zip code: 39645) $1000 to TRENT LOTT FOR MISSISSIPPI on 05/27/88
E H HURST (DAIRYMAN), (Zip code: 39645) $500 to THOMAS COLLINS CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE on 05/23/88
1981 / 1982 Contributions:
E H HURST (FARMER-DAIRYMAN), (Zip code: 39645) $510 to LILES WILLIAMS FOR CONGRESS COMMITTEE on 05/19/81
1979 / 1980 Contributions:
E H HURST, (Zip code: 39645) $ 500 to MISSISSIPPI REPUBLICAN PARTY CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE (AKA CAMPAIGN 80) on 10/24/80
Condi, please call your dad and let him know that the guy who wouldn‘t let him register to vote is now a Republican.