"You heard of the Citizens Councils?" Barbour asked The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson last December. "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."
"This was a nice little town," Mott reminisced as he drove by a Dollar Store, one of the only bustling businesses Yazoo City has left these days. "It was really a Mayberry in a lot of ways. Haley was quoted as saying things were good and of course he was criticized. 'Blah blah blah. It was horrible.' It wasn't horrible. People got along fine."
When Barbour announced yesterday that he would not run for president, the news came as a shock not just to the reporters who've been covering him but even to the operatives he had hired to staff his presumptive campaign. And the guessing game immediately began about why, after giving every indication for the past six months that he was going to run, he had decided at the last minute to stay put in Mississippi. Some took at face value Barbour's claim that he lacked the "absolute fire in the belly" demanded by a presidential campaign, noting that, at 63 years old, his famously large body is already showing signs of wear and tear. Indeed, Barbour had begun privately referring to his recent swings through Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire as his "death march." Others speculated about family reasons: His wife, Marsha, had publicly expressed her reluctance about Barbour running for president and Jackson has been abuzz with gossip about how she might respond privately if he went ahead with the campaign.
But neither of these explanations are entirely convincing. After all, Barbour had lost 20 pounds in recent months and was determined to lose 20 more—I recently witnessed his newfound self-restraint when I watched him daintily take just a couple bites of a chicken sandwich during a luncheon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And Marsha had voiced objections to many of Barbour's previous political endeavors, only to come around in the end. "I've known her as long as I've known Haley," Clarke Reed, the father of the modern Mississippi Republican Party and Barbour's political mentor, told me a couple weeks ago, recalling how Marsha had once tried to persuade her husband to quit his job as executive director of the Mississippi GOP. "She's very frank, she's very independent, but she's going to back Haley."
The likely rationale for Barbour's decision to pull the plug on his presidential bid might have been the most pragmatic: he realized he couldn't win. As one of the GOP's savviest operators—"maybe the most brilliant political strategist in America today," according to Mike Huckabee—Barbour was fully cognizant of his political liabilities, from his career as a lobbyist to his stewardship of a state that routinely ranks 50th in things like health care and education. Over the past few months he appeared to have developed satisfying responses to the inevitable attacks he would face on those issues. But what Barbour was never able to do, as he must have eventually realized, was find a persuasive way to talk about race and civil rights—and Yazoo City.
···
As a boy, Haley Barbour was a prince of Yazoo City. A Delta aristocrat by birth—the Barbours had been in Yazoo City for five generations and were one of its most prominent families—Haley had more than just strong bloodlines going for him. He was a star athlete and a straight-A student. "He could have been mayor of Yazoo City when he was twelve," his childhood friend Ardis Russell recalls. Such was Barbour's charmed boyhood that in February 1965, when the Yazoo Herald wanted to remind its readers that Valentine's Day was fast approaching, it did so with a front-page, heart-framed photo of Barbour, age 17, planting a kiss on the cheek of a pretty high school classmate.
But it was two articles flanking that front-page photo that paint a less idyllic picture of Barbour's boyhood days. One advertised an upcoming meeting "for all white citizens" of a neighboring town, where the judge who had recently presided over Byron de la Beckwith's mistrial for the murder of Medgar Evers would "answer many questions that are on the minds of most Mississippians on the problems confronting us today." The other was an editorial by Bubba Mott arguing that nothing in the 1964 Civil Rights Act mandates that "a school or public facility has to be racially integrated. The law merely says you can't have a policy of denying admission on the grounds of race.... In other words, an institution won't be segregated even if all persons involved are of one race. It's just a matter of what is the official policy."
And yet, according to some of Barbour's Yazoo City contemporaries, it wasn't unusual for teenagers of that era to be blissfully unaware of the injustices around them. "Haley had his mind on girls and football and flirting and talking with the guys," says Russell, who was in the class of 1966, one year behind Barbour's, at the all-white Yazoo City High School. "We did not do the racial talk: 'Did you see that 'n' on TV last night?' Or 'What do you think about them n's?' You had a couple of rednecks who might say something like that and, when they did, Haley was the kind of guy that would give them a look, that Barbour stare, like 'You're killing me.'"
Even some of Barbour's black contemporaries shared this sense of quiet, almost oblivious distance. "We were in different worlds," Clifton Jones, who graduated from Yazoo City's black high school, N.D. Taylor, in 1967, told me. "They were over there and we were over here. I couldn't determine what the problems were because everybody stayed in their own little world." Although Jones and other black Yazoo Citians were forced to grow up drinking from separate water fountains, attending separate schools, living in separate neighborhoods, and being permitted to shop in Yazoo City's then-bustling downtown only on Saturdays, segregation also frequently managed to insulate them from overt racial conflict. "We were having fun with our own thing," explains Jones, who's the former president of the local NAACP and is now a Yazoo City alderman. "They didn't bother us. And we weren't curious at all. I guess if you don't know something, it don't bother you."
Driving around Yazoo City, Bubba Mott, who is now in his 80s, tried to explain this context, to help his friend Haley clean up his "civil rights mess." Most of that mess, he conceded, stemmed from Barbour's praise of the Citizens' Council, which seemed worse than amnesia. After all, in 1955 the Yazoo City Citizens Council had launched an economic boycott against 53 black city residents who, in the wake of Brown v. Board, had signed a petition calling for the integration of Yazoo City's schools—ultimately driving 51 of them to withdraw their names. Mott, at the time, had supported the Citizens Council, which was headed up by Haley Barbour's uncle William, a prominent Yazoo City lawyer who was also a father figure to Haley, whose own father had died when he was only two.
But Mott eventually became one of Yazoo City's most progressive voices, penning editorials in the Herald that ultimately paved the way for the successful integration of Yazoo City's schools in 1970. (In his book about that achievement, Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town, Willie Morris, a racial liberal and Yazoo City's most famous son, wrote of Mott: "If they give a Pulitzer Prize for an editor who speaks from deep inside himself, from travail and a personal recommitment, then he deserves it.") But, like Barbour with The Weekly Standard, Mott could not bring himself to condemn everything about the way things had once been. "Let me tell you a story," he said, after we had been in his car for close to an hour and were now driving down some of the same streets for the third and fourth times. "I ain't never told this story, and maybe I shouldn't be telling it to you."
Mott said that one early morning in the mid-1960s, the salesman who worked for the office supply business that was attached to the Herald called him in a panic. "He said, 'I need to see you right away,'" Mott recalled. "He lived up on the hill near Hayman's Bluff, and I went up there to see him and he met me with no shirt on, unshaven, and he was holding a .45 pistol." The salesman told Mott that he had been working undercover for the FBI to help infiltrate the local Klan, but that his cover had been blown, and now he needed $500 so he and his wife and child could leave town. "I didn't have five hundred dollars, so I called Haley's uncle." Together, William and Haley's mother, LeFlore, who worked as William's legal secretary, went to meet with the salesman at a local motel—and, in exchange for $500, he told them the names of all the local members of the Klan. ""And, the result of that, through economic pressure, some of those would-be Klan leaders were treated just like the blacks were treated who signed that petition," Mott said."And they left. No violence. Never. And nothing illegal. Economic pressure. 'Hey, you owe me money. Pay me now or I'll sue.' That kind of stuff. They foreclosed on loans or mortgages and drove you out of business. Gone. And that's what they did. Now that's probably not a point, but that's who they were."
It is hard not to wonder whether that episode is what Barbour had been referring to when he made his remark about the Citizens Council helping to make sure Klansmen "got their ass run out of town." He wasn't just talking about some abstract group of town leaders. He was talking about his uncle and his mother and perhaps repeating a piece of family lore. I asked Mott if, given all that, he thought there was some way that Barbour could talk about race and civil rights and Yazoo City that wouldn't make him seem so insensitive—that wouldn't feed the perception that Barbour, 40 years later, was still on the wrong side of history.
"I wish I knew, I wish I knew," Mott replied. "I don't know. He's smart enough to know, and if there's a way to figure it out he will." He paused to think a little more. "But if he hasn't figured out how you overcome it, or pretty well minimize it, in my opinion he won't run." As it turned, Mott knew his old friend awfully well
No comments:
Post a Comment