I never realized what a scoundrel Theodore Bilbo was until I read his Wikipedia page. And, yet, Mississippians just get kept electing and promoting him anyway.
Accepting bribes? No problem. Hiding in a barn to avoid being served a subpoena? No sweat. Firing all the state’s college presidents and replacing them with “a realtor, a press agent, and a recent B.A. degree recipient”? Bravo. Losing the accreditation of those schools as a result? Who cares? Bankrupting the state? Let’s make him our senator.
When the Senate refused to seat him for a third-term (a feather in the cap of the Republicans who led that fight) he returned home to publish his racist manifesto: Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization. A couple of choice quotes from the book should suffice to give you an idea of what Bilbo was all about:
If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South’s Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be “No.” By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed.
What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs ? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise – openly and frankly stated – upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.
This book was written and published in 1946-47, when the horrors of the Holocaust (the logical outcome of National Socialist ideology) were freshest in the minds of Americans. Yet, Bilbo was unashamed to talk nakedly of “the blood of the white race.” But this shouldn’t really surprise us:
Most white Americans in the 1950s were opposed to interracial marriage and did not see laws banning interracial marriage as an affront to the principles of American democracy. A 1958 Gallup poll showed that 96 percent of white Americans disapproved of interracial marriage.
That is why laws banning interracial marriage outlasted all other Jim Crow prescriptions. So, this is the context in which Barack Obama Jr. was born in August of 1961. That he was able to be elected president is a minor miracle. How much has Mississippi changed? This is from yesterday.
After 30 years of barring black students from running for class president, a Mississippi public middle school, reversed a Jim Crow era policy today and announced students of all races would be allowed to run for student government.
Students at Nettleton Middle School looking to run for class president, previously needed to maintain a B average, obtain 10 signatures from their classmates – and be white.
Rules issued last week outlined the school’s rules for seeking office. Students could run for president, vice president, secretary-treasurer and reporter, but some positions were off-limits depending on race.
In all three grades, only white students could run for president. In eighth grade black students could run for vice president and reporter. In seventh grade blacks could only run for secretary-treasurer, and in sixth grade only for reporter.
There were no assigned positions for students of other races and no mention of students who are mixed race.
The President of the United States is now eligible to be a class president in this public school in Mississippi (provided he can maintain a ‘B’ average), but he wasn’t eligible two days ago.
Mississippi has come a long way, but this country still has a long way to go. And it isn’t an accident that the modern day Bilbos share with him certain characteristics, like an uneven and undistinguished scholastic record, problems with the law, and even substance abuse. America seems to produce hucksters like Bilbo, Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin on a regular basis. The frightening thing is how easily they find success, both financially and electorally.
These people are who we thought they were.
