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.
For years, a bronze statue of him stood in the rotunda of the Mississippi state Capitol building, but it was eventually relocated to a room where the Legislative Black Caucus often meets, where Bilbo’s outstretched arm is occasionally used as a coat rack.
The best part of that clown’s Wikipedia entry.
yeah, but I wonder whose decision it was to offensively place the statue there.
I don’t know but it seems they made the best out of the situation. I do wonder why they don’t have the statue chopped off and the scrap sold off. It’s not like anyone would miss it at this point.
Probably for the same reason that Mandela kept the rugby team around.
Good post, Booman.
I put this in the comments section of some other, similarly-themed post of yours awhile back. But it’s so good, I’m going to do it again. Some of the best snark I have ever seen or heard:
Maybe they thought it was educational do limit black representation that way. I mean it’s not like there’s going to be a black governor of Mississippi. Everyone has to learn their place.
There are indeed ideals – openly and frankly stated – that must be resisted with every fiber of our being. There are some things for which we must be willing to fight, things for which we are willing to die, things for which we are willing to make someone else die. The abject subjugation of a people would be one of those things. The preservation of one’s people would be another.
I know what is required for me to take up arms and do violence, and it would be wise for everyone else to know the same for themselves – November 2012 will likely be a tipping point in this nation…
Also check out Cotton Ed Smith.
Southern voters kept sending them back so they would get enough seniority to stop whatever the rest of the Congress wanted to get done. In times of Democratic majorities, they were chairs of committees and could sit on legislation. That’s why they could be utterly corrupt and get re-elected.
A while back kos was running his rhetorical mouth and dismissed Mississippians partisan ID as some holdover from the Dixiecrat era. He was wrong. There is an underlying demographic shift and the under 15 population in Mississippi (IIRC Georgia as well) is now majority-minority.
MSNBC has a very different write-up of the Miss. middle school: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38880820/ns/us_news-life/
If this is accurate (and I find it much more believable than the ABC version), then we’re talking about a well-meaning policy here.