Mississippi's History of Race-Baiting & the MS-1 Special Election

The state of Mississippi has had a terrible problem with race-baiting over the years.

Most of the worst race-baiters in the United States Congress have come from this, the most heavily African-American state in the union.

In 1900, 58.5% of Mississippi's population was black, but the combination of literacy tests, poll taxes (with grandfather clauses to allow whites to waive those tests) and violent intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan and others made the electorate overwhelmingly white.

Like the rest of the South, the black percentage of Mississippi's population declined significantly during the 1st (1910-1940) and 2nd (1940-1970) Great Migrations out. In Mississippi, there were 1,009,487 black residents in 1910, and only 815,770 in 1970 [the absolute black population also decreased in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky and South Carolina; it decreased absolutely from 1910-1940 in Georgia and Virginia as well]

At any rate, Mississippi had some of the very worst race-baiters in the Congress

• Theodore Bilbo-terribly racist even by Mississippi standards, Bilbo was declared "unfit to sit with honest, upright men in a respectable legislative body" due to his having accepted a $645 bribe in 1910. This didn't stop him from being elected Lieutenant Governor and Governor. Spending 10 days in jail for contempt of court in 1923 didn't hurt him either. A famous cry of Bilbo's "I call upon every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the nigger away from the polls," helped push the Republican-controlled [this was still to some extent the party of Lincoln] Senate to attempt to not seat him after his re-election in 1946; a compromise was made whereas the matter would be left alone until he returned from Mississippi following recuperation from illness (he died and so it was never an issue)


• James Vardaman-a Senator from 1913 to 1919, Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908; once declared that he would rather see William Jennings Bryan defeated than be elected by "votes of veneered savages" (as he called black voters); it was because of men like Vardaman that the editor of the New York Age, the black Republican newspaper, remarked that "It's against human nature for a negro to vote Democratic. It is the party of Tillman and Vardaman" (New York Times, August 9, 1908)


• Ross Robert Barnett-joined the 1920's Ku Klux Klan, believed (and stated) "the Negro is different because God made him different to punish him", helped get Byron De La Beckwith off in his first trial for murdering Medgar Evers, and as Governor was extremely active in opposing James Meredith's admission to Ole Miss


• Paul B. Johnson Jr.-as Governor, surmised that James Chaney, Michael Schwermer and Andrew Goodman had not been murdered but in fact "maybe went to Cuba" (i.e. they were damned Commies for supporting voting rights)


• James O. Eastland-Senator from Mississippi, one of the longest-serving ever; Time magazine called him "the nation's most dangerous demagogue" in the 1950's; Lyndon Johnson once said "Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he'd say 'The niggers caused it, helped out some by the Communists.'"


• John Rankin-Representative who refused to ever sit next to Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell and, contrary to all evidence, blamed African-Americans for losing a battle in WWII; also a vicious anti-Semite.

Of course, these were the pre-Civil Rights days when blacks didn't vote in Mississippi .

Later on, the Republican party adopted the race-baiting strategy, starting with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, continuing with Ronald Reagan's law-and-order rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi [site of the murders of Schwermer, Goodman and Chaney].


The blogosphere gained prominence when Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo exposed Trent Lott's remarks at the 100th birthday of J. Strom Thurmond (South Carolina also had many of the worst race-baiters, perhaps not a coincidence as it had also had the second-highest black percentage of the population at the time)) "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."


Then, of course, there was this special election. Republican Greg Davis ran ads attempting to tie Democratic candidate and now Representative Travis Childers to "scary liberal black man with foreign-sounding name" Barack Obama. The claim, is that it's "wrong" to be endorsed "a liberal black man who claims you'll help build his movement" (I assume by movement, they mean something like "Obama will sleep with your wife, force you to convert to Islam and sodomize you" [all untrue, of course, but that's the message they seemed to want to convey]



his "anti-American and very, very very scary black preacher who wants to 9/11 your gun with his anti-American Christian Islamic religion" [it does not have to make sense] Jeremiah Wright.



However, things may have changed in Mississippi. This tactic may have "blackfired" (galvanized black turnout in this 27% black district; thanks to the Voting Rights Act, blacks voting is something the Republicans have to worry about).

It's not clear whether it did. I used Excel to plot the relative gain in terms of votes Travis Childers made in a county on May 13th vs. April 22nd (that is, to what extent if any the increase in votes on May 13th slanted towards Travis Childers) versus the African-American percentage of that county.

It seems like there is some correlation, but it's not clear and it's not that significant (only about .3 when running a linear regression analysis). It's quite possible, though, that it's more significant when calculated by precinct [of course, then I need to figure out how I determine how black a precinct is]

Ron Paul "Favors" Obama-How Will White Supremacists React?

Ron Paul just tonight told Wolf Blitzer that he "favors Sen. Barack Obama because of positions on foreign policy. 'But that’s doesn’t mean that’s an endorsement,'"


Barack has already been endorsed by some old-school Republicans opposed to the Iraq War and creeping executive power, like Lincoln Chafee, Susan Eisenhower, and Doug Kmiec.

Ron Paul has managed to get nearly a million votes in the Republican primary so far, and will likely have a million at the end of primary season [there are still quite a few decent-sized states left, and I expect him to do especially well in the Idaho and Oregon primaries].

He's been getting support from various disaffected anti-government groups, including primarily:

1) Drug users
2) Libertarians (this includes the Internet spammers and the Constitution-lovers)
3) anti-war Republicans
4) Conspiracy theorists
5) Paleoconservatives
6) White Supremacists

Obama's shown great strength in third category, and lesser but still significant strength in the 2nd category. Those in the 1st, who knows (but they will not vote McCain)

Conspiracy theorists will probably vote McKinney or Nader (or Gravel, if he runs as the Gravelanche party candidate after failing to get the Libertarian nomination)

Paleoconservatives (Pat Buchanan types) are probably likely to stick with McCain.

What about the white supremacists? They absolutely love Ron Paul. Don Black, operator of the pre-eminent white supremacist site Stormfront sent the Paul campaign a big check [which they kept]

One would think that "Of course they'll do anything to stop a black president."

And they probably will.

However, these days white supremacists have been less concerned about the "Negro menace" (or whatever they call it).

Their biggest focus is on:

1) Latino immigrants [they despise McCain for pushing "amnesty" since the 1980's]


and

2) The Jews [my people! as Tom Lehrer sang:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics.
And the Catholics hate the Protestants.
And the Hindus hate the Muslims.
And everybody hates the Jews.

I'm not exaggerating at all.

David Duke, quite possibly America's best-known living white supremacist, proves my point.

While they've of course called him a black supremacist and whitey-hater and such referencing Wright, they've quite possibly spent more time attacking Obama for being too pro-Jew.

I'm not kidding.

One would think that a white supremacist would spent most of his response to the "bitter" remarks:

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Mr. Obama said. (Quoted by the New York Times, April 12, 2008)

bashing him as an uppity Negro and bashing him for the problems they generally blame blacks for.

He does attack affirmative action in the first line.

The second line is devoted mostly to what he sees as the ways blacks have ruined public schools, although he also gets in a bash at gays and "educational mediocrity" (which may be blacks, but may not be).

His third line bashes "able-bodied welfare parasites" (which I assume is code for blacks), but is at least halfway devoted to illegal immigrant-bashing.

The fourth line is devoted to further illegal-immigrant bashing.

The rest of the piece, at least ten lines long, is devoted entirely to bashing Jews with the exception of one line about "dangerous streets" requiring people to cling to their guns. And he really covers all the anti-Semitic falsehood. The only things I'm missing are "Jews did 9/11," "Jews drink Christian baby blood," and "The Holocaust never happened"


Everything else, he covers:

He's got:

• Jews Have Ruined our Economy-"unelected economic czars such as Greenspan and Bernanke, Wolfowitz and a whole coterie of Jewish “people who aren’t like them” have ripped them off"


• Jews made us go to war with Iraq


• Jewish Financiers are in Control of Our Government


• Jews are destroying Christianity

Even the fundraiser itself isn't spared the Jew-bashing. While most people have been emphasizing the "San Francisco elitist" (i.e. gay) aspect, David Duke twice makes sure to note that the real issue was that the people at the fundraiser were "heavily Jewish"

This is also his main problem with Barack Obama's association with English professor and former radical William Ayers; that the Weather Underground was "a Jewish organization."

Ayers was/is a Protestant; his wife and fellow former Underground member Bernardine Dohrn was/is a white Catholic.

While it's true that the New Left had a heavy Jewish contingent-at least partly because in the 60's colleges had eliminated their Jewish quotas (and even then, the vast majority of Jews attended college due to cultural/economic factors, while far fewer non-Jews attended in those days), but probably overrepresented even so.

And it's also true that 3 of the Chicago 7 came from Jewish backgrounds (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Lee Weiner)

and that the Weathermen did have a decent number of prominent Jewish members: Ted Gold, Kathy Boudin, Mark Rudd, Jane Alpert, David Gilbert, Naomi Jaffe

But again, neither Ayers nor Dohrn was Jewish; neither was Diana Oughton, Jeff Jones, Brian Flanagan, Terry Robbins, Cathy Wilkerson, Linda Evans, Marilyn Buck, Tim Blunk, , Jim Mellen, Gerry Long, Steve Tappis ...

The point being, I guess, that David Duke will find the craziest "Jewish conspiracy" connections.




So, anyway, will Paul's favoring have an effect?

I doubt it. But stranger things have happened.

Ron Paul Wins Virginia Republican Straw Poll

That's right. DR. RON PAUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! got 38 percent (182 of the 479) votes cast at the Virginia Republican Advance

That put him ahead of Frederick's of Hollywood (112 votes), I <3 Huckabees (at 51), Willard (45), The Serial Adulterer Ghoul(43), John McCain (23), Military Industrial Complex Patron Hunter (19), and 4 votes for the Native American candidate [his name sounds suspiciously Italian, though].

Some might explain this victory simply by claiming that Ron Paul supporters are "organized" and enthusiastic.

I have another theory-Ron Paul is the natural candidate of the racists who are in charge of the Virginia Republican party.

My evidence:

• Fairfax County Republican roast full of racist jokes
  
• Rep. Virgil Goode bashed Muslim African-American Rep. Keith Ellison and use that to bash immigrants [Ellison was born in Detroit]
  
• George Allen-noose-hanging, Confederate-flag lover who lost his race by disgusting Independent Virginians with his racist attack on S.R. Sidarth
  
• Ron Paul, the candidate of white supremacists, won the straw poll
  

For good measure, let's end with the famous "Macaca video." The applause of racism by the Republican rank and file really brings my point home.