Boss Hogg remembers

NOTHING gets my back up like segregation apologists who attempt to rewrite the history of the Deep South during the Civil Rights Era. This morning, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour moved to the head of the line. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad," he said recalling his boyhood in Yazoo City, in 1962, as a white person, in the heart of Dixie. During an interview with The Weekly Standard, Boss Hogg went on to praise -- yes, praise -- the White Citizens Councils, a movement dedicated to segregation and black disenfranchisement. But, according to this good ‘ol boy, that dog don’t hunt: We Yankees have gotten history all wrong. Barbour said these folks were all about promoting racial harmony. Never mind what Rep. John B. William told a Greenville White Citizens Council in 1956: “I’d gladly trade all the Negroes in the country for my few good nigger friends.” Oops. The quote appeared in a devastating piece written at the time by the late David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/author. The congressman inadvertently defined the true nature of the Citizens Councils. "Pull aside the curtain of States’ Rights and you find, more prominent than anything else, this desire to trade coat-and-tie Negroes for barefoot ones," Halberstam wrote. But that’s not so bad, right governor? Halberstam goes on to dismantle the Citizens Councils’ duplicity, brick by ugly brick. Read the entire article here. Since the 1960s, America has made great strides in checking racism. But as evidenced by throwbacks like Barbour, the cancer is still there.