The 2018 midterm elections in Virginia saw northern carpetbagger Corey Stewart run as a neo-Confederate candidate. Thankfully, Tim Kaine crushed Stewart who lost by close to a 15% margin. Virginia - at least in the urban areas - has moved beyond supporting Confederate values. On Tuesday in Mississippi, a run off election for a Mississippi seat in the U.S. Senate will take place that pits a true believer in the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws against a black Democrat. Despite a series of racist comments and actions, polls show GOP candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith leading her Democrat challenger by five points as of last Wednesday. Mississippi is not Virginia - when I lived in Alabama years ago, we always were thankful for Mississippi because it was always worse than Alabama in pretty much every ranking - so the outcome of the election remains unclear. What is clear is that Hyde-Smith (who has now been documented to have attended a segregationist "academy") embraces and represents the worst of Mississippi's past. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the legacy that Hyde-Smith seemingly supports. Here are excerpts:
Cindy Hyde-Smith took time during Tuesday night’s senatorial debate in Jackson, Mississippi, to read an apology from her notes. “For anyone that was offended by my comments, I certainly apologize,” she said. “There was no ill will, no intent whatsoever in my statements.” She was referring to video from November 2 showing her respond to praise from a Tupelo cattle rancher, Colin Hutchinson, by remarking, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Hyde-Smith rebuked the suggestion this was a reference to Mississippi’s history of lynchings and accused her critics of taking it out of context
Shortly after the “hanging” video surfaced on November 11, another video went public of her purportedly “making a joke” about suppressing unfavorable votes. “And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote,” she said during a campaign stop in Columbus on November 3. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”
Either comment might be interpreted plausibly as a slip of the tongue, in isolation. Hyde-Smith is new to campaigns with national implications, having been previously appointed to the Senate, not elected. What might fly locally — as far as jokes and off-color remarks — invites more scrutiny with the country watching. But on Monday, Politico uncovered Facebook photos that Hyde-Smith posted in 2014, depicting the then-state commissioner of agriculture and commerce at the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library, the former Biloxi residence of the Confederate leader and slavery proponent. She was wearing a Confederate soldier’s hat.
At this point, this is no accident. Mississippi history holds many lessons, good and bad. That its white governors and their foot soldiers among the citizenry fought a war to preserve the routine bondage, forced labor, and torture of black men, women, and children, is among the most damning, even without the century of segregation and terrorism that followed.
Public hangings are not neutral events anywhere, but in Mississippi, they and similar forms of extrajudicial torture and execution long served as tools of racist terrorism. The state led the nation in such violence over the course of nearly 75 years, with 654 incidents between 1877 and 1950, according to a database developed by the Equal Justice Initiative . . . . “While one thousand white spectators watched, [Holbert and his wife’s] fingers and toes were cut off and large corkscrews were bored into their flesh,” Ifill wrote. “After a prolonged torture, the Holberts were burned alive. Three other black field workers who reportedly looked like Holbert were also killed that day by members of the posse organized to search for Holbert.”
Mississippi’s history of suppressing votes is equally brutal. Making voting “a little more difficult” for opposing constituencies often meant white citizens terrorizing black people into avoiding the ballot box altogether.
Activist Charles Cobb described in further detail the violence that often faced such efforts. “Right after the first attempt to register people to vote [in Indianola in 1962], nightriders came through the black community and shot up three houses, wounding the daughter of a neighbor of the person we were staying with.” Such stories are not rare. When journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones visited Greenwood in 2014, she met Silas McGhee, a local black man who had tried to register other black locals under Jim Crow. “At the height of the Mississippi civil rights struggle, a white man pulled up in a car and shot McGhee in his face when McGhee was sitting outside of a Greenwood restaurant,” she wrote. “The bullet barreled through his mouth, taking his front teeth with it.” And although suppressive efforts are more subtle today, they often achieve similar ends.
As for Hyde-Smith’s celebration of Confederate history, Mississippi’s own declaration of secession outlines the reasons for its rude departure in stark terms. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” it reads. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth … These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
The will be campaigning for Hyde-Smithis clear. That a candidate for U.S. senate has made such a persistent habit of winking at these gory strands of Mississippi history erases plausible deniability that she meant them innocently. Such gleeful treatment, further, leaves little doubt she finds them unimportant enough to be flippant about them at best, and worth celebrating at worst. There are likely those who appreciate this approach. Many likely sympathize. But nobody is required to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Polls currently have Hyde-Smith ahead by five points. Next Tuesday, Mississippi will have its answer.
1 comment:
Ugh. Hope she is dragged. But racism in Mississippi is kind of a non issue.
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