Mississippi Signals the World That It Is Still Defined by Racial Bigotry

Sadly, yesterday 54% of voters in Mississippi opted to vote for Cindy Hyde-Smith, a segregationist who "joked" about attending a public lynching if invited, referred to her state's days in the Confederacy as its "best history" and attend a segregated private "academy" and enrolled her own daughter in a similar segregated school.  The message sent to the rest of America and the world was very clear: Mississippi is the home of racist, bigots and individuals who hold others who are different in contempt  - if not subjecting them to open hatred.  Not surprisingly, Hyde-Smith also opposes marriage equality and opposes same sex couples using state park facilities for commitment/marriage ceremonies. Its a continuation of Mississippi's ugly history.  A history which has condemned the state to being among the worse state in the nation in numerous rankings (see the image above).  Some states in the South - particularly Virginia - have disavowed their ugly past and are striving (at least in urban and suburban areas) to be welcoming to all citizens, regardless of race, religious faith and sexual orientation.   Why is this important?  For several reasons: (i) educated people flee backward, bigoted states and regions - look no further than Southwest Virginia - and (ii) progressive, modern businesses who want to hire the best and the brightest do not locate in backward, bigoted states and regions - e.g., Amazon's decision to locate in Northern Virginia and New York City.   A piece in the New York Times looks at the history of racism and inequality that Hyde-Smith and her supporters seek to maintain. Here are highlights:

On Tuesday, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith won a hard-fought runoff election over her Democratic opponent, Mike Espy. That Mississippi is sending a Republican back to Washington is hardly a surprise, but Ms. Hyde-Smith gave the opposition hope in the closing weeks of the campaign as she careened from one gaffe to the next — each one emphasizing both that she was tone deaf and that she found humor in her state’s history of racial violence and voter suppression. Racist violence, segregation and voter suppression are not shared historical jokes. They are our present. Unless we change course, they will define our future. Ms. Hyde-Smith claims not to have realized there was anything wrong with what she said. She has steadfastly refused to apologize. Perhaps most important, since her comments came to light, she has yet to publicly engage in conversation with constituents of hers for whom hanging is not a joke and voting is a hard-fought, continually challenged right. During the campaign, she did not acknowledge there was even a dialogue worth having. Perhaps this is because for much of her life she has been hearing only one side of an argument and doesn’t know or care that there is a larger conversation to be had. If this is the case, it may have something to do with where Ms. Hyde-Smith went to school and where she chose to send her daughter to school. It was only a few days ago that we learned not only that Ms. Hyde-Smith had attended and graduated from a now closed, whites-only segregation academy called the Lawrence County Academy but also that she had chosen to send her daughter to Brookhaven Academy, which shared the same founding history. And as late as 2016, it had managed to maintain a strikingly white racial makeup, with one black child and five Latino children attending a school with 386 pupils in a town that is 54 percent black.

The most notable thing about the South’s segregation academies isn’t that they were racially segregated. Racially and economically segregated schools remain across all parts of the United States. What is notable is that taxpayer dollars financed these all-white schools at the cost of simultaneously creating poorly funded all-black public-school systems in the South. To put it simply, as the financial drain of taxpayer dollars from whites attending segregation academies decimated school systems educating black children, black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites.

[S]egregation academies were a private school concept adopted in Mississippi and found across the South in the decade following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. They were conceived as a way to permit white parents to avoid sending their children to schools with black students and a legal way to work around the Brown decision, which did not apply to private schools. These funding schemes were so successful that by 1970, roughly 300,000 students were enrolled in all-white private schools across 11 Southern states, and by 1974, 3,500 academies enrolled 750,000 white children. In Jackson, Miss., alone, white enrollment in the public schools fell by 12,000 students, going from representing more than half of the student body in 1969 to less than a third in 1976. That demographic shift caused a drastic reduction in the funds available to educate the predominantly black children left behind, as tax dollars earmarked for their educations followed white children both to quasi-private segregation academies or to still segregated white public schools. For their part, black parents fought back using the legal system to file hundreds of lawsuits arguing for educational access and equal funding, but many also acquiesced. Terror campaigns, both economic and physical, convinced them it was in their best interest to “choose” to stay in underfunded, segregated schools. Those who attempted to enroll in all-white public schools were subjected to numerous forms of both physical and economic intimidation — job loss, eviction, threatening phone calls and physical attacks.

That is part of the educational history of the defeated Democratic candidate in the race for the Senate in Mississippi, Mike Espy, who integrated Yazoo City High School in 1969.

Mr. Espy attended a parochial school through his first two years of high school, then it closed and he enrolled at Yazoo City High School. He was the only black student in his class and remembers having to carry a stick with him during the day to fend off the physical attacks he often faced when the teacher left the room. In 1970, he was joined by his twin sister, Althea Michelle, and 15 other black students.

Reflecting on the difference between his experience integrating a public school and that of Ms. Hyde-Smith, he said, “If the story is correct, she consciously made a decision to separate, and my parents consciously made a decision to be inclusive.”

Mr. Espy knows that racist violence is no joking matter. We know that his opponent cannot say the same.

Hopefully, decent people and progressive business will take not of Mississippi's signal to them and choose to avoid the state like the plague. If this happens, the downward spiral and economic isolation of Mississippi will intensify and, hopefully, at some future day Mississippi residents will opt to throw its ugly past and people like Ms. Hyde-Smith on the trash heap.

Cindy Hyde-Smith's History of Embracing Racial Bigotry

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.

Der Trumpenführer will be campaigning for Hyde-Smith in Mississippi.  One racist campaigning for another racist.

A Simple Fix If Republicans Don’t Want to be Called Racist

GOP candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith who defends her statement she's attend a public lynching.

Some of my Republican friends - two spring immediately to mind - whine that they don't want to be called or considered to be racists, yet through the actions they silently condone  and some of the racially offense materials they mindlessly post on social media they all but prove their critics' point.  It's quite simple, as long as these Republicans continue to vote for Trump and other GOP candidates who use racism to instill fear and racial animosity, they deserve to be labeled for what they share complicity. And sadly, it's a short step from racism to antisemitism and homophobia.  Former Republican Jennifer Rubin has an on point column in the Washington Post that looks at the racism Republicans continue to support through their votes.  Here are excerpts:

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), facing a runoff race against Democratic former congressman Mike Espy, has had multiple embarrassing videos released recently. In one leaked video, she said that if someone “invited me to a public hanging I’d be in the front row.” In another, she declared that “there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. So I think that’s a great idea.”

CNN conservative commentator Amanda Carpenter responded to the first comment this way: “There’s no explanation for it. It’s a racist thing to say. I’m not from the South, but I’m pretty sure joking around about going to a public lynching is not something people say.” She continued, “What she needs to do is tour the new lynching museum that’s down South where they show the horrific things that people went through in her backyard.”

When a former Trump campaign adviser tried defending Hyde-Smith by claiming this was all part of “the outrage culture,” Carpenter countered, “It’s wrong when someone says something so provocative that you blame the people who are offended.” She bluntly declared, “If Republicans want to quit being accused of being racist, they have to stop saying racist things.”

That kind of straight talk and zero tolerance for racism is exceedingly rare among GOP elected officials, candidates and their helpmates in the right-wing media. The usual response is that he or she didn’t mean it, or “What about … ?”

The explanation for why Republicans talk this way and other Republicans don’t object should be obvious: In the Trump era, where white grievance is the prime motivator for turning out the base and resentment of “elites” is what binds voters to President Trump, GOP politicians are loath to repudiate racist rhetoric. Instead they try to harness not only the winks, nods and overt statements of solidarity with the alt-right (including fondness for Confederate statues and emblems) but also the reaction this generates from those whom their base scorns — the media, urban elites and civil rights groups.

Trump spent the last weeks of the campaign hysterically warning about a non-emergency, the progress of a caravan of refugees a thousand miles from our border. Once the election was over, the matter was dropped. Well, to crib from Carpenter, if Republicans want to quit being accused of being “anti-immigrant,” they have to stop saying anti-immigrant things (e.g. calling them “animals,” talking about an infestation, making up a crime wave purportedly caused by immigrants).

Indeed, this formulation should serve as a guidepost for Republicans:

If Republicans want to quit being accused of science denial, they have to stop denying science.

If Republicans want to quit being accused of hypocrisy, they have to stop being hypocrites about the debt (bad only for Democrats), executive power (bad only for Democrats) and corporate cronyism (bad only for Democrats).

If Republicans want to quit being accused of misogyny, they have to stop suggesting that women invent allegations of sexual assault, don’t want to work hard enough to be on the Judiciary Committee and aren’t intelligent. 

If Republicans want to quit being accused of being doormats for dictators, they have to stop defending Trump when he refuses to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, to name just a few.

In short, Republicans bring criticism on themselves when they talk and act in ways that are factually wrong and morally indefensible. It’s a big reason that voters who care about facts and public morality won’t vote for them.

Growing up, my mother always lectured us kids that we would be labeled by the company that we kept and that, therefore, choosing one's friends and the causes one supported were important .  Nowadays, Republicans tolerate, if not openly support, racist and immoral individuals - Trump being the prime example.  Indeed, I increasingly believe that nowadays it is impossible for a decent and truly moral person to vote Republican.