<< Back 12/18/02 Lott’s retro rhetoric raises troubling questions By Karl Rohr “Do we have to remember dates?” My history students always ask me that the first day of class. I tell them to simply remember events chronologically. Don’t get bogged down in dates or anything else that clouds your ability to interpret those events. Place them in order, understand their significance, but don’t try to remember all those dates. But 19-year-old university students have to learn a heck of a lot of history that they never lived. They don’t have the benefit of somebody who is, oh say for example, a hundred years old. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who turned 100 this month, had the good fortune or misfortune to reach political maturity in an era that finally forced Americans to quit pointing at other countries and put their own house in order. Segregation became the litmus test on how much a politician had progressed beyond the terrible traditions they had inherited. Thurmond could remain mired in a racist tar pit or he could courageously extricate himself and move forward, hopefully with little burdensome baggage in tow. The faces and voices of the civil rights era unfold on video screens in my classroom, including architects of white opposition: Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, 1957; Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, 1962; Alabama governors George Patterson, 1961, and George Wallace, 1968; Birmingham Chief of Police Bull Connor, 1963. And Strom Thurmond, 1948. Thurmond never liked the label, “Dixiecrat,” arguing that his presidential platform concerned national issues instead of regional ones. He claimed he had been racially progressive as South Carolina’s governor and that President Harry Truman’s civil rights policies intruded upon matters other than race. They would hinder personal liberties and states’ rights and harm what he saw as positive aspects of segregation. Thurmond even argued that anti-lynching provisions would reduce police power and that the Fair Employment Practices Commission would create an army of federal spies posing as police. The doomed Dixiecrats had a short lifespan but briefly included some of the South’s most virulent segregationists. When I heard that Incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had argued at Thurmond’s centennial birthday party that the nation would be better today if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, I thought that he had been misquoted by his opponents. A feeble effort by unorganized Democrats to annoy a political Goliath with kicks to the shins instead of a death blow, I thought to myself. Then I saw the video of Lott’s speech. It worsened each time I heard it. I do not put Lott in the same category as the racists mentioned above, but when I closed my eyes and listened to his comments, he might as well have been Wallace or Barnett. His tone was what really caught my attention. It was the same boastful, in-your-face defiance that decades ago lamented the loss of the good-ol’-days when folks knew their place and challenged any damn liberal to do anything about it . Mississippi was one of four states Thurmond carried in 1948. “We’re proud of it,” Lott said. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” The expected firestorm started slowly. But Lott’s explanations seemed strangely evasive. What were these “problems” we have now that would have been avoided? Was he aware of Thurmond’s record in 1948? He never said that he wasn’t. His original explanation dismissed his speech as something of a joke, caught up in the lighthearted spirit of a birthday party. Hee hee. Haw haw. That ol’ Trent, boy, he sure can give a funny after-dinner speech. After reports surfaced that Lott had made similar comments in 1980, Lott’s crew argued that the senator had been referring to “Ronald Reagan’s policies of smaller government and fiscal responsibilities.” Oh, O.K. While Lott spun his apologetic wheels, the vultures descended, but most of us saw the political motivations. President Bush did what he had to do and slapped Lott on the wrist, Incoming Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle continued his human ping-pong ball impression and left us baffled on what he believed, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson crumbled under an onslaught of Lott’s defenders on a CNN talk show. Lott stopped offering muddled explanations and came closer to more sincere apologies when he said he made “a mistake of the head, not the heart.” But the hole got deeper. Time Magazine reported that Lott had tried to keep blacks out of his fraternity at the University of Mississippi in the 1960s. That one didn’t jolt me. I still pay tuition to Ole Miss. Tell me something I don’t know. I’m not a native of Lott’s home state, but the nucleus of my family has long been entrenched in New Orleans, where I first learned about a practice called segregation. As a doctoral history student at Ole Miss, my comprehensive exam essay topics included the ideology of race, southern culture as a shared white and black experience, and more questions than I can remember on slavery and segregation. Our list of speakers at Ole Miss included civil rights figures Myrlie Evers, Julian Bond and the extremely strange James Meredith, who encountered a violent welcoming committee in 1962 as the first black student to attend Ole Miss. Race, then, loomed large as a way of defining Ole Miss, however much the university had become a proud promoter of the new Mississippi, a state that had evolved into something far more enlightened and progressive than the bastion of intolerance it had been. That’s why I sent Lott’s office an e-mail requesting that he apologize to the state of Mississippi. I’m certain he never saw it, but at least he apologized in his hometown of Pascagoula. His hometown newspaper had called for his resignation. I’m certain that many disappointed Mississippians feel that Lott dragged out some embarrassing mementos from the state’s racist closet. Outside of Ole Miss, away from the Greek revival frat and sorority houses, the pre-football game feasts complete with candelabras and cocktail dresses and the drunken students waving Confederate flags, one can find the Mississippi that even its staunchest defenders have a hard time explaining. Would Lott have been brazen or foolish enough to deliver his Thurmond comments in America’s Third World, the Mississippi Delta? Could he speak to the residents of Clarksdale, Greenville, Greenwood or Friar’s Point and tell them how much better they would be if we had elected a segregationist president in 1948? It is indeed possible that Lott has absorbed so much of his past that it occasionally escapes from its fragile bars. Heritage not hate, so the bumper stickers tell us. But recent incidents at Ole Miss prove that one’s heritage can become twisted around the wrong flagpole, so that the good ol’ Stars and Bars become a symbol of more than regional pride. On Nov. 6, somebody scrawled racial obscenities on the fifth floor of Kincannon Hall dormitory at Ole Miss. The suspected culprits are residents of the fourth floor. The Associated Student Body’s Office of Minority Affairs held a “Say No to Racism” rally in the Student Union Plaza. About 200 students attended. University students apparently committed this atrocity. They might have seen it as a humorous prank. They might have meant it as a cruel threat or declaration of hatred. This much is certain – they’re probably continuing a learned pattern of behavior .They had to learn it somewhere. Maybe they picked it up from somebody influential, a parent, or somebody else from the generation of oh, say, Trent Lott. Do we have to remember dates? No, but years from now, I might be talking about the closing weeks of 2002, when Americans briefly realized that their obsession with an approaching war somewhere in the Middle East had clouded their recollections of a previous war within their own borders, one whose eventual casualties included a powerful Mississippi senator with a hazy memory. Or, as many offended Americans believe, one with a memory all too clear. (Karl Rohr teaches in the history department at Western Carolina University. He can be reached at rohr@wcu.edu)