Marathon Pundit: Haley Barbour hubbub defused

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has twice been a GOP hero. He was the chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1994 when the GOP won both houses of Congress. And he is chairman of the Republican Governors Association. November was very kind to GOP gubernatorial candidates last month and Barbour can take credit for their success.

He has been the Magnolia State's governor since 2003, he enjoys a 70 percent approval rating and was praised for his strong leadership when Hurricane Katrina devastated southern Mississippi.

Naturally, Barbour is looking like presidential material, which is why the Weekly Standard, in a cover piece entitled "The Boy From Yazoo City," takes a look at the governor. Race and segregation was a topic. Barbour tells the magazine that his hometown never became a Selma-like flashpoint in the 1960s and 1970s.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

He later tells WS that when Martin Luther King came to Yazoo City in 1962, Barbour was there, although he admits he was quite some distance from King and couldn't hear everything he said.

Liberal critics, who probably only know Mississippi from movie depictions, pounced on Barbour's comments. For instance, Matt Yglesias says Yazoo City citizens' council was a white supremacist group. He posted an excerpt on his blog from a book that notes that the group was opposed to school integration in 1955--when Barbour was eight years old.

Barbour's gave this statement yesterday:

When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the "Citizens Council," is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.

National Review Online's Jim Geraghty puts this quasi-controversy into perspective:

Still, we've hit a new low when an interview in which the subject recalls attending a Martin Luther King Jr. speech is the trigger for the accusation of racial animosity.

The angry left is always going to label white Republicans, particularly southern white Republicans, as racist. Luckily, they make up a small slice of the electorate.

On the fortieth anniversary of the murder of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi, Barbour gave a moving speech that honored their sacrifice.

We must stand for the proposition that intolerance is intolerable. We must not limit ourselves to opposing murder or terrorism or other obvious evil. Let’s commit ourselves today to rooting out the small intolerances too. Especially those in our own mind, words and deeds. When we disagree, let it be agreeably. Let us learn to tolerate opposing views even if we work to uphold in our own lives the values and standards we claim to cherish. For those of us that are Christians, let us try to obey Jesus’ commandment that we should love our neighbors even as he loved us. If we do that evil will find this a very poor place to take root and to do its damage. God bless you. God bless our Mississippi and God bless America.