Haley Barbour: Civil Rights Era In Mississippi Not Something I Recall Well

JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says he has little personal recollection of Freedom Summer activities in his state in 1964, when the slayings of three civil rights workers outraged the nation.

Asked by The Associated Press on Thursday how much he remembers about the summer, the potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate said: "Not much."

Barbour said he was a 16-year-old high school student in Yazoo City that summer and didn't pay attention to news coverage. Barbour, who graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1965, also said he has no memory of discussions about civil-rights activities at the time.

The governor's remarks came three days after he gave a speech on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in which he condemned violence against civil rights workers in Mississippi in the early 1960s: "Deplorable actions including the murder of innocent people, young men in service to a cause that was right, will always be a stain on our history."

Civil rights workers converged on the state in the summer of 1964 to challenge the state's brutal system of segregation.

James Chaney, who was a black Mississippian, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were white New Yorkers, were slain by Ku Klux Klansman in Philadelphia, Miss., on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found weeks later in an earthen dam following a massive search led by the FBI.

State Sen. David Jordan of Greenwood, a black Democrat, said Thursday that 1964 was a tumultuous year in Mississippi.

"I think the governor's much too alert to say that he doesn't remember," said Jordan, who was teaching at all-black schools in the Mississippi Delta in 1964. "It was everywhere, an everyday part of life – the resistance and persistence in trying to change it and make it better for those of us who were victimized by it."

Barbour has been criticized in recent months for his take on the civil rights era. He recently called on lawmakers to move forward with stalled plans for a civil rights museum, and said that Freedom Riders coming to the state this spring to mark the 50th anniversary of their challenge to segregation "will find Mississippi an enormously changed state as to race relations."

Comments

[MosesDidItBest]

02:14 PM on 03/14/2011

Just a quick obsevation, but am I the only one who thinks a Teletubbie look alike should not run for high office?

[MosesDidItBest]

02:12 PM on 03/14/2011

I have only one piece of advice for Haley, do not run the Alberto Gonzales sudden memory loss on us, it was not credible when he did it and it's not credible when you use it.

Finish your job in Mississippi and then retire, we need new ideas not old ones, because the old GOP ideas didnt work, and giving old ideas a new name doen't make them any more feasible under any other name.

[rcozad]

08:50 AM on 03/02/2011

Selective memory! Will the GOP possibly select a man (or woman) who has the vision to see Government as a method of doing the most good for the most people or , as it appears views government simply as a method to consolidate wealth and punish opposition?

[Luke Friesen]

07:43 PM on 01/22/2011

and how long before mississippi changes towards gay rights?

[CenterMod]

09:45 AM on 01/22/2011

Governor Barbour also probably really thinks the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, any public political statements to the contrary.

[hetrose]

05:25 PM on 01/21/2011

Hey, those were his Moonshine days. So he is lucky to be able to remember he was there at all.

[cuzzbuster]

04:55 PM on 01/21/2011

Didn't he say not too long ago that he attended a Martin Luther King speech but was not paying attention?

[cuzzbuster]

04:48 PM on 01/21/2011

Haley just needs to keep his mouth shut....PERIOD!!

[returnofthejedi]

04:40 PM on 01/21/2011

When the h#ll does this moderator go home?

[returnofthejedi]

04:40 PM on 01/21/2011

Well maybe the Governor does not "recollect" because he had no interest in the civil rights of black "citizens. I happen to disagree that blacks have ever been accepted as citizens by people like this!

[rgilley]

04:35 PM on 01/21/2011

The self described "Fat old Redneck" is losing his memory? Alzhiemers perhaps?

[scottymac11]

03:11 PM on 01/21/2011

I was in the service when Dr. King was assasinated. I was assigned a cleaning detail with a real life southerner from Alabama. He had the reddest of necks and was proud of it. He was the one that told me of the assination. That led to a much heated confrontation. His opinion was that Dr. King was a trouble maker. The people down south were very happy without him. Now that he's gone things can get back to their normal order. Now people can be happy again. I have remembered that day and that encounter as a life lesson in the southern alternate universe. I think probably Haley was just like him. If these are the best lies he can spin on the subject. Imagine what his truth is like.

[Wood]

09:58 PM on 01/21/2011

It's very typical of this type...

[lachihuahua]

03:04 PM on 01/21/2011

There is no plausible way to believe his statement. At 16 he is certainly old enough to hear and see things and as valedictorian of his high school, he was apparently smarter than the rest of his class.

He is either not telling the truth or being willfully dense. I was born more than a decade later in California and even I know the history! (nn)

[Wood]

09:59 PM on 01/21/2011

Let's call him what he is.. a lyin' a/z/z/ed mo/fo..

[Bronxdude]

02:40 PM on 01/21/2011

Desperate to protect his “real” base—tea klan borgs, Haley resurrected the “southern strategy” George Wallace and Ronald Reagan used to win votes by encouraging and exploiting racial fear among disaffected, undereducated blue-collar Whites too simple-minded to grasp the complexity of the deception. Wallace linked states’ rights to segregation, Reagan linked entitlement programs to fictitious Black “welfare queens” and Bush 41 linked Willie Horton to Black vengeance. By polarizing America, the appeal of the anti-Obama campaign has been partially successful, especially with low income Whites. If there is any doubt that Republicans are fomenting racial hatred, just watch Fox News—the official republican propaganda machine. According to O’Reilly and Beck—usually explained in shrouded lingo and hyperbole imbued with Jim Crow Era code words, the path to republican midterm victory is tied to instilling fear in Whites that under Obama, it’s payback time; people of color are coming for you, to take what's yours, whether it’s ACORN, Van Jones or Shirley Sherrod. Fox News is obsessed with frightening White people, about making Whites feel afraid of minorities as if they are not fellow Americans. Republicans have incited fear by portraying Obama as a reverse racist eager to exact revenge for misdeeds visited upon Blacks by Whites. This time around, Blacks, Muslims, and Mexicans are the bogeymen. Next time, will it be you? 

[stuoverit]

04:02 PM on 01/21/2011

Precisely, if one does not believe Bronxdude, I urge them to just read the comments section on any article about any African-american in Jackson, MS's newspaper @ clarionledger.com. Just read any article about Obama, immigration, healthcare etc. and 80% of the comments are about the "welfare queen" or other nonsensical ad hominen attacks on democrats or "lib-tards" as they say.

[TXOBAMAGIRL73]

02:38 PM on 01/21/2011

Wait Wait ....is he saying life wasn't box of |ylVching and f|re hoses for Blacks in MS and he doesn't remember what type linen it was! Seriously... Haley if you want to be believed, maybe you should taken your own linen off first.