^Magnaut, you ever READ anything about Barbour? At the same time black churches were being burnt down in Mississippi and they were fighting to integrate schools – and needed the National Guard to do so – Barbour thought it was just fine.
(from Salon):
Asked about coming of age in Yazoo City, Miss., during the civil rights “revolution,” Barbour, who was 16 when three civil rights workers were murdered in the state in the summer of 1964, tells Ferguson, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.” He goes on to talk of standing “at the periphery” when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in his hometown (but not really paying attention to what was said because he was too busy looking at girls) and to salute the Citizens Council for (supposedly) ensuring the peaceful integration of Yazoo City’s schools – something that was achieved 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Barbour tells Ferguson:
“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 pbleeeped a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their bleeep 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.”
Here’s how the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette explained the history of the Councils in 1996:
The Delta was home to the Citizens Councils, a name familiar to Southerners who lived through the turbulent 1950s and ’60s. The first Citizens Council was organized by ardent segregationists at Indianola during the summer of 1954. By the next year, there were 60,000 members in Mississippi. The councils claimed to oppose violence, but their goal was to prevent black inroads during those nascent days of the civil rights movement and to protect what members characterized as the “Southern way of life.” In Mississippi, the state’s most powerful farmers, bankers and businessmen were members.
“It was a coterie that could apply frightful pressure on dissenters, whether white or black, in the enclosed, isolated Mississippi society,” [Neil] Peirce wrote in 1974. “… By their very presence and rhetoric, the councils created a climate in which racial murder could be tolerated still longer in Mississippi.”
Barbour’s also previously bleeeperted that the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 – accomplished only through federal intervention and which set off riots that killed two people – was “a very pleasant experience.”
^Magnaut, you ever READ anything about Barbour? At the same time black churches were being burnt down in Mississippi and they were fighting to integrate schools – and needed the National Guard to do so – Barbour thought it was just fine. (from Salon): Asked about coming of age in Yazoo City, Miss., during the civil rights “revolution,” Barbour, who was 16 when three civil rights workers were murdered in the state in the summer of 1964, tells Ferguson, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.” He goes on to talk of standing “at the periphery” when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in his hometown (but not really paying attention to what was said because he was too busy looking at girls) and to salute the Citizens Council for (supposedly) ensuring the peaceful integration of Yazoo City’s schools – something that was achieved 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Barbour tells Ferguson:
“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 pbleeeped a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their bleeep 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.”
Here’s how the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette explained the history of the Councils in 1996:
The Delta was home to the Citizens Councils, a name familiar to Southerners who lived through the turbulent 1950s and ’60s. The first Citizens Council was organized by ardent segregationists at Indianola during the summer of 1954. By the next year, there were 60,000 members in Mississippi. The councils claimed to oppose violence, but their goal was to prevent black inroads during those nascent days of the civil rights movement and to protect what members characterized as the “Southern way of life.” In Mississippi, the state’s most powerful farmers, bankers and businessmen were members. “It was a coterie that could apply frightful pressure on dissenters, whether white or black, in the enclosed, isolated Mississippi society,” [Neil] Peirce wrote in 1974. “… By their very presence and rhetoric, the councils created a climate in which racial murder could be tolerated still longer in Mississippi.”
Barbour’s also previously bleeeperted that the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 – accomplished only through federal intervention and which set off riots that killed two people – was “a very pleasant experience.”