Martin Luther King Jr.

By Mustang Bobby

Today is the federal holiday set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

For me, growing up as a white kid in a middle-class suburb in the Midwest in the 1960's, Dr. King's legacy would seem to have a minimum impact; after all, what he was fighting for didn't affect me directly in any way. But my parents always taught me that anyone oppressed in our society was wrong, and that in some way it did affect me. This became much more apparent as I grew up and saw how the nation treated its black citizens; those grainy images on TV and in the paper of water-hoses turned on the Freedom Marchers in Alabama showed me how much hatred could be turned on people who were simply asking for their due in a country that promised it to them. And when I came out as a gay man, I became much more aware of it when I applied the same standards to society in their treatment of gays and lesbians.

Perhaps the greatest impression that Dr. King had on me was his unswerving dedication to non-violence in his pursuit of civil rights. He withstood taunts, provocations, and rank invasions of his privacy and his life at the hands of racists, hate-mongers, and the federal government, yet he never raised a hand in anger against anyone. He deplored the idea of an eye for an eye, and he knew that responding in kind would only set back the cause. I was also impressed that his spirituality and faith were his armor and his shield, not his weapon, and he never tried to force his religion on anyone else. The supreme irony was that he died at the hands of violence, much like his role model, Mahatma Gandhi.

So here we now celebrate and honor the birthday of Dr. King two years into the presidency of the first African-American elected as president and a little more than a week after yet another reminder that the violence that took Dr. King from us 1968 is still with us. There's a bitter sense of irony to that; perhaps one that Dr. King himself might have appreciated were it not so tragic.

There's a question in the minds of a lot of people of how to celebrate a federal holiday for a civil rights leader.  Isn't there supposed to be a ritual or a ceremony we're supposed to perform to mark the occasion? But how do you signify in one day or in one action what Dr. King stood for, lived for, and died for? For me, it's having the memories of what it used to be like and seeing what it has become for all of us that don't take our civil rights for granted, which should be all of us, and being both grateful that we have come as far as we have and humbled to know how much further we still have to go.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Haley Barbour, Jim Crow Republican

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've described Mississippi Gov. Haley "Boss Hogg" Barbour as "a crazy blowhard" but "pretty much your perfect Republican."

And his history of racism (and cozying up to racism) has been well-documented -- for example, the fact that he has a Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis in his office, not to mention the fact that he has been involved with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a segregationist group.

In many ways, Barbour is a throwback to the Jim Crow Deep South, and so it hardly comes a surprise that he thought the Old South of racism and segregation wasn't so bad:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says he doesn't remember the Civil Rights era being "that bad," citing his attendance at a Martin Luther King Jr. rally nearly 50 years ago.

"I just don't remember it as being that bad," Barbour (R), 63, told the conservative Weekly Standard, which did a lengthy profile on the governor. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white."

Yes, I'm sure Barbour just loved MLK. TPM's Eric Kleefeld has more:

As Barbour recalls it in a new profile in The Weekly Standard, things weren't so bad in his hometown of Yazoo City, which took until 1970 to integrate its schools (though the final event itself is said to have gone on peacefully). For example, Barbour says that there was no problem of Ku Klux Klan activity in the town -- thanks to the Citizens Council movement, an organization that was founded on the basis of resistance to integration and the promotion of white supremacy.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "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."

So there wasn't the Klan, but that's only because there was the Klan-lite, Citizens Councils that fought for the same things:

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights -- notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour's hometown, as opposed to Barbour's recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

A Barbour spokesman claims that the governor isn't a racist, but the evidence keeps piling up. At the very least, he seems to have, and to have had, no problem with racism, including the organized racism of these councils.

As Matthew Yglesias points out, after all, the council in Yazoo City was actually a white supremacist group, not some benign anti-KKK group. Are we to believe that Barbour doesn't know this? Please.

Haley Barbour is just your basic Jim Crow Republican.

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Earlier this year, I happily endorsed Barbour for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. I stand by that in light of these new revelations.

He's pretty much the perfect Republican nominee, more perfect than Palin, more perfect than Huckabee. He's pretty much the incarnation of what it means to be a Republican. And so the Republicans would be stupid not to hand him the nomination should he decide to run.

As Jonathan Chait has written, "There are people who think that the solution to the GOP's image problem is to nominate a sleazy, corpulent, cigar-chomping lobbyist from the Deep South? Is Boss Hogg unavailable?"

You certainly don't need Boss Hogg when you've got the real thing.

Haley Barbour '12!
Because you can't be too Republican.