Analysis
Some thank Lott for showing racism still alive
By JOE FEUERHERD
Washington
In her newly released memoir, former Reagan-era Civil Rights
Commission chair Linda Chavez recalled a pre-confirmation meeting with South
Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, then 81 years old.
“ ‘You’re not all that dark,’ he said, putting
his hand next to mine for comparison. I could just see the wheels turning --
would it be miscegenation if he managed to have his way with me?”
The Strom Thurmond recalled by Chavez was the man his colleagues
planned to fete at his 100th birthday party Dec. 5. Unfortunate details -- his
role as the feisty standard-bearer for the segregationist Dixiecrats in 1948,
his 24-hour filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Act -- were to be omitted,
replaced by a one-joke Friar’s Club-like roast: Whatever his shortcomings,
Strom, that horny old coot, sure knew how to have a good time.
“I see so many people here today whose life Strom Thurmond
has touched -- and some he even squeezed,” said a former Thurmond staffer.
Among the many events the senator never missed back home in South Carolina, he
continued, was “the opening of any Hooters Restaurant.” Viagra
spokesman Bob Dole told Thurmond that he could set him up with his Pepsi
advertising partner, 21-year-old Britney Spears. Eeech.
The party -- underwriters for which included the American Truckers
Association, Circuit City and Lockheed Martin -- was sexist, tacky and not
particularly funny (even by Washington’s anemic comedic standards). But
none of it was even vaguely racist, which, given the honoree’s career, was
notable.
Not, that is, until Mississippi’s Trent Lott took the
microphone.
Keeping with the jocularity of the moment, Lott noted that his
89-year-old mother was smitten by the very senior senator. Thurmond liked that.
Ha ha.
Lott continued, “I want to say this about my state: When
Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of
it.” Polite chuckles from the crowd. “And if the rest of the country
had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all
these years, either.”
The room went quickly silent. Did he just say that? Some listening
to the event -- C-SPAN Radio carried it live -- knew that there would be
repercussions, though few would have guessed how far-reaching.
The event continued, but Lott had gone over the line.
Not the taste line, for that had been violated innumerable times
in the course of the event. And not the sex line, because it was understood
that anyone so humorless as to have a problem with honoring Thurmond in a
burlesque manner didn’t have a vote worth getting.
No, he was in much deeper. “He got stuck in the American
family taboo,” says Precious Blood Fr. Clarence Williams, founder of the
Institute for Recovery from Racisms and head of the Detroit archdiocese’s
Office for Black Catholic Ministries.
The pundits and prognosticators had a field day. Was Lott a
racist? Did he really mean that “all these problems” Thurmond ran on
in 1948 should have been settled along Dixiecrat lines? And what of his record
-- votes against the Martin Luther King holiday and extension of the Voting
Rights Act, opposition to affirmative action, previous favorable comments about
Thurmond’s 1948 campaign, sympathy for Confederate president Jefferson
Davis, support for segregationist Bob Jones University, cozying up to the
Klan’s successors in his home state?
“I’m not surprised he said it,” said Sr. Anita
Price Baird, a Daughter of the Heart of Mary who is president of the National
Black Sisters’ Conference and director of the Chicago Archdiocesan Office
of Racial Justice. “I think he spoke what he believed. … He comes out
of the end of that generation that believes that the South was wronged, that
they had a right to ‘states rights’ and, as George Wallace said,
‘Segregation yesterday, today and forever.’ ”
Continued Baird: “As a senator, in that setting, he probably
thought he was safe saying that. There are no people of color in the Senate --
he felt he was in the living room making this statement and it
backfired.”
The aftermath was a field day for Democrats, still reeling from
their loss of the Senate the previous month. Though slow to take advantage
(Democratic leader Tom Daschle, for example, initially gave Lott a pass), once
on message they stayed there relentlessly. Republican activists, many with no
great love for Lott to begin with, sensed opportunity and piled on. At first,
Lott issued a strained apology -- he said his words were misconstrued -- then
went on a public relations offensive where he pleaded for forgiveness.
Some conservatives -- Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh among them --
decried a double standard that called for Lott’s removal but largely
ignored the overtly offensive statements of the Senate’s longest serving
Democrat, former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd.
Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement,
told the Associated Press that he is “not one of those calling for him to
step down and give up his leadership post. We all make mistakes. We all make
blunders. It’s very much in keeping with the philosophy and discipline of
nonviolence to forgive and move on.”
It happens all the time in the workplace, said Williams, recalling
the many workshops he has conducted on race issues: A white person makes a
comment, is heard correctly or, for that matter, incorrectly, and then all hell
breaks loose. Charges fly, accusations are made, and there is pain all around.
Lott is playing out a role Williams has seen countless times in
those workshops. There’s denial (“I didn’t mean it like
that”), fear (mostly of saying the “wrong thing”), anger, and
guilt. The political and media fishbowl is not, said Williams, an arena suited
to dealing with the larger issues raised by Lott’s comments.
For all the conversation Lott’s comments have engendered,
Williams fears the episode will result in less dialogue about race, not more.
“It’s a posture of disavowal -- it’s not me -- the only one who
has a problem is Trent Lott and if we can just get rid of Trent Lott [then that
will solve the problem],” said Williams.
“But if we get rid of Trent Lott,” continued Williams,
“there are people lined up to take his position, another version, someone
who hasn’t spoken out or taken a position. The person taking his place
probably has the same voting record, but just didn’t make the
mistake.”
Back in Chicago, Baird said she “was very grateful to Trent
Lott.” The reason for her gratitude: It will enable her to counter the
widespread notion that racism is largely a thing of the past, that “race
relations are a lot better now.” Chicago is “one of the most racist
cities in the nation” with levels of legal housing segregation unrivaled
in the South, said Baird.
The Thurmond party, meanwhile, concluded as it began, in a flurry
of bad taste. A Marilyn Monroe look-alike sang “Happy Birthday” in
the suggestive manner the real Monroe had sung it 41 years earlier to President
John F. Kennedy.
Strom Thurmond looked like a happy man.
Joe Feuerherd is NCR Washington correspondent. His
e-mail address is jfeuerherd@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, December 27,
2002
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