Vol. 75/No. 2      January 17, 2011

In an interview published in the December 21 Weekly Standard, Barbour, who is eyeing a U.S. presidential run on the 2012 Republican ticket, looked back on the good old days of Jim Crow segregation. Asked about life in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi, during the 1960s when racist violence was common throughout the South, he said, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”

“You heard of the Citizens Councils?” Barbour asked. “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.”

Barbour rapidly issued a “clarification” of his remarks, saying “nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints… . Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation.”

The White Citizens’ Council, as the organization was commonly known, was founded in 1954 in reaction to the Supreme Court decision that year outlawing segregation in public education. The council sought to project a more palatable image than the anti-working-class night riders of the Klan, but its motto of “racial integrity” and “states rights” left no doubt where it stood.

In 1955 the White Citizens’ Council in Yazoo City ran a full-page ad in the daily paper listing the names and addresses of 53 African Americans who had petitioned for enforcement of the Supreme Court desegregation decision. The threat was clear—withdraw your name from this petition or risk losing your job, your home, or worse. All but two signers took their names off.

Yazoo at the time had a whites-only hospital and separate—and unequal—schools for Blacks and whites. The segregated schools lasted all the way until 1969, when insistent supporters of Black rights finally forced the county to desegregate. The “town leaders” of the White Citizens’ Council immediately set up a Manchester Academy for white children. Barbour enrolled his two sons there.

The circumstances surrounding the parole of Jamie and Gladys Scott makes it clear Barbour has had no change of heart. They were convicted in 1994 on charges they led two men into a trap where they were robbed at gunpoint of $11. The Scotts maintain their innocence. Mississippi law allows a sentence of up to life in prison for armed robbery, legislation enacted for use against Blacks and other workers. Three other defendants in the case who pled guilty served two-year terms and were freed.

Barbour said he was suspending indefinitely the sentences of the two sisters but put a price tag on their release. For Gladys Scott it’s conditional on donating a kidney to her sister Jamie, who is severely ill and has been denied adequate dialysis treatment in prison. Barbour said, “Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.” The state Department of Corrections will not have to finance the kidney transplant operation if the sisters are released.

Many newspapers have pointed to the callousness of Barbour’s pardon statement and the fact he never said a word about the injustices the Scotts have faced. Michael Shapiro, chief of organ transplantation at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, said Barbour’s decision to coerce someone to give up a kidney as the price for parole was “unethical and possibly illegal.”

NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, on the other hand, praised the way the governor handled the case, calling it a “shining example.” The NAACP played a prominent role in efforts to get Jamie and Gladys Scott out of jail.

In an interview with CNN shortly after meeting with Barbour December 30, Jealous said the two of them “didn’t talk about” the issue of whether the imprisonment of the Scotts was just. But Barbour understood, said Jealous, “that these women simply don’t need to be in prison one day longer.”

Mississippi “is a state with a lot of divisions,” Jealous continued. “And you’ve got to communicate across all of those. And I think that [Barbour’s] statement does that in a way that’s very craftily done.”
 
 
Related articles:
Class origins of White Citizens’ Councils  
 
 
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