EDITORIAL
Trent Lott & Jim Crow
Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott has proffered a
belated apology for his "poor choice of words" at the birthday
party of Sen. Strom Thurmond. These amends focus on semantics.
The truth is, he saluted Jim Crow in his toast to the
100-year-old politician from South Carolina.
Lott had waxed eloquent about Thurmond's 1948 run for the
Oval Office. "I want to say this about my state: When Strom
Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of
it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we
wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years,
either."
Thurmond ran on a platform with one plank: racist
segregation. He was the States Rights Democratic candidate.
"States' rights" has been the cry of slave masters and
segregationists since the Civil War.
Lott knows that. During the 1990s he was up to his hips in
the Council of Conservative Citizens--the heir to the Klan-like
White Citizens Council. In fact, he told their members they
stood "for the right principles and the right philosophy."
So the real question is, what did Lott mean that "we"
wouldn't have all these problems if Thurmond had been elected
commander in chief?
That water fountains and public toilets should still carry
apartheid labels? That without the mighty Civil Rights movement
the Republicans wouldn't have to dirty their hands burying
affirmative action and re-segregating the educational system?
That without the Voting Rights Act it wouldn't have been
necessary to invalidate Black Florida voters to steal the
election for Dubya?
Hopeful Democrat Al Gore expressed consternation over Lott's
remarks. But his party was originally Strom Thurmond's home,
and has been complicit in the erosion of civil rights and
affirmative action won through the mass struggle. And Gore was
part of Clinton's team when they abolished the pittance
subsistence of welfare, plunging millions of women and children
deeper into poverty. Tom Daschle, Democratic leader in the
Senate, at first "accept ed" Lott's apology, trying to belittle
the whole incident. That it hasn't gone away is testament to
the vitality of the movement that exists outside these
capitalist parties.
Reprinted from the Dec. 19, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
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