The Jesse Helms Thing

This is lovely:

"I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation," Helms writes. "By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences. "

He added: "We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance. We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust. We do know that too many lives were lost, businesses were destroyed, millions of dollars were diverted from books and teachers to support the cost of buses and gasoline. We do know that turning our public schools into social laboratories almost destroyed them."

Outside agitators like Civil Rights heroes Martin Luther King Jr. (a Georgia native and Alabama resident), Fannie Lou Hamer (from Mississippi), Fred Shuttlesworth (Alabama), E.D. Nixon (Alabama), John Lewis (Alabama native and current Georgia Congressman), Ralph Abernathy (Alabama), James Meredith (Mississippi), and Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr., the four black students that began the lunch counter sit-in movement at a Woolworth's in Helms' native North Carolina? While it is true that by 1964, sympathetic white northerners rushed to the South to help organize, particularly in Mississippi (and as a side note, this created a backlash among black activists, ultimately creating the Black Power movement), the backbone of the Civil Rights movement was comprised by southerners.

Helms complains that these "outside agitators" caused more problems than would have existed had the South been left alone. That is garbage, considering that the North, and the federal government in general, had left the South alone since 1877, when federal troops were removed from the region as part of the compromise between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. With no protection, that left blacks vulnerable to white terrorism, seen in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, as well as the dramatic rise in lynching over the years. With the culmination of the First World War which created a labor shortage in the North, these undesirable living conditions led to the first black northern migration. In other words, there was absolutely no historical precedent that suggested that the South would have ended racism and segregation without northern and federal intervention. At least George Wallace recanted his segregationist views. Helms remains a tired old dinosaur that is bitter because the South had finally moved into modernity.