I’m stunned by Gov. Haley Barbour’s recent comments defending the Citizens Council. Here is the Clarion-Ledger article on the story. Tom Freeland has excellent posts about it here and here.

Here is what Barbour said:

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

The Clarion-Ledger article provides an accurate description of the Citizen’s Council:

The white Citizens Council was “the uptown KKK,” Dittmer said, citing the former Delta Democrat Times editor Hodding Carter. Bankers and businessmen were members, Dittmer said.

“They had the power. They didn’t have to go kill people to keep from desegregating the schools. They could get them fired from their jobs,” Dittmer said.

The Citizens Council and the Klan had the same goals. The Citizens Council was not ok because—unlike the Klan—it didn’t get its hands dirty. The Citizens Council was just as nefarious as the Klan and would have had more influence than the Klan on things like preventing the integration of Ole Miss.

For more on the integration of Ole Miss, read Charles Eagles’ book The Price of Defiance, which I reviewed here. In my review I stated:

But by 1960 white supremacy was probably more about power and money than racist ideals. Thinking whites had to know that once African-Americans could vote and had equal access to education that whites would lose their monopoly on political offices and patronage. Putting it bluntly, a bunch of dumb rednecks were going to be out of a job. Plus, the “help” might balk at continuing to work for slave wages.

That’s where the Citizens Council came in. They were the thinking whites who thought that they could quietly do what the Klan did, without the violence and blood. But make no mistake about it, the purose of the Citizens Council was to maintain white supremacy.

If I had to guess, it would be that Gov. Barbour is ignorant on the Citizens Council. That’s not unusual. A lot of people do not know much about our state’s history.

But his comment that glorifies the Citizens Council like the movie Birth of a Nation romanticized the Klan? OMG. That’s just inexcusably stupid.

I thought—apparently incorrectly—that Barbour was smarter than this. Statements like this place one foot over the edge of a political cliff and the other foot on a banana peel. Think Trent Lott at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party.

The Governor needs a governor on his mouth. He needs someone—and it needs to be someone under the age of 45 who knows a little history–-to follow him around and make sure he doesn’t make old-white-guy dumb-ass comments like this.

I don’t know if Barbour’s presidential aspirations can survive this. Seriously. It may be over before it got off the ground.

But I do know that Barbour’s presidential aspirations cannot survive any more of this. He simply cannot be the stereotype of an old white guy who romanticizes white supremacy because it was the way of life when he was a boy and it seemed great to him at the time. He’s got to be smarter than that.

Otherwise, we’ll get comments like this:

You heard of slavery? Up north they think it was bad. Where I come from it was an institution that provided jobs to African-American immigrants. We didn’t have a problem with slavery in Yazoo City. The slaves were happy to have the job. Heck, Granny Barbour even said that slaves sang in the fields.