Jesse Helms - Enlarge Image
No matter how much Republicans try to sanitize Mr. Helms — after his death last week, his legacy will remain that of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and Confederate Segregationism.

The former North Carolina Senator was an unyielding champion of the conservative “Bigot” movement.

And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his “action-oriented Marxism.”

In an opinion piece, columnist DeWayne Wickham asserts that Helms subtly carried the torch of white supremacy during his lifetime:

“The former North Carolina senator seldom displayed the overt, incendiary racial prejudice that Ben Tillman, the turn-of-the-20th century South Carolina demagogue, often spewed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. But in many ways, Helms accepted the torch that Tillman passed to a new generation of white supremacists — and served the same cause with a tad more subtlety.”

While working as a television editorialist in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960, Helms called the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus the “university of Negroes and Communists.” That snideness echoed the ring of Tillman’s condemnation of education for blacks: “When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand,” …wrote Wickham

When President Theodore Roosevelt invited black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, Tillman was outraged. “The action … will necessitate our killing a thousand “niggers” in the South before they will learn their place again,” the senator said.

Ninety-four years later, as a guest on Larry King Live, Helms was greeted by a caller who thanked him for helping to “keep down the niggers.”

“Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” said Helms, sounding just a bit embarrassed — and a lot like the linear successor to Tillman.

That was “White-Sheet” Jesse Helms — a bigot whose “nobility” is being shamelessly parroted in the air-waves by right-wingers ….who have eagerly been linking his death to July 4th — Independence day!, to smother the ugliness of Mr. Helms’ White-Supremacist past.

What a Joke!

Teddy Partridge of firedoglake.com says:

“….don’t let the Independence Day paeans fool you. Jesse Helms was a bigot, a racist, a homophobe — and a media charlatan. America would be a much worse place if he’d had his way on his many signature issues. Our nation’s birthday is brighter for him not in it.” ….Click here for more

In an Aug. 29, 2001 piece, David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post states:

“What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.”

“In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what “some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history,” ….says Broder.

“Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,” Peterson wrote, “but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master.”

In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Once again, he pulled through.

Jesse Helms’ White Hands AD

That is not a history to be sanitized.

Richard Nixon was one of the first Republicans to recognize Helms’ Racist utility.

From The Nation:

The North Carolinian was welcomed into the GOP by then President Nixon and his southern strategists of the late 1960s and early 1970s because they understood that Helms was skilled at working the fault lines that could turn white fears into Republican votes.

The Republicans are still working those fault-lines. Indeed, some of the people who worked most closely with Helms as he transformed what began as an anti-slavery party into a comfortable retreat for white-backlash voters are now key players in the campaign of John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

“Let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation,” McCain declared in a statement on the death of Helms, to whom he was compared favorably by former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole earlier this year. (Actually, Dole suggested that McCain was somewhat more conservative than Helms.)

In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Richard Nixon touched the essence of the southern strategy:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Republicans have used this Racist strategy ever since — very effectively. Read more about The Southern Strategy.

Jesse Helms — May You Rot In Peace!

REFERENCES

1. The Republican Party and racism: from the “southern strategy” to Bush
2. Nixon’s Southern strategy — ‘It’s All In the Charts’
3. National Black Republican Association (NBRA) - Democrats are ‘More Racist’

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