Arch conservative and rabid race baiter, Jesse Helms, died, ironically, on Independence Day.
For most of the 86 years he spent on this earth, Helms devoted way too much of his time and energy preventing African Americans from experiencing the freedom and independence that he, along with other Euro-Americans, took for granted.
In 1950, Helms became an unofficial researcher for United States Senate candidate Willis Smith, a conservative Democratic lawyer. While working on the primary campaign against Frank Porter Graham,
Helms had a hand in creating an ad that read, "White people, wake up before it
is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your
daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of
the races."
When not being outright racist, the five-term North Carolina senator was about as negative as he could get. Not only did he oppose civil rights, he opposed gay rights. Not only was he against communism, he also opposed a woman’s right to choose. Helms was against school busing and opposed giving up the Panama Canal.
"There was plenty to stand up and say 'No!' to during my first term in the U.S. Senate," Helms wrote in his memoir, Here's Where I Stand.
By the end of his first term, Helms had earned the moniker “Senator No.” He relished the label, even though it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
"If there is such a place as hell, then Helms will be fist bumping while hanging out in the deepest, most segregated corner with another one of the right-wing's iconic bigots, Strom Thurmond...."
Before running for the Senate, Helms was a conservative commentator on WRAL-TV. This is what he had to say about America’s greatest civil rights leader and the SCLC: "Dr. King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior."
Helms also called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress."
A conservative icon, Helms defeated former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt—who is African American—in his last two runs for Senate in 1990 and 1996, by running racially loaded campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumpling up a job application, with these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."
Helms will be remembered, noted Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University, “for the strong racist streak that articulated his politics and almost all of his political campaigns.”
If there is such a place as hell, then Helms will be fist bumping while hanging out in the deepest, most segregated corner with another one of the right-wing's iconic bigots, Strom Thurmond, who died five years ago. Although both racial dinosaurs are gone, unfortunately, their hate-filled beliefs have been passed down from one generation to the next.
Just go to some of the right-wing blogs where you will see the pack mule mentality that was wrong-headed and outdated when Jesse and Strom were just good old country boys. The blogs, written by hand-me-down haters in this millennium, perpetuate all that is ugly and ignorant in what passes for conservative thought.
There’s Tightrope, for one example, a blog where “it’s not illegal to be white, yet,” which features four pages of nigger jokes and sells white power t-shirts on the side.
Fortunately, the nation former Dixiecrats Helms and Thurmond cherished, and the blog mob on Tightrope pines for, is slowly but surely becoming a bad American memory.
And Barack Obama’s swearing in on January 20 as the nation’s new leader will be the clearest signal yet that the twisted convictions of Helms and his ilk are those that belong to a dying breed.
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