Extra!‘s March/April 1999 cover story, by Steve Rendall, on Trent Lott’s ties to white supremacism.
On Meet the Press (1/4/15), host Chuck Todd tried to provide some historical context to the controversy over incoming GOP majority whip Steve Scalise’s speaking before David Duke’s EURO white supremacist convention in 2002 (CenLamar, 12/28/14).
In 2002, incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was forced to resign his leadership post when, at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, he praised the South Carolina senator who ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform.
Later, Todd summed up the politics of Lott’s resignation to NBC‘s Andrea Mitchell:
Trent Lott, you could say, said nice things about an old man at his 100th birthday party. How he said it, obviously, in heat. And there was an agenda by some who want to get rid of Lott.
To which Mitchell replied, “Right.”
Actually, not right. Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond’s 1948 campaign (whose slogan was “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow and Segregation Forever”) only highlighted the senator’s intimate connections to organized white supremacy. As FAIR (Press Release, 12/11/02) noted shortly before Lott stepped down as majority leader:
Lott’s long history of support for racist and neo-Confederate causes is generally missing from coverage of the Thurmond controversy…. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978, Lott was behind a successful effort to reinstate the citizenship of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Associated Press, 6/2/78). In 1981, the year he became house minority whip, Lott prodded the Reagan administration into taking the side of Bob Jones University and other segregated private schools that were suing the Internal Revenue Service to restore tax exemptions withdrawn a decade earlier because of the schools’ discriminatory racial policies (Washington Post, 1/18/82)….
Lott’s appointment to chair the 1984 Republican Platform committee…was the same year Lott boasted in a speech to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform” (Southern Partisan, 4th quarter, 1984).
A few months later, in an interview with the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan (4th quarter, 1984), Lott–himself a member and promoter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans–repeated Jefferson Davis’ posthumous endorsement of the GOP platform, throwing in a reference to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression.”…
It wasn’t until 1998 that national press scrutiny (with help from FAIR) focused on one neo-Confederate group–the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The CCC is the successor to the notorious white Citizens Councils, whose history dates back half a century to the 1950s when the groups were referred to as the “uptown Klan.” Today’s CCC rails against “race-mixing” and immigrants, and proudly associates with extreme rightists, from white supremacist David Duke to French racist and anti-Semite Jean-Marie LePen.
Trent Lott meeting with leaders of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group (Citizens Informer, Summer/97)
In December 1998, Lott denied any personal knowledge of the CCC, falsely claiming through a spokesperson that his links to the group amounted to a single speech made over a decade before he’d entered the Senate. In 1992, Sen. Lott praised the CCC as keynote speaker at its national convention; in 1997, he met with top CCC leaders in his Senate office; his column appeared throughout the 1990s in the group’s newsletter, which once published a cheerful photo of Lott and CCC members who were also his close relatives. Lott was also the guest of honor at a 1982 banquet hosted by a Mississippi chapter of the old white Citizens Councils (Extra!, 3-4/99).
This press release from FAIR was headlined “Media Play Catch-up on Lott’s Latest Endorsement of Racism.” Clearly some in the media have never caught up.
The New York Times (1/4/15) referred yesterday to the Scalise controversy as part of an “image problem” for the Republican Party. It’s part of the same media mindset that boils down a long history of white supremacist ties as “[saying] nice things about an old man at his 100th birthday party.”
