WASHINGTON--In his 2005 memoir, Jesse Helms said he was not a racist. His rejection of the label came in the closing years of a public life that caused more than a few people to reject his denial.
The former senator from North Carolina, who died Friday at the age of 86, 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.
However, in many ways, former Sen. Helms accepted the torch that Tillman passed to a new generation of white supremacists--and served the same cause with a tad more subtlety.
In a 1900 Senate speech, Tillman, a Democrat, admitted that whites in South Carolina used fraud and violence to seize control of the Reconstruction government that gave Blacks a share of power.
“We took the government away,” Tillman, an unabashed racist, said. “We stuffed the ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”
Nearly a century later, according to the Department of Justice, then-Sen. Helms’ 1990 reelection committee and state GOP officials were behind mailings that were sent mostly to Blacks, threatening them with arrest if they showed up at the polls.
In 1992, they signed a consent decree to stop the intimidation.
Tillman once said Blacks “must remain subordinate [to whites] or be exterminated.” Helms never went that far.
However, in 1993, he treated U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (Dem., Ill.), the first Black woman to serve in the Senate, as if she were his subordinate.
“I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries,” Sen. Helms told a Republican colleague as he boarded a Senate elevator Sen. Braun was riding.
His singing of the Confederate anthem was meant to torment Sen. Braun for blocking a bill he sponsored to approve a patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy that included a Confederate flag insignia.
It was unacceptable to “put the imprimatur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind,” Sen. Braun had argued.
Six years later, Sen. Helms tried mightily to keep the Senate from confirming Mrs. Braun as ambassador to New Zealand, a move widely seen as payback for the defeat she dealt him in 1993.
While working as a television editorialist in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960, Sen. Helms called the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus the “University of Negroes and Communists.”
That snide remark 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.”
As non-violent civil rights protesters in the South pressed for racial equality in the 1960’s, Mr. Helms said during one of his televised editorials: “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s, thus far, left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and interfere with other men’s rights.”
Many years earlier, Tillman complained that Blacks had been taught the “damnable heresy of equality” with whites and inoculated “with the virus of social equality.”
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 n_____s in the South before they will learn their place again,” the senator said.
Ninety-four years later, as a guest on “Larry King Live,” Sen. Helms was greeted by a caller who thanked him for helping to “keep down the n_____s”
“Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” said Sen. Helms, sounding just a bit embarrassed--and a lot like the linear successor to Tillman.
