Foot in Mouth

Haley Barbour Praises Racist Group

Says Citizens Council upheld order.

Might Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour have just kissed his presidential ambitions goodbye? In a profile in The Weekly Standard, Barbour praises the Citizens Council for upholding order during the civil-rights era in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi. The Citizens Council was a White Supremacists organization that called itself “the South’s answer to the mongrelizers,” and declared, “We will not be integrated.” As for the local chapter in Yazoo City, it published the names and addresses of 53 black people who signed a desegregation petition, leading to a boycott of their businesses that forced many of them to withdraw their names from the petition.