Not long before the bloody mayhem erupted in Tucson, Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, may have committed ritual seppuku on his embryonic 2012 presidential campaign. In an interview, Barbour waxed nostalgic about his growing-up days in Yazoo City, just as the civil-rights movement was hitting a high tide of bloody mayhem in his home state.
Barbour spoke fondly of the old White Citizens Councils, the organizations formed in many Southern towns in which a town's respectable folk would band together to resist integration through the economic and social sway they had over the community. They wore suits and fine shoes. They spoke the language of law and of commerce, and hardly any of them were impolite enough to mention the people across town, in overalls and dungboots, who believed in rather more direct action. But there always was a common purpose there. They would not be the last people to do this. Oh, no. There would always be others.
In Carry Me Home, her luminous memoir of growing up in the genteel precincts of Birmingham during that city's ferocious resistance to racial equality, Diane McWhorter writes simply and clearly about those parts of the past that Haley Barbour, that fathead, tried to wish away, to his everlasting shame:
The bombing of the 16th street Baptist Church was the endgame in the city fathers' long and profitable tradition of maintaining their industrial supremacy through vigilantism...
Not that anyone standing in that buffet line that Sunday had anything to do with the lethal package planted during those dark hours before the blast, when no sensible white person would be found in the colored section of downtown. The fuse had been lit years earlier, in the broad daylight of community approval, and even the cleanest hands ... did their bit to keep it dry as it sizzled through bad neighborhoods and across many decades before it blew up four black Sunday school girls on September 15, 1963.
In short, God's curse on all the respectable people.
Political violence in America always has been a matter of great convenience to the people who actually own the country. They don't have to inspire it, or finance it. They can even deplore it. All they really have to do is...
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/political-violence-in-america-4834173?src=rss
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