All Whitewash is local ! Listen you'll hear it.....Aids and Lynching

Despite the Helms whitewash, we can still see the hood
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
By Tony Norman
Yesterday, the U.S. Senate got around to apologizing for failing to enact anti-lynching legislation when a law against hanging one's neighbors would've meant something.
Though a day late and 4,742 lives short, the Senate's apology was a chance for this generation of lawmakers to register how ashamed they are of their predecessors' inaction.
Between 1882 and 1968, 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced. Seven presidents petitioned Congress to make lynching a federal crime. But the apostles of states rights and white supremacy boxed every piece of legislation in committee or on the Senate floor. The filibuster was once the bigot's best friend.
The Senate apology comes just as excerpts from former Sen. Jesse Helms' autobiography "Here's Where I Stand" have begun circulating. One wonders how Helms would've voted if he were still dragging his knuckles across the floor of that august body.
"I did not advocate segregation and I did not advocate aggravation," Helms wrote disingenuously, skirting his active campaign against integrating his church. "By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built these communities in the first place. I believe right would prevail as people followed their own consciences."
In other words, trickle down brotherhood was better than civil rights legislation. Let the bigoted coffee shop owner decide on his own when he was ready to serve Negroes. That's the only way to guarantee that gobs of spit wouldn't end up in the coffee and key lime pie.
Unfortunately, Helms' belated bid to be perceived as a more moderate bigot is undermined by statements he made in 1963 when he was just a race-baiting television commentator: "The Negro can't 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."
It was that kind of veiled threat that distinguished the owlish-looking segregationist from the Kluxers who did the actual lynching, bombing and beating up of school children across Jefferson Davis' old Confederate Republic.
In another section of his biography, Helms wrote: "We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance."
Ah, the fabled outside agitators of Southern lore with their pesky demands for freedoms guaranteed to all by the Constitution. If only they had accepted the second-class status of the Negro, much of the violence that made anti-lynching legislation necessary would've abated. Racial brotherhood and democracy would've evolved faster without the iron boot of Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King pressing down on Jim Crow's fragile neck.
In another coincidence of timing, Baptist preacher Edgar Ray Killen, 80, went on trial yesterday in Mississippi for his alleged role in the murder of "outside agitators" Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney a year after Helms announced that the white man's patience was wearing thin.
One of the most tear jerking passages in Helms' book is about the time his father overheard the then 5-year-old son calling a playmate a nigger. "Gently, he taught me a lesson I've never forgotten," Helms quoted his father saying. " 'There's nothing you did that made you white and not a thing he did that made him colored. Son, I don't want to hear you say that word again'."
Helms' recollection is out of sync with what he told substitute host Bob Novak on "Larry King Live" on Sept. 12, 1995 after this charming exchange with a caller from Alabama.
Caller: "Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I think you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you've done to keep down the niggers."
Novak: "Oh, dear."
Helms: "Whoops! Well, thank you, I think."
Novak: "That was a bad word. That was politically incorrect. We don't condone that kind of language, do we?"
Helms: "No. My father didn't condone it when I was a little boy. One of the worst spankings I ever got was when I used that word, and I don't think I've ever used it since."
So, which one was it? Was it a spanking or a gentle admonition from his father that convinced the future senator to stop using the slur within earshot of black people? And how did a 5-year-old get it in his head to use "nigger" with such impunity? He must have heard the word somewhere.
Age hasn't mellowed him. Helms is prepared to meet his Maker wearing the white hood he's kept hanging in the closet for special occasions. After working hard in the Senate for three decades to keep blacks consigned to second-class status in America, Jesse Helms is too old to start lying about it now.
(Tony Norman can be reached at 412-263-1631 or tnorman@post-gazette.com.)
source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05165/521081.stm
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Note: Is KXYL's James Wiliamson cloaking again. Could he not find this to use along with his diatribe this morning on a gay quarantine ?