Senator Trent Lott stepped down as Senate Majority Leader late last week amid the controversy surrounding racially insensitive remarks he made at fellow Senator Strom Thurmond's one-hundredth birthday celebration. He stated that the country would have been better off if it had elected Thurmond President in 1948, who ran as a Dixiecrat on an almost exclusively segregationist platform. Lott claimed that his remark was an isolated mistake caused by "winging" a speech. However, when you take a closer look at Lott's life, you will quickly discover that these remarks are only the latest in a long series of remarks and policies that show the true nature of Lott, that he is a blatant racist:
- 1968: Trent Lott becomes an aide to Representative William Colmer. Colmer, a Democrat from Mississippi, was an avowed segregationist.
- 1978: Lott, as a member of the House, spearheads a successful effort to posthumously restore citizenship to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy.
- 1979: Lott supports a bipartisan group in an effort to pass a Constitutional Amendment banning busing to desegregated schools. The group's proposal fails by only seven votes.
- 1981: He supports Bob Jones University in a friend of the court briefing, saying that it deserves tax breaks despite its discriminatory policies because "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy."
- 1983: Trent Lott votes against Martin Luther King Day, arguing that we have not made holidays for "a lot of people that were more deserving."
- 1992: During a speech to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a pro-segregationist organization, he tells them that they have stood for the "right principles."
- 2002: Lott, speaking at Strom Thurmond's birthday party, says that the United States would have been better off if Thurman had won his 1948 Presidential campaign, which ran from a blatantly racist platform. Because of the ensuing controversy, Lott resigns as Majority Leader, pledging to remain a as member of the Senate.
While one or even several of these events might be explained away by coincidence, taken together, they paint a picture of a racist man still stuck in the past.
sources:
- Newsweek's December 23, 2002 edition (Article entitled "Ghosts of the Past")
- Cnn.com