I deliberately did not write about the passing of Jessie Helms because I am very ambivalent on his contributions and I was always taught to not speak ill of the dead. But where blacks are concerned, Jessie Helms was a thorn in our sides and a reminder of anything Antebellum. The bottom line is that Jessie Helms was a segregationist, and a very nasty one too. Long after many of his contemporaries ceased their “Jim Crow’ ways, he kept playing the race card whenever it suited him politically. As far as my memory serves me, when he was not picking on blacks, he picked on other ethnicities, immigrants, trade unionists, gays and lesbians. In short, the sky was the limit for Helms, as long as it had nothing to do with Caucasians. So, given that, I could not muster any emotions to mourn his passing, or even care that he passed away.
While Helms served thirty years in the Senate, his tenure on Capitol Hill was never memorable for all the right reasons in many instances. “He’ll be remembered, in part, for the strong racist streak that articulated his politics and almost all of his political campaigns – they were racialized in the most negative ways,” recalled Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University.
In essence, his death Friday, at age 86, has brought America a small step closer to the end of the antebellum era in our politics that saw the men who had battled to deny the franchise to millions of Americans because of the color of their skin, and who fought even more aggressively to deny adequate education, nutrition and health care to African-American children, make the easy transition to leadership positions in the “modern” Republican Party. So, this makes Barack Obama’s accomplishment as the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party all the more significant. If Jessie Helms had his way, Barack Obama would be in a subservient position. No black should ever dare to dream big, as Jessie Helms would have it.
I dug around a little about this man in order to put what I penned in perspective. You see, he was not always a Republican. As a young man of the Old South, he had no interest in joining an organization that, well into the 20th century, proudly referred to itself as “the party of Lincoln.”It was only when the Grand Old Party adopted a southern accent and replaced references to the Great Emancipator with grumblings about “racial quotas” did Helms make the switch to the party of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and John McCain. He brought along the symbols and sounds of the “Jim Crow” Democrats, insisting that Republican events celebrate the memory of Robert E. Lee and encouraging the singing of “Dixie” at party rallies.
What is sad and equally shocking is that he was not just any Republican. He was an essential player in the remaking of the party. With his National Congressional Club, a money-raising machine that helped forge what came to be called “the New Right” within the GOP, Helms aide Carter Wrenn says the senator forced “the realignment of the Republican party.””You can’t really separate the growth of the Republican party from Jesse’s career,” explained Wrenn. The sly fox, Richard Nixon, was one of the first Republicans to recognize Helms’ utility. Helms was welcomed into the GOP by then President Nixon and his southern strategists of the late 1960s and early 1970s because they understood that Helms was skilled at working the fault lines that could turn white fears into Republican votes.
Fast forward eons later, and the Republicans are still working those same fault-lines. Some of the people who worked most closely with Helms as he transformed what began as an anti-slavery party into a comfortable retreat for white-backlash voters are now key players in the campaign of John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president–an even scarier reality that we face. “Let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation,” McCain declared in a statement on the death of Helms, to whom he was compared favorably by former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole earlier this year.
Those who battled hardest against Helms and his racial politics are quite certain that the 2008 campaign of Republican McCain against Democrat Barack Obama, who in August will become the first African-American nominee of a major party for president, will take a Helmsian turn. Yep, they will play the race card with no reservations. “There’s no question appeals will be made by McCain’s campaign on racial lines,” says North Carolina Congressman Mel Watt, who felt the full brunt of that racial politics when he managed the campaign of Harvey Gantt, a black Democrat who challenged Helms in 1990 and 1996.
Putting Jesse Helms in a Historical Context….
Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. entered national politics as a campaign strategist for Willis Smith, who mounted a race-baiting challenge to U.S. Senator Frank Porter Graham in the 1950 North Carolina Democratic primary. Graham, a former president of the University of North Carolina, served in the Senate as a national Democrat, who supported President Harry Truman and accepted the party’s emerging commitment to civil rights.
Smith, who was backed by the segregationist dead-enders who that had supported the 1948 States’ Rights Party (“Dixiecrat”) campaign of segregationist Strom Thurmond, hired Helms to help him win by exploiting racist sentiment in the state.
One advertisement that Helms and his team created screamed: “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”
Another advertisement allegedly worked up by Helms highlighted a doctored photograph that purported to illustrate the penchant of Graham’s wife for dancing with African-American men.
The Smith campaign was, according to the Raleigh News & Observer, a publication for which Helms once worked, “called the most overtly racist campaign since the turn of the century.” The sad reality was that it was also successful, which was a lesson not lost on the 29-year-old Helms.
Smith beat Graham, won the general election, went to Washington and brought the campaign along as his administrative assistant. But Helms was soon back in North Carolina, encouraging massive resistance to integration, as a Raleigh city councilman and a television commentator who referred to the University of North Carolina as the “University of Negroes and Communists” and suggested that walls be erected around the UNC campus to prevent enlightened thinking from “infecting” the rest of North Carolina. Helms warned that, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” He suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and refused, even decades after King’s death, to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner. He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and “moral degenerates.
As the movement gathered strength, and as murderous violence against activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased, Helms suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that, “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.”
When his fellow Democrats began to reject his brand of race-baiting politics in a series of primaries that saw moderates such as former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford beat segregationists, Helms followed Thurmond into the Republican Party. In 1972, he determined to follow Thurmond into the Senate.
Helms got a couple of lucky political breaks. First, President Nixon was running his “southern strategy” reelection campaign to attract segregationist Democrats to the GOP. Second, the Democratic nominee for the Senate that year was North Carolina Congressman Nick Galifianakis.
Galifianakis was a Greek-American, which to Helms and his supporters meant the congressman was a bit too “ethnic” to represent North Carolina. The newly-minted Republican, who could always be counted on to exploit any difference that might benefit his candidacy, campaigned on the slogan: “Vote for Helms — He’s One of Us!” That campaign was mild compared with the 1990 and 1996 campaigns Helms ran against Gantt, the former Charlotte mayor who was the first African-American to compete seriously for a southern Senate seat in the modern era.
In 1990, after Helms fell behind in the race, his campaign began running television advertisements that showed a white man’s hands crumpling up a rejection notice from a corporation that had refused to hire him because affirmative action policies had supposedly required that the job go to a “less qualified minority.” To add insult to injury, after those words were uttered, an image of Gantt flashed on the screen. Helms won a narrow victory that year, as he did in 1996.
Final thoughts…..
Unlike George Wallace and a number of other southern politicians, who made racism a platform during the electoral process, but then quietly funded roads, schools and other projects in African-American communities, the former senator’s hometown newspaper noted delicately in an obituary that, “Although Helms denied he was a racist, his work in the Senate seemed at odds with the interests of blacks.” In other words, he was a damn racist in more ways than one. In addition to waging a filibuster in an attempt to block the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, he opposed extension of the Voting Rights Act and championed the apartheid regime in South Africa. When Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate, Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: “Watch me make her cry. I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.” Then, emphasizing the lines about how “good” things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang “Dixie.”
Despite the best efforts of the senator and his spin doctors to rehabilitate the old man by hiring a few conservative staffers who happened to be people of color or by posing him for pictures with U2’s Bono, Helms finished his career without the apologies that came from George Wallace, Orval Faubus and his fellow segregationists. Even Strom Thurmond, who fathered a child with a black woman, admitted his defenses of segregation were wrong, but not Helms. Nor did the North Carolinian ever make serious efforts to appeal to African-American voters, as Wallace, Thurmond and “Jim Crow” politicians began to do late in their careers. That SOB Jesse Helms was unrepentant to the very end. He’ll be singing “Dixie” in his grave when he meets up with his segregationist buddies.
The sad reality is that those who sang “Dixie” with him are now singing the same tune loud and clear as they work for John McCain. Alex Castellanos, the veteran Republican media consultant who produced the so-called “White Hands” commercial that Helms used against Gantt, has according to the Washington Post been advising McCain’s campaign on media strategy.
Republican strategist Charlie Black, perhaps the most prominent member of McCain’s political inner circle, especially since he suggested that a terrorist attack on the U.S. would benefit the Republican’s prospects this fall, advised Helms throughout much of the senator’s career and played a particularly central role in the 1990 campaign, according to contemporary media accounts.
When the “White Hands” ad stirred a national controversy, Black appeared on the PBS’s Newshour to defend it. Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown, who was also on the show, said to Black: “You are a principal adviser of Jesse Helms. Would you advise him to run that kind of ad, Charlie? Do you approve of that ad, Charlie?”Black replied, “I advised Jesse Helms to do what he’s always done.”
So while Black and company cannot utilize the same overtly racist tactics as Helms, they will undoubtedly employ more subtle tactics, with the same goals in mind. Another Republican is trailing an African American candidate. Yes, we will be hearing faint strains of “Dixie” the closer we get to the presidential elections, only with different undertones.
So, I cannot mourn the loss of a great senator and I was always taught not to speak ill of the dead, but the facts are the facts and I will leave it at that. Just my thoughts, you be the judge…
Filed under: Barack Obama, Charlie Black, Harvey Gantt, Jesse Helms, John McCain, Richard Nixon
Black Political Thought 