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Back to Commentary Table of Contents Like the Biblical ‘Pillar of Salt,’ One
Short Infamous Speech By William F. Finucane On his way to the birthday party for the Republican senior senator for Mississippi, the junior senator must have been beaming. And understandably, for he was on the verge of becoming one of the prime candidates for president. Oh it wouldn’t happen right away. But when the time came, after George W. Bush finished his second term, this man was going to be ready. His name is Trent Lott. What a strong name. So much power it exuded. So he stepped into the birthday of his senior, the 100-year-old Strom Thurmond, to say good luck. Thurmond quit the Senate. This was a birthday-send-off day. Everything should have been superb. It was, until Lott said the words that bumped him out of the Senate leadership role he had held for some years, and quite likely out of any future race for the presidency. Lott’s words: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either." End of statement.
Thurmond ran as a segregationist in 1948, the year Harry Truman triumphed over both the loss of Southern Democrats to the new Dixiecrat splinter party and the well funded and polished campaign of Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Lott and Thurmond no longer hew to segregationist beliefs – so they say outwardly, at any rate – and both say they welcome black votes nowadays. This whole business, Lott said, was taken out of context; wildly overblown. Somewhere in Lott’s thought process, shortly after this horrible gaffe, there must have been a conscience that roared, ‘You idiot. To say something cute, you stuck your foot in your mouth and kept hammering until it was down your throat as far as your knee. You imbecile.’ Trent booked himself into every television show with an opening and told everybody who would listen that this was a simple misunderstanding and that he was a regular Republican politician, not some sort of Mississippi bigot. Didn’t work People balked at trusting this man. Even President Bush chided Lott. Imagine being chastised for your speech by one of the modern world’s premier word abusers. Embarrassing, extremely. Lott could not talk away his birthday talk because it carried the deep, sonorous, bigoted tone of white man’s superiority in between each letter. Did Lott intend that? No, probably not. But that is exactly what is so dangerous. In 1948 when Thurmond ran for president as a segregationist he saw black men and women as subhuman. To attach yourself and anyone else with that sick thinking is to paint yourself and anyone else as, at best, a recovering segregationist. To say, "We’re proud of it," is to say that the speaker – Lott – and his close friends still feel that way. Who, in God’s name, can say this today, when segregation is original sin? Hoping to save himself, Lott came up with a clever explanation for it all. His enemies had arranged all this to trick him into making these outlandish statements, and they then used the statements to strangle him. The enemies theory: Some bad people with mischief on their minds thought this all through and then executed Trent masterful. No, no, Trent, and no again. What happened was you let a little bit of the segregationist creep out from behind the neat lapels of your suit jacket and show who was running the show. That of course doesn’t mean you are a white supremacist now. It does mean you were one once. And are apparently still proud of it, finally, when all the legal briefs, church books and campaign literature have been cleared away and what there is left is you and your deepest self worth to satisfy. Perhaps this is the most important short speech an American politician has ever made. And it was a good one! It has saved us from the possibility of a president who dislikes blacks. Even though he thinks he doesn’t.
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