Youthful Memories Unadulterated by Civil Rights Struggle Trouble Barbour Critics - FoxNews.com
As always the commenters at Fox prove the point they are trying to disprove as they try to airbrushwhitewash for Haley.
Even after apologizing and backtracking on certain remarks, Barbour has trouble striking the right note: Just days ago, the governor told The Associated Press he remembers little about the racial violence pulsating through the state and the South during his youth. What does Barbour recall about the Freedom Summer of 1964, when he was 16, and the slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi shocked the nation?
“Not much,” Barbour said casually, the kind of answer his critics find at once unbelievable and predictable.
“The governor has a pattern, in my opinion, of doing things that are outrageous and insensitive,” said state Rep. Rufus Straughter, who is black and a decade older than Barbour and grew up a county away from him.
“He’s been getting away with it because in Mississippi, he’s been speaking to groups that agree with him,” Straughter said. “What he fails to understand is that whatever he says gets out there into the wider world.”
The Mississippi in which Barbour grew up was home to some of the deadliest conflicts of the civil rights era, as black citizens sought to gain voting rights and to integrate public facilities, including schools and universities. Those who knew Barbour then say he stayed out of the fray, neither a civil rights activist nor a vocal opponent of the movement.