SPLC Report:

Defending Dixie

Excerpts:

After singling out the Southern culture warrior, Sen. Jesse Helms, as a political hero, Pruden bragged about his great-grandmother shooting a Union cavalryman and boasted that the Times was the most “in-your-face” conservative newspaper in America. When Robert E. Lee’s birthday rolls around every year, he said, “I make sure we have a story” — especially because the occasion “falls around Martin Luther King’s birthday.”

Born and raised in Arkansas, Pruden has a deep-rooted affection for Dixie. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a leading spokesperson for Little Rock’s racist Capital Citizens Council, which fought bitterly against school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. During the landmark confrontations at Little Rock High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent National Guard troops to protect nine black teenagers as they entered the white school, Pruden Sr. reportedly told the assembled mob: “That’s what we’ve got to fight! N*ggers, Communists, and cops!”

In 1998, Pruden, whose newspaper is the only major daily in America that runs a weekly page about a war that ended 138 years ago, spoke to the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the Manassas Battlefield Park. He began by making the kind of promise most editors avoid at any cost: “I will never fail to respond to you when you call on me for help, because I believe in what you are doing to cherish and protect and preserve the heritage of our great Southern people.”

Concluding with a flourish, Pruden said “Southerners … hold loyalty to two countries in our hearts.” The second country is one “baptized 137 years ago on this very field in the blood of First Manassas, a country no longer at the mercy of the vicissitudes in the tangled affairs of men, a country that lives within us, a country that will endure for as long as men and women know love. … God bless America, God bless the Confederate States of America, and God bless you all.”

Another neo-Confederate. Ironically it looks like he got his racist inclinations from his father blood.