RIVERS IN CONFLUENCE

Today the President of the United States, speaking in Philadelphia, denounced the remarks of his party’s Senate Majority Leader which seemed to most Americans to express nostalgia for the old days when society was segregated by race. Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments testing whether a Virginia statute criminalizing cross burnings violated the First Amendment as a restriction on free speech. In one of those rare occasions of history all three branches of the Federal Government were dealing with the same problem – the problem of racial discrimination at the highest levels of American society.

The President used no uncertain rhetoric in his denunciation. He was clear, he was unequivocal and the meaning of the words he spoke was clear and unmistakable. Yet he stopped short of calling for the Senator from Mississippi to recede from the Senate leadership.

In the Supreme Court Mr. Justice Thomas found his voice and his assault upon the proposition that tool of terrorism was protected, albeit hateful symbolic speech was carried forward by the Brethren. Threats of harm, whether spoken or conveyed without words, are beyond the scope of the protections afforded by the First Amendment. The threat conveyed by the burning cross displayed to the victim is as clear and unequivocal as were the President’s words. Burning a cross “has no other purpose”, Justice Thomas said.

Senator Peter Fitzgerald, R-Illinois, speaking of Trent Lott said, “ You need to be judged as a person on a lifetime of work, not on the few times you make public statements that are patently ridiculous.” Senator Fitzgerald is a fair minded man and his remarks should be taken in that spirit. It is good advice and we should examine Trent Lott’s record before reaching judgment.

From his political start in 1968 as an assistant to Democratic William Colmer who used his position on the House Rules Committee to stymie civil rights legislation through his remarks last Thursday Lott has written a record that belies his protests that the words he spoke were a mistake of the mind and not of the heart. Perhaps it was, because this particular mistake of the mind has been repeated over and over. At a 1980 Republican rally in Jackson, Mississippi, in almost the same words, he expressed the same sentiment as he did last Thursday.

His ties to the neo-Confederate Council of Conservative Citizens are deeper than he admits publicly. It is not just an appearance and a speech to the 1999 conference of what many call the “Uptown Klan”. During the decade of the 1990s he penned several columns for the group’s newsletter, The Citizen Informer. The groups current website features him.

He argued in a Supreme Court brief he filed in 1981 defending Bob Jones University that, “Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy.” In 1984 in an interview with the neo-Confederate magazine, Southern Partisan he said, “Look at the cost involved in the Martin Luther King holiday and the fact that we have not done it for other people who were more deserving. That same year he told a Sons of the Confederacy rally held in Biloxi that “The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the Republican Platform.” All too frequently the “mistakes of the head” recur too frequently to be mere mistakes.

The President’s father once told the American people not to “listen to what we say but pay attention to what we do.” Like Senator Fitzgerald’s remarks that, too, was good advice. Mr. President, we have heard what you said, now we are paying attention to what you do.