It’s time to cut Trent Lott loose
By COLBERT I. KING
The Washington Post
King is a Washington Post columnist.
WASHINGTON - All of today’s huffing and puffing about Trent Lott’s record is old news.
About four years ago -- December 19, 1998, to be exact -- I wrote a column, “Lott’s Odd Friends,” that urged senators to make their first order of business in January 1999 a review of “Majority Leader Trent Lott’s fitness to serve as guiding light of the world’s most deliberative body.” Of course, the Senate did no such thing.
Instead, Republicans, with the acquiescence of their fellow Democratic club members, blithely went on with business as usual, looking past revelations about Lott’s warm and fuzzy association with xenophobic, race-baiting bigots in the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).
Look at where it got them. Friday, Lott proved the old adage “A crisis is when you can’t say, ‘Let’s forget the whole thing.”’ Nothing that Lott said has undone the damage he has done to himself and to his party. All of today’s huffing and puffing about Lott’s record is old news.
The Senate was aware of Lott’s CCC connections in 1999, as well as his earlier opposition to civil and voting rights legislation and to the creation of a Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. It was well known at the time that Lott styled himself a top defender of Confederate symbols and protector of Southern “heritage and traditions.” There were stories in The Post by Tom Edsall, while this columnist and a few other, mainly African American columnists around the country called for the Senate to take a closer look at its leader. But the Washington establishment -- Congress, political reporters, Sunday talk shows and the nation’s editorial boards -- gave the Mississippi senator a pass. And that, of course, is what he’s counting on now.
He expects his pals to keep pretending they don’t know who he really is. Let’s be clear: Trent Lott is not a New South Republican born in the postsegregation era.
He came to Washington in 1968 as a Democrat and worked as the right-hand man of one Capitol Hill’s chief executioners of civil rights legislation, Mississippi’s rabidly segregationist Democratic congressman William Colmer. And when Colmer retired, Lott joined the flight of other race-conscious white Southerners to the Republican Party and won Colmer’s seat.
And, as if Trent Lott’s own civil rights record weren’t lousy enough, it turns out that he can’t count, either. In one of his several alibis for the remarks he made at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, Lott allowed how Thurmond’s segregationist beliefs were abandoned “over 50 years ago.” As reader Edward Boswell pointed out, “Lott needs to figure out how subtracting 1,957 from 2,002 will provide him with a figure ‘over 50.”’
Boswell was referring to the fact that in 1957, Thurmond filibustered in the Senate for 24 hours and 18 minutes to derail a vote on a housing measure that he denounced as “race mixing.”
Ah, but this will not become a screed against Strom Thurmond. Thanks to the potent Voting Rights Act and a surge in black voter registration in the late 1960s and ’70s, Thurmond came to see South Carolinians of color in a whole new light. Funny how the prospect of throngs of African Americans trudging to the polls on Election Day can focus a politician’s mind wonderfully. So it was with Thurmond.
Which may help explain why throngs of people braved a snowstorm to hear a Marilyn Monroe impersonator sing a breathy happy birthday to Thurmond. Who knows which phase of Thurmond’s life they were celebrating? Was it the first 80 years, during which Thurmond, as state senator, state circuit judge, governor and US senator successfully subordinated the aspirations of black citizens in his state and in the South? Or the past two decades, when, recognizing defeat, Thurmond went along with the rest of the nation?
It’s clear which Strom Thurmond was being honored by Lott.
The Republican leader was gushing over the man from South Carolina who wrote the first draft of the “Southern Manifesto” denouncing the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision and the man who walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention to create the segregationist Dixiecrat party.
And by now everyone knows what Lott had to say at Thurmond’s birthday bash -- and back in 1980 as well -- about how much better off America would have been had Thurmond the segregationist been elected president in 1948.
What’s left to know is how the Senate will deal with Lott. Senate Republicans hope to do nothing, even in the face of a strong and welcome repudiation of Lott’s remarks by President Bush. And Democrats, despite their public hissy fits over his remarks, would love to keep Lott around and out front as the face of the Republican Party. That’s inside-the-Beltway stuff.
Running through Lott’s political career is a thirst to appease the worst side of his Old South roots. It informs his public behavior. Trent Lott may be a modern-day political leader, but he belongs to an era that is fading away. His presence in one of the government’s most prominent positions says the wrong thing about where the nation should be headed. In the words of black abolitionist and Republican Frederick Douglass, the Republican Party must “scorn the counsel of cowards” in its ranks. It’s time to cut Lott loose. And let him go commune with his soul brothers, Roy Innis and Bob Johnson. |
