JACKSON, Miss., Dec. 21 (UPI) -- Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy by saying he doesn't recall the Civil Rights era as being "that bad".
Barbour, considered a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, told the conservative Weekly Standard he didn't remember the '60s in Yazoo City, Miss., his home town, as being turbulent.
"I just don't remember it as being that bad," Barbour said. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white".
Democrats seized on his comments, saying they disqualified Barbour from consideration as a presidential candidate, The Hill reported Monday.
On his Twitter page, Democratic National Committee spokesman Haru Sevugan said the comment shows Barbour isn't ready to run the nation.
"Re Barbour's 'not that bad' comment: He's not ready for prime time or not ready for the 21st century - either way it's disqualifying," Sevugan posted.
In the profile published Monday, Barbour also discussed the White Citizens' Councils, which opposed racial integration, The New York Times reported. In Yazoo City, Barbour said, the councils were a positive force, and "an organization of town leaders" who didn't tolerate racist attitudes of the Ku Klux Klan.
"In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan" would be "run out of town," Mr. Barbour said. "If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City".
Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP, told The Huffington Post, "It's beyond disturbing -- it's offensive that he would take that approach to the history of this state to many African-Americans who had to suffer as a result of the policies and practices of the Citizens Council".
A spokesman for Barbour did not return calls and e-mail messages from the Times Monday. Dan Turner, Barbour's press secretary, told Talking Points Memo, "You're trying to paint the governor as a racist and nothing could be further from the truth".
The Web site quoted Turner as saying, "There's nothing in his past that shows that. If you pick out a sentence or a paragraph out of a fairly long article and harp on it, you can manipulate it". UPI
