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NATIONAL
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Jesse Helms’ Revisionist History
by Cash Michaels
Wilmington Journal
WILMINGTON, N.C. (NNPA) – To former Sen. Jesse Helms, if only civil rights “agitators” like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left Southern segregation alone in the 1960’s, Whites would have eventually decided on their own when to breakdown racial barriers.
“There is a difference between opportunity and force,” he once said as an editorialist on WRAL-TV in the 60s. “There is a difference between cooperation and compulsion. Much of America is gaining the impression that ‘civil rights’ and legal wrongs have become synonymous. And since there can be no action without a reaction, America is beginning to react.”
And as to why “Negroes” of the time were not good enough to be integrated with Whites:
“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.”
Almost 40 years later, a mellower, older Jesse Helms, 83, on the same subject.
“I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation,” Helms reportedly writes in his upcoming autobiography Here’s Where I Stand, due out in August.
“By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences.”
That measured, considerate tone is clearly not what Helms used back in the 60s when he railed against King and the civil rights movement.
To observers like Irving Joyner, law professor at North Carolina Central University School of Law, that’s a prime and sad example of the once fiery conservative Republican still trying to justify the racist system of segregation he took part in, instead of admitting, as his friend the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond did before his passing, that he was wrong.
“The old Jesse Helms is the real one,” Joyner says. “He’s trying to reorient history today; soften the rhetoric now that he’s in his last years. But he can’t do it. There’s too much of a record there.”
Others are insulted that Helms would still patronize African-Americans by suggesting they should have waited for their freedom until whites were ready to give it to them.
“If only we’d just shut up and waited a few more decades,” wrote Black columnist Allen Johnson in the Greensboro News and Record. “It’s as if Helms expected the civil rights movement to happen by osmosis, some grand, rapturous mass epiphany where goodness fills everyone’s hearts and we all decide, suddenly, to clasp hands and get along.”
Even a cursory look at Sen. Helms’ record on race - how he voted against every civil rights measure during his 29 years in the US Senate, how he stood virtually alone in trying to block the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – shows a man not interested in paving a way for integration, but doing all he could to preserve the archaic principles of a segregationist way of life he felt served the South well.
Born in the small town of Monroe, N.C. in 1921, Helms was reared in a large conservative family, values that stayed with him, and became his trademark.
After attending Wingate and Wake Forest colleges, Helms got a job at The News & Observer in Raleigh as a part-time proofreader in 1939.
He never finished college, opting instead to work full-time at the paper as a reporter, and then, an assistant city editor of the Raleigh Times. After a stint in the Navy and on radio, Helms, a Democrat, got his feet wet in politics when he advised conservative and segregationist candidate Willis Smith during the 1950 U.S. Senate race against Frank Porter Graham. Smith wins, using race-baiting as an effective tactic.
“White people, wake up before it is too late,” one Smith newspaper ad said. “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”
Three years later, Helms would write a column in The Tarheel Banker opposing the pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling against public school segregation. The column gives him visibility and in 1957, Helms is elected to the Raleigh City Council for two terms.
After leaving the council in 1960, Helms is employed by WRAL-TV for the next 12 years to do conservative commentaries. Many of them are in opposition to the civil rights movement which Helms believes is a Communist-inspired plot to undermine America and take freedom away from “decent” citizens.
After switching over to the Republican Party, Helms rides the reelection coattails of President Richard Nixon in 1972 to the U.S. Senate.
For the next 29 years, Helms opposes every piece of civil rights and affirmative action legislation. He chastises homosexuals, votes against federal funding for AIDS programs and blocks black judges from being considered for the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 1982, he votes against the extension of the Voting Rights Act, something even his good friend, conservative President Ronald Reagan supports. The following year, Helms single handedly tries to stop passage of the federal Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.
“King’s view of American society was thus not fundamentally different from that of CPUSA (Communist Party of America) or of other Marxists,” Helms said on the Senate floor in 1983. “While he is generally remembered today as the pioneer of civil rights for blacks and as the architect of nonviolent techniques of dissent and political agitation, his hostility to and hatred for America should be made clear.”
Helms opposed busing, supported the racist apartheid regime of South Africa and for years blocked attempts by President Bill Clinton to appoint a black judge to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
A staunch adversary of liberals, Helms renamed the University of North Carolina, “The University of Negroes and Communists.”
When he made an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live in Sept. 1995, a caller praised him “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.”
Helms looked in the camera and replied, “Well thank you, I think.”
A constant critic of poor Blacks unable to help themselves, Helms had no qualms in investing in poverty. Raleigh city records show that he and his wife were landlords to several dilapidated properties in Southeast Raleigh, properties where low-income residents paid hundreds of dollars monthly in rent but got little service or upkeep for it.
In Raleigh, Helms outraged Black alums of the once all-Black John W. Ligon High School when he told The Charlotte Observer in 1997, “In Raleigh, discipline is no longer possible at [Needham] Broughton High School,” referring to what he felt were the negative affects of school desegregation “after Raleigh’s former all-black Ligon High School was closed in the early 1970s,” The N&O reported.
Helms called the integration of formally all-White schools like Broughton High “…failed social experiments [that were] a colossal flop…that has caused more upheaval in the schools.”
“Sen. Helms is sick,” Yvonne Trice, a 1965 Ligon alumna, told The Wilmington Journal then. “He’s a disgrace to North Carolina; he’s a racist.”
Another Ligonite, Raleigh businessman Bruce Lightner, also went at Helms then with both barrels.
“Some Whites have always tried to hinder or prevent Black people from being educated, even to the point of prohibiting them from learning how to read,” he told The Wilmington Journal then. “So this is, in my view, simply a carry-over of that racist mindset, and it’s something that we’ve been dealing with for a long time.”
Upon Helms’ announcement in 2001 that he would not run for reelection, David Broder, respected columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece titled “Jesse Helms, White Racist.”
“What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans,” wrote Broder then.
Melvin “Skip” Alston, president of the state NAACP, calls Helms “Mr. Jim Crow Sr.”
“He is a constant reminder that racism is alive and well and we still have a long way to go,” Alston told The News & Observer several years ago. “He is a dinosaur. He fought against everything that would advance the African-American community.”
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