JACKSON Miss. – Haley Barbour’s folksy style, savvy leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and success as a GOP strategist have made the two-term Mississippi governor a serious contender early in the wide-open contest for the Republican presidential nomination.
Yet the 63-year-old has shown a penchant for airbrushing his state’s segregationist past, a period he’s inclined to describe as more like Mayberry than “Mississippi Burning.”
Critics have dogged him for such comments, and Barbour has recently attempted to make amends, a sign he’s aware that if he is to carry his party’s banner next year against the country’s first African-American president, he will have to be more forthright about Mississippi’s troubled history.
Even after apologizing and backtracking on certain remarks, Barbour has trouble striking the right note: Just days ago, the governor told The Associated Press he remembers little about the racial violence pulsating through the state and the South during his youth. What does Barbour recall about the Freedom Summer of 1964, when he was 16, and the slayings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi shocked the nation?
“Not much,” Barbour said casually, the kind of answer his critics find at once unbelievable and predictable.
“The governor has a pattern, in my opinion, of doing things that are outrageous and insensitive,” said state Rep. Rufus Straughter, who is Black and a decade older than Barbour and grew up a county away from him.
“He’s been getting away with it because in Mississippi, he’s been speaking to groups that agree with him,” Straughter said. “What he fails to understand is that whatever he says gets out there into the wider world.”
