The Way It Really Was

In this sesquicentennial year of Confederate treason, as we contemplate the presidential candidacy of Professional Racist Haley Barbour, Blue Texan digs up some golden oldies:

Why is everyone making such a fuss about Haley Barbour’s comment that life in his home state “wasn’t that bad” during the Jim Crow era? During Barbour’s teen years, Mississippi was a perfectly fine place to grow up.

1960:
In the Deep South considerable pressure was put on blacks by Klansmen not to vote. An example of this was the state of Mississippi. By 1960, 42% of the population were black but only 2% were registered to vote.

1961:
Herbert Lee, a Negro who had been active in voter registration, was shot and killed by white state representative E. H. Hurst in downtown Liberty. No prosecution was undertaken, the authorities explaining that the representative had shot in self-defense.

1962:
Two people have been killed and at least 75 injured in rioting at the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford.

Hundreds of extra troops have been brought in to join Federal forces already stationed in the nearby town of Oxford as the violence spread to its streets.
The protesters are angry at the admission of James Meredith, a black American, to the university.

1963:
On June 12, 1963, a day after President John F. Kennedy’s speech on national television in support of civil rights, [Medgar] Evers pulled into his driveway just after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go,” Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 .303 rifle that ricocheted into his Jackson, Mississippi home. He staggered 9 meters (30 feet) before collapsing. He died at a local hospital 50 minutes later. [...]

On June 23, 1964, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers’ murder.

1964:
The bodies of three civil rights workers missing for six weeks have been found buried in a partially constructed dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation found the three young men – two white and one black man – about six miles from the town in a wooded area near where they were last seen on the night of 21 June.

They were Michael Schwerner, aged 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both from New York and James Chaney, 22, from Meridian, Mississippi. All were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination.

1965:
Allie W. Shelby is shot to death in the Hinds County Jailhouse in Jackson, Mississippi after having been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six months on charges of making indecent gestures towards a white woman.

1966:
Ben Chester White, who had worked most of his life as a caretaker on a plantation, had no involvement in civil rights work. He was murdered by Klansmen [in Natchez, Mississippi] who thought they could divert attention from a civil rights march by killing a black person.

All y’all librul Yankees need to quit watchin’ Mississippi Burnin’.

And all y'all out there shaking your heads, saying even the rethuglicans would never nominate Barbour and if they did he'd never win ...

yeah, that's exactly what we all said about W. back in 1999.