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Discussing Civil Rights Era, a Governor Is Criticized

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — In an interview that set off a new round of debate on Monday about racial attitudes and politics, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a potential Republican presidential candidate, recalled the 1960s civil rights struggle in his hometown, Yazoo City, saying, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”

In a profile published Monday in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Barbour also talked about the White Citizens’ Councils of the late 1960s, which opposed racial integration. Mr. Barbour, a teenager and young adult during the 1960s, said that in his town, they were a positive force, praising them as “an organization of town leaders” who refused to tolerate the 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.”

The comments came as Mr. Barbour, 62, is actively considering a bid for the White House, and the governor’s political opponents and some civil rights groups quickly seized on the remarks.

Media Matters, a liberal organization, sent e-mail messages to reporters Monday urging coverage of the comments. Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi N.A.A.C.P., 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 Mr. Barbour did not return calls and e-mail messages on Monday. Dan Turner, the governor’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 Mr. 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.”

Mr. Barbour had little to say in the interview with The Weekly Standard about the broader struggle for civil rights that played out during those years. In the article he recalled once seeing The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in his town, but said he did not remember what Dr. King had said.

“We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do,” Mr. Barbour said, recalling the visit, in 1962, when he was about 15. “We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

The interview explored Mr. Barbour’s political assets and challenges. He was chairman of the Republican National Committee and spent years as a Washington lobbyist before becoming governor. Within Republican circles, he is known as a savvy political operator and prodigious fund-raiser, who as chairman of the Republican Governors Association this year led the party to big gains in statehouse races across the country.

Race was part of the backdrop to President Obama’s 2008 campaign, and remains nearly as sensitive and nuanced a topic as ever in politics. The response to Mr. Barbour’s remarks indicated that he could face intensive scrutiny in a presidential campaign as a white Southerner who came of age during the height of the civil rights era.

In 1982, as Mr. Barbour ran unsuccessfully against Senator John C. Stennis, an article in The New York Times quoted Mr. Barbour as chiding an aide for a racist comment by saying that if the aide made similar remarks he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks. The Times article was cited by Politico on Monday in a blog post exploring the ramifications of The Weekly Standard interview for Mr. Barbour.

More recently, Mr. Barbour came to the defense of Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who had omitted any mention of slavery in his office’s annual declaration of April as Confederate History Month. Interviewed on CNN, Mr. Barbour dismissed the incident.

“To me, it’s a sort of feeling that it’s a nit, that it is not significant,” he said, adding that it was “trying to make a big deal out of something doesn’t amount to diddly.”