From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The Case Against Jesse Helms
Thursday's Best of the Web takes David Broder to task for not including a factual treatise of Jesse Helms's racist history before denouncing Mr. Helms as a white racist. There is certainly a sufficient factual basis to denounce Mr. Helms as a racist.
Jesse Helms began his career as a radio newsman, and broke into politics by assisting segregationist Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign. Mr. Helms is credited with inventing the description of UNC, the University of North Carolina, as the "University of Negroes and Communists." He may have written--and, at a minimum, was certainly aware of as part of the campaign--newspaper ads that asked: "Do you want Negroes working beside you and your wife and daughter eating beside you sleeping in the same hotels teaching and disciplining your children in school occupying the same hospital rooms using your toilet facilities?" Another of Smith's adds featured a doctored photo of the incumbent's wife dancing with a black man. Mr. Helms later denied any involvement, but a newspaper advertising manager told Helms biographer Ernest Furgurson that Mr. Helms personally cut up the photos. Mr. Helms was rewarded for his campaign work with a job as an administrative assistant to Smith in Washington.
In the late 1950s, Mr. Helms won a seat on the Raleigh City Council, where he took up the charge of defending segregation, criticizing black student sit-ins attempting to desegregate the luncheon counters in downtown Raleigh. As soon as Mr. Helms was sworn in, he immediately spoke up for Arkansas's Gov. Orval Faubus's confrontation with federal troops after the court desegregation. Mr. Helms attacked integration by declaring that many more "race riots" and other such troubles occur in the North.
In 1960, he took a job as a TV commentator, initially hired to counter David Brinkley's repeated calls for an end to institutionalized racism. He spent the next decade railing against Martin Luther King, "Negro hoodlums" and anyone on welfare. Mr. Helms derided the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress."
Long after segregationists like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond began making amends and attempting to court black voters and avoid racially divisive politics, Mr. Helms continued to only raise racial issues when it would possible stoke white resentment. In addition to his election tactics to which Mr. Broder's piece referred, Sen. Helms consistently opposed every piece of civil-rights legislation. He opposed the Martin Luther King holiday, arguing that Dr. King and his associates had "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion" and feeling that the issue was of such grave importance that it warranted a filibuster. In 1983, asked whether his denunciations of Dr. King as a "Marxist-Leninist" might cause difficulties in his re-election bid the following year, Mr. Helms replied, "I'm not going to get any black votes, period." Mr. Helms continued his crusade to get Dr. King's, J. Edgar Hoover-created FBI files opened to the public.
With the end of segregation, Mr. Helms could only attempt to preserve segregation abroad. During the 1970s he defended the racist regime in Rhodesia, offering amendments to eliminate economic sanctions. In 1979, two Helms aides showed up in London to monitor negotiations over the independence of Zimbabwe, eliciting a protest from the British government that the senator's staffers were encouraging the former Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, to hold out longer.
In the 1980s Mr. Helms defended the apartheid regime of South Africa as a friend, describing economic sanctions as a "kick in the teeth" and denouncing the Mandela-led opposition as a communist front. He claimed sanctions would produce violent revolution and tyranny.
Mr. Helms has also made his views on race clear through a series of merely symbolic actions. Soon after a Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, Mr. Helms ran into then-Sen. Carol Mosely-Braun of Illinois, who is black, in a capitol elevator. Mr. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." He then proceeded to sing the song about the good life during slavery.
One of the most telling commentaries on whether Mr. Helms ever abandoned his racist views was provided by a conservative commentator. Fred Barnes wrote in The Weekly Standard last week that "Helms hasn't grown at all since his days as a conservative commentator on WRAL-TV in Raleigh in the 1960s and early 1970s. So far as I know, he's changed his mind on only one issue in three decades, dropping his criticism of Israel and becoming a strong supporter."
While researching Mr. Helms, I found it tough to find any defense on the issue of race, aside from dismissive claims like yours that there is no evidence that Mr. Helms is a racist. The senator has asserted that blacks who know him know he is not a racist. He also did hire James Meredith, who was the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi, as a domestic-policy adviser. However, Mr. Helms hired Meredith after Meredith had changed his views on desegregation, once calling integration the "biggest con job ever pulled on anybody."
At best, Mr. Helms is wholly insensitive to any concerns of racial injustice who would certainly support and defend segregation today, if such an option were at all possible. Mr. Broder's assessment that Mr. Helms has continued to pick at the scab of racism is entirely correct. The only racial injustice Mr. Helms has ever acknowledged, in spite of growing up in the segregated South, was a concern that blacks were taking the jobs of more qualified whites under affirmative action.
At least Robert Byrd and Fritz Hollings (who probably still share the same attitudes, as evidenced by their occasional racist gaffes) do not run racially divisive campaigns and repeatedly let such views shape their public actions. It's too bad that conservatives such as you continue to defend Mr. Helms on issues of race instead of at least conceding that his time may have been better spent worrying about sources of communism other than Martin Luther King (especially after Mr. King had been dead for more than a decade).
It's clear that Mr. Helms supported segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. I think it is fair to say that supporting segregation is sufficient to meet your definition of racism, as such separation would be necessary only if one believed that certain race was inherently superior to (or better off separate from) the other. While every Helms action since 1970 could be possibly ascribed to some other motive, I challenge you to find any evidence that Mr. Helms has ever denounced segregation or has ever expressed support for equal opportunity for blacks (outside of the context of his opposition to affirmative action). He was a commentator for more than a decade, and has held national office for nearly 30 years. Good luck.
