In 2002, Trent Lott of Mississippi tried, awkwardly, to make amends.
What did the then-Senate majority leader do to merit penance? Waxing poetic and perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic, Lott gave a speech honoring the 100th birthday of fellow Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the onetime Dixiecrat who once broke off from the Democratic Party with a group of the like-minded to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party, built on segregation and steeped in white supremacy.
“I want to say this about my state,” said Lott, harking back to Thurmond’s 1948 folly. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
First, Lott backtracked by saying he did not mean what he clearly said, calling the celebration “lighthearted.” Next, the apology, “to anyone who was offended.” “A poor choice of words conveyed to some that I embraced the discarded policies of the past,” he said in a statement. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
He resigned as majority leader after receiving criticism mostly from Democrats but also from some Republicans, worried they might lose support of Black conservative voters for whom whistling Dixie was a step too far.
I’m not sure if Lott’s motive was genuine moral growth or reading the room. But at the very least, it acknowledged that longing for the bad old days was not a good thing.
For reasons exemplary or political or both, anything that name-checked the divisive and ugly politics of Dixiecrat days of glory was seen as a drag for a politician and his or her party. This was true even when the words honored Thurmond, a longtime senator, one whose hypocrisy moved front and center when his Black daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, in 2003 claimed her truth and her birthright.
Was 2002 really that long ago? In political years, apparently, yes.
Will the Democratic South rise again?
It was almost but not quite like being in the middle of the action on Inauguration Day. If you opened the door of the restaurant on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol, you could practically hear echoes of President Obama’s speech and Beyonce’s rendition of the National Anthem, real or lip-synched. But it was all a little muddled. You could say the same about the state of the Democratic Party in the South.
I watched the inauguration ceremonies on big screens in the eatery, surrounded by Southern Democrats with a plan. I listened to strategies designed to re-establish the party’s dominance in the region it once owned. Because of issues of race, social issues and habit, for starters, it won’t be easy.