Jessie Helms Dead

"Soon after the Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) ran into Mosely-Braun in a Capitol elevator. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-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 to Mosely-Braun.
-- (Gannett News Service, 9/2/93; Time, 8/16/93).

The daddy will continue his series on poetry tomorrow. But today, he wanted to say a few words about Jessie Helms.

Yes, former North Carolina Senator Jessie Helms Helms died in his sleep this morning at 1:15 a.m., this 4^th of July. He was 86.

Now, my bible-reading, God-fearing, ebonics-talking Aunt Bess, who raised us after my mother died, told me to never “speak ugly” of the dead. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” she would always say. The press seems to have gotten the memo from Aunt Bess, calling Helms “an institution,” a “great public servant,” a senator “whose stature had few equals.” And so on. Well, before this sleeping dog is put into the ground, the daddy will list just a few things that this "great public servant" is famous for.

First, politics is called "the art of compromise" but Helms was famous for being uncompromising. As they say in black churches, Helms “made it plain” in a 1959 editorial: “Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?”

Helms offended a lot of people. In 1986, after Mexicans protested his visit there, he said "Those Latins are volatile people, so I wasn't surprised." In 1995, he called lesbians "wenches" on a radio program. In 1968, after Dr. King's assassination, black students held a vigil on Duke University's campus. Helms response to white student's support of this vigil? "They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro."

He was a fierce opponent of a woman’s right to choose, gay rights, Castro's Cuba. But he was definitely pro-business, especially the tobacco industry. Despite the fact that tobacco causes cancer, Helms was—you might say—“uncompromising” in his support of tobacco growers and farmers selling death all over the world, even to children.

But Helms was best known for his opposition to black rights. In fact, more than any other politician, it was helms who perfected the so-called southern strategy, which was nothing more than using race to scare poor whites into voting for white politicians, against black rights, even against their (poor whites) own interest.

Helms hatred of blacks knew no bounds. In fact, for him it was more than southern politics; It was an integral part of his deeply-held convictions about Christianity and what he called "the southern way of life." To his way of thinking, no true white Christian in the land of cotton and tobacco should "mix" in any way with the inferior "Negro."

Indeed, it was Helms, more than any other politician at the time, who created a coordinated right-wing structure to keep blacks "in their place, mobilizing the religious right to vote for white males, to fight against issues like a Dr. King holiday, divestment in South Africa, gay and women's rights.

Fighting against blacks was Helm's stock and trade. Christopher Scott, leader of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, put it this way: "His racial politics are deeply held convictions, not simply politics of convenience. He has a view of a fundamentalist Christian society in which everyone is not welcome. If you could pick up the South Africa of 20 years ago and transplant it to America, that's what he would do." As Aunt Bess would say, "Ugh, ugh, ugh."

Okay, folks, how much are you going to miss yo boy Jessie Helms, your "great public servant,” your all-around nice guy “whose stature had few equals?”

And you wouldn't speak ugly about the dead, wouldja?