I don't think it's about racist feelings in his heart so much as donating a shitload of money to a guy who might as well have been in the KKK:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=18624
And, of course, the real star of tonight's show -- a truly great North Carolinian with an unparalleled record of success, loved by his fans, feared by his opponents. You all know him -- professional wrestler Ric "Nature Boy" Flair, down here. Ric, I was thinking you ought to team up with my friend, the Chairman of the national Fitness Council, Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, Conan the Republican. [Laughter] And maybe the two of you could bench-press the Federal budget. I'm glad you're here.
I would love to think it was cool that Ric got that kind of praise in his prime from the president of the USA but he was there because he donated lots of money to Jesse Helms, whom he supported at other times in his career as they were such good friends.
But the real Jesse Helms oozed out nearly every time he opened his mouth to slander those who didn’t agree with him. He claimed “crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced” in a 1981 New York Times interview, and in 1963 asked, “Are civil rights only for Negroes? White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights.”
Beyond his hateful words, Helms’ bigotry was shown by his political aims. He led the opposition to the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and consistently opposed civil rights legislation. For nearly two decades, he fought tooth and nail against expanded federal funding for AIDS research, and exploited gays and lesbians as convenient scapegoats in his constant fear-mongering crusade.
Some of those things he did in office thanks to winning campaigns that Ric donated to.
In North Carolina historian Tim Tyson’s biography of civil rights leader Robert Williams, head of the Monroe NAACP, Williams described watching when he was eleven years old as Mr. Jesse beat a black woman on the street, then “dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head.” He was haunted for years by the woman’s “tortured screams as the flesh was ground away from the friction of the concrete.”
Interviewed in 2005 for the documentary Senator No and asked about Monroe in the 1920s and 30s, Helms said, “In so many ways I think the relationship between the races was far better than it is now. I could give you a thousand examples of why I’m convinced of that. I don’t know of anybody who ever persecuted anybody of another race.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erik-ose/jesse-helms-shameful-lega_b_111791.html
This isn't quietly voting for a racist because of feelings in your heart. It's not even like he's a politician who had to play the game by working with Helms. He was a private citizen who liked this flaming piece of human garbage and what he stood for so much that he put his money and public image behind him on more than a few campaigns. That's disgusting, and I love Ric so it hurts me to type this post. But the best way to respect the dead is to be honest about their legacy and life choices.
Re: That 1990 campaign btw
David Duke did not invent the technique of code words. He did not make Willie Horton an issue in 1988, or invent the issue of "quotas" to obstruct a civil rights bill for two years. Jesse Helms in his 1990 campaign played on fear of affirmative action in about the same way as Mr. Duke, and George Bush endorsed Senator Helms.
President Bush is evidently beginning to regret using the racial issue. Immediately after the Louisiana primary his people said the state now had two bad choices for governor. But last week Mr. Bush forthrightly called David Duke "a charlatan" and said he would vote, if he could, for the opposing candidate, Edwin Edwards.
People speak of him like he's cut from the same cloth as David Duke.
I watched David Duke on NBC's "Meet the Press," and I was frightened. Here was a man who two years ago was selling Nazi pamphlets from his office in the Louisiana Legislature. Now he was a candidate for governor -- with a good chance to win -- and he was talking blandly about the trouble with welfare and affirmative action.
If the politics of hatred is going to take power in America at the end of the 20th century, that is the form in which it will come: not rabble-rousing but cold words and professions of Christian redemption.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/11/opinion/abroad-at-home-it-can-happen-here.html
I hate to sound like a broken record but ffs this was written in 1991 and if someone were to write a follow up in 2017 they would have to point out how things have gotten WORSE
Not putting racism and racism supporters on full blast is how that happens. Sorry, Ric. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for how he feels now, but he isn't getting off the hook for actively pushing the white supremacist agenda (and since his money was involved, it was certainly active).