So yes, it turns out that one of the Republican presidential contenders has some fairly interesting ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, the pro-segregation group Dylann Roof cited as inspiration for murdering nine black Americans in their church. No, not all the candidates
hastily returning campaign donations from the group's leader, Earl Holt III. We're talking about Mike Huckabee, who gave an "
extremely well-recieved" videotaped address as keynote for their 1993 convention. He had planned to be there in person
but his day job intervened.
Huckabee's plan was complicated, however, when Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker journeyed out of state and appointed a state senator to preside over the governorship. The Arkansas state legislature passed a resolution forbidding the lieutenant governor from leaving Arkansas until Tucker returned, thus preventing Huckabee from attending the CofCC's conference.
There's no word on
what happened to that tape, by the way—it seems to have gone the way of Huckabee's videotaped church sermons, tapes
he locked away after he began to have presidential ambitions. (Huckabee was replaced onstage at the segregationist event by right-wing political cartoonist Michael Ramirez, whose work you continue to see in major newspapers to this day for reasons that escape most of the rest of us.)
By the next year Huckabee's relationship with the group had soured, mostly because the Arkansas press had taken a keen notice.
[Huckabee] became apprehensive when the Arkansas media reported that he would be joined on the CofCC's podium by Kirk Lyons, a white nationalist legal activist who has hailed Hitler as "probably the most misunderstood man in German history." [...]
But Baum refused to remove his friend Lyons from the bill. Huckabee, who was more concerned about receiving bad publicity than by the racist underpinnings of the CofCC, withdrew his promise to speak. The CofCC replaced him this time with former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson, a White Citizens Council founder who organized the mob that rioted against the integration of Little Rock High School [...]
So it seems the gathered crowd still got their money's worth. And Huckabee, for his part, continued to woo the same crowds. Campaigning in South Carolina in 2008 he declared the flying of the Confederate flag a matter for the states to decide; a pro-Huckabee group
ran radio ads blasting John McCain for his criticism of the flag while praising Huckabee as the candidate who "understands the value of heritage."
And right now, after this latest murder of black Americans by an obsessive fan of the same far-right "Conservative Citizen" group he himself wooed? He's been even more reticent to weigh in than most of the other candidates, but when he appeared on Meet The Press the Sunday after last week's mass murder, he sniffled he was being "baited" when asked to give an opinion on flying the Confederate flag, once again saying "that's an issue for the people of South Carolina."