A surprising number Mississippi politicians have ties to the white supremacist organization that radicalized Dylann Roof, the gunman who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night. A list of state leaders with ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) includes U.S. Senator Roger Wicker and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
The Council describes itself as a group organizing for “the interests of European-Americans” and describes black people as a retrograde species.
“Mississippi is toting a load of fat blacks on welfare,” the Council’s website once read. “Though disgust is a natural reaction when some blubbery welfare queens buys her pork chops and cream pies with food stamps, remember that the government is subsidizing this gluttony.”
On another occasion, the CCC railed against gay people in an editorial.
“If the South seizes upon queer marriage and beheads that serpent, then a new era for States Rights will commence,” the Council wrote. “By the Grace of God, queer marriage may be the petard upon which Brown v. Topeka (the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools), and all other pernicious civil rights regulations, will be blasted down the memory hole.”
While both of those quotes were reported on in 2004, the CCC continues to use similar rhetoric today.
The blog for the Mississippi Council of Conservative Citizens includes headlines from this decade such as, “Niggers Stir Up Racism in Pearl High School,” “Blacks fluck [sic] or have to cheat to pass test,” and “Military Homos” (in response to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell).
Constant headlines from CCC websites led gunman Dylann Roof to commit the Charleston church massacre, he revealed in a manifesto:
“[The Trayvon Martin case] prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”
So who exactly are the Mississippi politicians who have ties to the white supremacist organization? The list of politicians in Mississippi who have participated in CCC events, compiled by the
Southern Poverty Law Center in 2004, includes 23 Mississippi current and former Mississippi politicians. Of the 23 listed, 15 still hold elected office in Mississippi today.
