Governors Of Mississippi

"But it took more than just a change in white attitudes to bring down Bilbo. A more energized black civil rights movement emerged from World War II as many African Americans, having fought for democracy abroad, demanded changes at home...Indeed, the remarkable courage of southern blacks who tried to vote during the 1946 election despite the threat of violence—along with pressure from the NAACP and black newspapers—was key to Bilbo’s removal. The changing attitudes of white elites, however, also helped to seal “The Man’s” fate."

"In the end, Bilbo defeated his four opponents, garnering fifty-one percent of the vote to avoid a runoff and win re-election to a third term. Although Bilbo’s opponents shared his views on segregation, the attacks by northern politicians and newspapers had allowed “The Man” to portray himself, in classic southern tradition, as defending Mississippi’s way of life against outside interference... Indeed, Bilbo achieved his broadest geographic support ever, winning seventy-six out of eighty-two counties, including all but one in the Delta, the traditional center of anti-Bilbo sentiment."

"Thousands who voted for him would have preferred to cast their ballots for a candidate of finer character and better qualification. . .. But the major issues in her senatorial campaign were shaped by outside extremists and propagandists of demagogue stripe whose stupid tactics made Bilbo’s election all but inevitable from the campaign start. The Senator shrewdly capitalized and exploited their stupidity."

"I heartily indorse [sic] the stand you have taken against the Social Equality of the negros."

"I thank God that there are men like you who are not afraid to tell the truth about the past."

"You are a menace to democracy and to the people defending it."

"I see Mississippi had disgraced itself again."

"The attacks on Bilbo only intensified in August when he revealed his old Klan membership on the radio program “Meet the Press.” He was unrepentant... The reaction to his admission was another example of changing elite perceptions. Dixie Demagogues, published in 1939, had exposed Bilbo’s Klan membership but drawn little notice; in 1946, however, the Federation of Italian Americans and the Shriners joined the chorus demanding Bilbo’s removal."

"His endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and his boast of membership appear to have genuinely shocked many Senators."

"He has become so vile that the men who would sit with him in Congress can bear him no longer."

"To those on the lowest rung of the ladder he does not offer a lift; he merely offers to create another rung, still lower, so that the progress of man will be a series of descending steps. This is the same sort of cheap thrill that was peddled in Germany by an ambitious house painter some ten years ago."

"The same groups which for the past four years have been fighting Senator Bilbo and what he stands for are behind this movement. But instead of having the courage to come into the Senate and say, “Throw him out because of his views on the poll tax bill,” they have camouflaged the issue."

"Virtually the entire national media supported the move against Bilbo. The Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all editorialized in favor of his removal. In a sign that Bilbo’s support was declining in the South, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution strongly approved of his removal, although it cited the war profiteering charges rather than his racist incitements as its rationale."

"There are diverse opinions as to the parliamentary means of preventing Theodore Bilbo from taking or holding a seat in the United States Senate, but there can be no reasonable or honest doubt of his unfitness to do so."

"The Bilbo compromise reached by the Senate late Saturday afternoon was really a victory for those who carried on the fight against the Senator-elect."

"The chances were very slim that he [Bilbo] would ever enter it [the Senate] again as a U.S. Senator."

"The Senate ‘compromise,’ so-called, on the issue of Senator Bilbo’s admission, may be defended on the grounds of expediency, but not it seems to us, upon constitutional or moral grounds."

"I am very sorry that you are physically unable to continue your ‘fight’ in Washington at this time. As I see it, our civilization is already in the evening twilight of its existence, and nothing can stop it."

"Like everybody in Mississippi, I have been watching the newspapers and listening to the radio and have kept up with you, and just want you to know that friends and foes alike are for you 1000%... In Kemper, Winston, and Sunflower counties I have heard, during the past week, a score or more men who have never voted for you in their lives say that if the election was being held now they would vote for you regardless of who opposed you."

"Bilbo never took his Senate seat again. He went to a New Orleans hospital to have surgery for throat cancer and died there six months later on August 21, 1947. In death, he was hailed as a hero by defenders of white supremacy and condemned as a symbol of racism by Jim Crow’s opponents."

"Senator Bilbo died a martyr to southern traditions, and his name will long be remembered when those of his most bitter critics will be forgotten before they are cold in their graves."

"We would be hard put to find a kinder word for Theodore G. Bilbo than the classic observation that he was not always as bad as he was sometimes."

"News of Senator-Elect Theodore G. Bilbo’s death in New Orleans brought on unparalleled rejoicing throughout civilized America...bartenders throughout the country [are] giving free drinks with which to toast the end of four decades of racial hatred."

"The Senate’s effort to deny Bilbo his seat was clear evidence of change. The war against Nazi Germany, the unifying effect of World War II, and America’s new role as the leader of the Western world altered elite attitudes outside of the South toward public racism. By 1947, such extreme rhetoric had become unacceptable from a major public figure."

"Theodore G. Bilbo was perhaps the most controversial public figure on the national scene.... The extremism of his pronouncements on race relations had polarized much of the country... To the vast majority of southern whites, Bilbo had become the leading spokesman in the fight to preserve that section's structure of racial segregation from those who wanted to bring about racial equality. To liberal whites and blacks, on the other hand, Bilbo was America's most vicious race-baiter."

"Bilbo’s ejection was the official repudiation of the rotten southern political system based on racial hatred, the system that had kept southern congressmen in Washington for decades. Bilbo was a symbol of the past."

"Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending “state’s rights,” but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes."