White Supremacists

"Its purpose is to plant the seeds of devilment and trouble-breeding in the days to come in the mind and heart of every American Negro ... It is the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing that I have ever seen in print. I would hate to have a son or daughter of mine permitted to read it; it is so filthy and so dirty. But it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any better from a person of his type."

"The principle of segregation of the White and Negro races in the South is so well known that it requires no definition. Briefly and plainly stated, the object of this policy is to prevent the two races from meeting on terms of social equality. By established practice, each race maintains its own institutions and promotes its own social life."

"I am ready to wage the most strenuous fight of my life to defeat the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the anti-poll tax bill, the anti-lynching bill, and the $4 billion loan to England...If you draft Negro boys into the army, give them three good meals a day, a good uniform and let them shoot craps and drink liquor around the barracks for a year, they won’t be worth a tinker’s damn thereafter."

"What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise - openly and frankly stated - upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it."

"I have just heard this Sunday night’s broadcast by you, the most limicolous liar and notorious scandalizing kike radio commentator of today."

"If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South's Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be "No." By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed."

"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."

"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."

"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 ‘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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

"I see Mississippi had disgraced itself again."

"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."

"When Bilbo went home to campaign in the summer of 1946, he faced a dramatically different situation from that of 1940. Northern and border state Democrats no longer wished to campaign with him. An extraordinarily broad coalition of elites— including both the Nation and the Saturday Evening Post, the Communist Party and the Jewish War Veterans, Robert Wagner and Robert Taft— desired and/or seriously considered his expulsion from the Senate."

"I would gladly give Bilbo and Rankin to the other side. Speaking personally, I’d be glad to see them both out of public life altogether."

"It’s been six years since the voters have seen him, six years since they elected him as their senior senator to Congress. In that time, he has made himself known throughout the nation. Indeed, his infamy has spread across the high seas. In Germany, today, citizens of the Reich sometimes ask the American military, ‘What kind of man is this Senator Bilbo?’"

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

"We have considered filing a petition to oust him [Bilbo] by a two-thirds vote, but he would revel in the publicity of a trial. Of course, as a general thing, senators cannot begin denouncing other senators because they disagree with them, but certainly Bilbo is not on the same basis as any other senator that I know of."

"Your conduct is a chilling deterrent to the world-wide belief that America is the symbol of democracy and human rights."

"For a long time now we have engaged in a long and bloody war to wipe out a regime which fostered racial antagonism . . . . Statements insulting to one or more of the many diverse groups which make up our great nation are a disservice to the principles on which this nation was founded and to those of our boys of all races and creeds who during the past few years have fought and in all too many instances died for the preservation of these principles."

"Proceedings [on removal] as soon as possible so that the people of our nation may retain the fruits of the victory which we have gained in the successful waging of war against Hitlerism, fascism, and Japanese militarism."

"Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, white elites outside the South—defined here as leading daily newspapers, weekly magazines, organizations, and political leaders—largely ignored Bilbo’s racist incitements."

"I am one of those unfortunates whose kids did not come back [from the war], and there were thousands of them, Catholic, Protestant and Jews, Negro and white, who died to keep this sweet land free. I hate and despise those bigots, like the nefarious Senator Bilbo of Mississippi."

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

"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."

"The rest of my life belongs to my culture, my language, my God and my nation."

"I have always been made out as a racist, someone who hates black people. I don't hate them. I grew up with them. I just know there are many differences between whites and the blacks and I will always believe it."

"Our nation is unique. We grew out of a desire to worship God in a certain way; we grew from a number of other nations who were being prosecuted because of their faith. We have a wonderful culture, a wonderful, vibrant language. I want my people to be proud of who they are again."

"[Self-determination] is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, the ability to rule yourself. They don't want to give us that. We are not free. We have everything a nation needs, except a land to call our own."

"Miscegenation, that is race-mixing, is and has always been, the greatest threat to the survival of the Aryan race."

"An unarmed or non-militant People will be enslaved."

"A People without a culture exclusively their own will perish."

"In the final analysis, a race or specie is not judged superior or inferior by its accomplishments, but by its will and ability to survive."