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Lott's attitude and record on civil rights became a burning issue last week because of what he said at a 100th-birthday celebration for retiring Senator Strom Thurmond. Former majority leader Bob Dole had set the stage nicely with a tribute to the wizened, wheelchair-bound Thurmond, a South Carolinian born when "America had yet to honor the promise of equal opportunity for all our citizens." A fiery segregationist for most of his career, Thurmond eventually embraced the extension of the Voting Rights Act and the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and thus came to symbolize, Dole said...
...just in Mississippi but in chapters across the U.S. In Congress he had voted against nearly every contentious civil rights measure, including some that most in his party had supported. He had filed a friend-of-the-court brief to argue for maintaining the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, despite its discriminatory policies and its ban on interracial dating. (In his defense, his office offered a list of largely symbolic accomplishments on behalf of minorities: a congressional medal for Rosa Parks, who began the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott; a task force to recognize the slaves who helped build...
...supported a constitutional amendment in 1979 to prohibit school busing, but it failed. In 1981 Lott persuaded President Reagan to support tax exemptions for racially segregated private schools, a shift in federal policy. Lott also filed his brief with the Supreme Court, defending the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, arguing that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy." The court sided against Lott and the school. In 1982 Lott voted against extension of the Voting Rights Act, but it passed into law. In 1983, he voted against the designation of a national holiday to honor Martin Luther...
...Lott's astonishing record of racial obtuseness. This is a man who has twice uttered public statements regretting the end of Jim Crow. He voted against a federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. "Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy," he wrote in a 1981 amicus brief defending Bob Jones University's ban on interracial dating. He has hobnobbed with thinly veiled white-supremacist groups. It took several attempts last week before he could manage to say that segregation is immoral. Everything Lott has done and said in his career suggests he doesn't view the civil rights movement...
...incidents that seem to confirm the beliefs suggested in Lott's remarks. Each new item is a nail in his coffin. But these incidents were publicly known at the time they occurred and have been no secret since. Just as Lott did, the entire Reagan Administration openly supported Bob Jones University in its claim for charitable tax status despite its rule forbidding interracial dating. There is a rarely acknowledged random element in what becomes a big news story and what does not. But moral outrage ought to aspire, at least, to some kind of consistency. The tendency in Washington...