Barbour doesn’t recall civil rights era being ‘that bad’

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour won't say if he's running for president in 2012, but he's already working to shape the narrative around a potential bid, especially when it comes to issues like race and his background as a former lobbyist.

In an interview with the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson, the GOPgovernor offers up some provocative comments about growing up in the racially charged deep South in the 1960s. By Barbour's account, things weren't "that bad" in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi, which escaped some of the violence other nearby towns suffered during the civilrights movement.

"I just don't remember it as being that bad," Barbour, who was in high school at the time, tells Ferguson. "I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke out at the old fairgrounds and it was full of people, black and white."

Barbour, who was 15 at the time, says he attended the rally because he wanted to hear what King had to say but ended up spending most of the time talking to his friends. "The truth is, we couldn't hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do," Barbour tells Ferguson. "We paid more attention to the girls than to King."

Asked why Yazoo City was more peaceful than other parts of the South, Barbour offers credit to the CitizensCouncil, a controversial group that has been likened by its critics to the Ku Klux Klan. But Barbour says this critique is unfair and that the group actually cracked down on the KKK.

"In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town," Barbour says.  "If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

But Think Progress's Matthew Yglesias suggests Barbour is presenting a revisionist history on race, noting that historians have described the Citizens Council as a racist organization that also worked to intimidate people who signed on to NAACP petitions at the time. A Barbour spokesman defended Barbour's comments, telling  TPMDC's Eric Kleefeld that Barbour was addressing "the business community in Yazoo City" and was not talking about the group's history as a movement.

Meanwhile, Barbour also addresses another issue sure to come up if he decides to make a 2012 run: his background as a highly paid Washington lobbyist. He argues that rather than serving as a detriment to public service, his time as a lobbyist should actually be viewed as a plus for anybody that has designs on the presidency.

'The first thing a president's going to have to do when he takes his hand off the Bible is start lobbying," the governor says. "He's going to need to lobby Congress. He's going to need to lobby the bureaucracy. He's going to need to lobby the governors. He's going to need to lobby our allies and our international competitors. And I'm a pretty good lobbyist."