Racial Politics
With his "K.O. the Kennedys" slogan, Phillips attempted to present himself as a more determined segregationist than his rival, Paul Johnson. In a statewide television broadcast, Phillips said that he had concluded that only Republicans could offer a realistic challenge to the national Democrats. Phillips' segregationist views were confirmed by the historian James W. Silver of the University of Mississippi, who quoted the Republican candidate as having told students in 1962 that the Kennedy administration was being "run by incompetents and communist sympathizers." Silver added that Phillips had called United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy "a little juvenile" who had "declared war on Mississippi, and he will demand unconditional surrender."
In Meadville, Phillips remarked, "I was born a segregationist, I am for segregation now, and I will be for segregation when I die." Phillips said that opponents who branded him a "closet integrationist" were deceptive: "noting could be further from the truth." Phillips said "the one-party system ... gave us John and Bobby Kennedy and the integration of our state's university." Phillips accused outgoing Governor Barnett and Democratic opponent Paul Johnson of "rooster fighting with U.S. martshals" in the 1962 desegregation crisis, which ended in the enrollment of James Meredith as the first African American student and subsequent Ole Miss graduate. Phillips said that Barnett and Johnson had merely tricked voters by staging their opposition to desegregation and that Johnson was the "Kennedy candidate" in the race.
Until the 1960s, Mississippians had known no alternative to segregation, and many linked the separation of the races to the Bible. Governor Barnett, like Phillips a Baptist Sunday school teacher, declared "The Good Lord was the original segregationist. He put the black man in Africa. ... He made us white because he wanted us white, and He intended that we should stay that way." Barnett said that Mississippi had the largest percent of African Americans because "they love our way of life here, and that way is segregation."
Read more about this topic: Rubel Phillips
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