Barbour Shifts on Anti-Integration Groups

Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a potential Republican presidential candidate, said Tuesday that he didn't condone the Citizens' Councils known for opposing racial integration in the Deep South decades ago, softening

remarks he made in a recent magazine interview.

Mr. Barbour released a written statement augmenting remarks that he had made in The Weekly Standard published

Monday. When asked why his hometown had avoided the violence that accompanied public-school integration in other

locales, Mr. Barbour had spoken well of the Citizens' Council in Yazoo City.

"You heard of the Citizens' Councils?" Mr. Barbour said in the magazine interview. "Up north they think it was like the

KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. 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."
Mr. Barbour, 63 years old, was a teenager and young adult during the civil-rights protests of the 1960s. He and his

supporters acknowledge that Mississippi's civil rights history is sure to be an issue if he runs for president.In his

statement Tuesday, Mr. Barbour said he had meant to emphasize Yazoo City's rejection of the Ku Klux Klan. "Nobody

should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either," he said. "Their vehicle, called the
'Citizens' Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation."
Mr. Barbour's remarks came on the heels of a successful year in politics.As chairman of the Republican Governors
Association, a position he left recently, Mr. Barbour helped his party raise a record $85 million and capture Democratic governorships in important presidential-battleground states.

Mr. Barbour has said he would make a decision in the spring about whether to enter the 2012 presidential race.
McArthur Straughter, the mayor of Yazoo City, population 11,000, recalled racial tensions in the city during the period
Mr. Barbour was discussing.
Mr. Straughter, a 68-year-old African-American, said he remembers being out with his brothers when they were falsely
accused of waving a gun out a car window after being turned away from a soda shop. The brothers were arrested but later let go.
"Contrary to what people light think about certain parts of the South, we have come a long ways," he said.

In a recent book, Joseph Crespino, a history professor at Atlanta's Emory University, discussed a 1955 incident in
Yazoo City in which the Citizens' Council published the names of 53 black parents who had petitioned the school board to adopt a policy of integration. Of those, 51 lost their jobs and businesses and many were run out of town, Mr. Crespino's book said.