Helms Cutting

Jesse Helms: Assessing a mixed legacy

David Frum
National Review Online
As a rule one shouldn't speak ill of the dead
a simple bigot will always cast a shadow
Helms opposed Civil Rights
for a white Southerner showed up at the polls.
opposing school integration
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday
For that was how he thought of him
school busing programs
Helm's staffers sent letters to the
first black woman election campaign
Once, as he was about to
board an elevator
to black threatening them with arrest
and even the commmemoration of the Old South
was a badge of The Racism
of a "courtly, principled, elected"
"venomous hick"
who died last week at 86
Helms carried the torch of white supremacy
meddling in the staunch belief that Helms
was completely innocent
Helm's once-controversial positions
the public has come around to
and the media have yet to adjust
but it would be wrong to dismiss
the South
no insult to Helm's memory to call him
a pro-conservative
caricature of the man
must be made for Jesse Helms
honor to this
entirely escapes its influence
on Helms' Legacy
It's a redneck act,
the Confederate anthem-"until she cries"
for three decades, Helms told a colleague
he was going to sing "Dixie"
"I should be able to make my own laws"
i'm not the issue of race