Here’s an anecdote:
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/a_jesse_helms_anecdote.php

“I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. The vigil was an instrument of our grieving and a voice for racial justice on Duke’s campus. Higher wages and union recognition for the non-academic employees—cooks, food-servers, maids, and janitors, most of whom were black—became the focal issue. We sat peacefully and largely silent day and night, studying for finals, listening to Dr. King’s speeches and singing “We Shall Overcome” every hour. To this day I count it as a major event in my spiritual formation.

Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to “marry a Negro” (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student’s parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class. We all took the words as vindication for our cause.”

The man was a racist and a sucking chest wound of a human being. The conservative movement befouls itself once again by embracing him.

Hogwash. It’s because the Dems promise free handouts, and the Republicans generally don’t.

Luckily, that’s not much of a challenge.

People like Richard Miniter are simply lying. Jesse Helms began to soften his image in his last Senate years and then retired, so he has been out of the news for going on 10 years. They are also basically trying to limit his racist views, tactics, and statements to opposition to affirmative action and busing. Even when you do mention the MANY specific things that Helms said and positions that he took, the liars challenge its authenticity or try to contextualize it away.

The best little trick that they have going on is to blame all segregation on the Democrats. To hear the current revisionist line, no one was a racist and no one was a segregationist but the Democrats, and oh yeah segregation and racism effectively ended with Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, so why are we talking about this anyway.

The worst thing is that people like this don’t even need to try to whitewash guys like Jesse Helms, because the GOP long moved past their willingness to defend segregation anyway just as the Democrats did. I cannot understand what these people honestly think that they are going to gain by claiming that an obvious segregationist and racist was just another one of the 70% of white Americans that oppose affirmative action and political correctness.

If people want to lie, just go ahead and let them. It is their own character and their own standing before a righteous God that will burn all liars in the lake of fire for an eternity (go read your Book of Revelation, it is there, so as for Helms’ claim in his biography that he was only opposed to busing and affirmative action … oh well I really hope the guy went to the altar and repented). As to whether God will burn for an eternity the people who – like Jesse Helms – left First Baptist Church when it admitted a black member as Helms did I am sorry but the Bible is not very clear on such matters.

And yes, Miniter, that did happen. Helms claimed that he didn’t vote against the guy because he was black, but because he was a troublemaker. How was he a troublemaker? By trying to integrate the church. So Helms switched his affiliation to a church that had black people in it already. Miniter, you fail to acknowledge the mindset of people like Helms. The SECOND black person to do something? They will love him and embrace him as an American hero. It is the FIRST black person who does something that the segregationists disliked, because the FIRST black person to do something was the one who tried to ruin the party, to challenge the existing order, who was trying to make people and things change. (It often isn’t about hating PEOPLE so much as it is about hating change.) Which, of course, is very understandable why Helms did not think that much of Harvey Gantt. Gantt was the first black man to attend Clemson University (needing a court order to do so), ran the first prominent black architecture/construction firm in North Carolina (and yes he did use affirmative action, because how else was a black man going to get a contract in a state filled with people like Helms running all the banks, businesses, and government agencies … opposing affirmative action in 1972 when this country was still very much segregated and racist is very different from opposing it today) and was the very popular and successful first black mayor of Charlotte.

That was the worst thing about the whole deal: conservatives claim to want a colorblind society where we are viewed by our character and individual merit rather than their color. Well, Gantt integrated Clemson University (Bob Jones University chose not to integrate around the same time by the way), was an award winning architect, was a very successful businessman, was a successful and popular mayor of North Carolina’s largest city supported and respected by blacks and whites Democrats and Republicans, and had very moderate views that were well within the mainstream of most North Carolinians. Helms’ ad turned Gantt into another Al Sharpton, Willie Horton, Sister Souljah, or Ricky Ray Rector and set race relations in North Carolina back years.

In a different country, a pro – business hard working very competent fellow like Harvey Gantt would have been a REPUBLICAN. People like Jesse Helms are the reason why 90% of all blacks cling to the Democratic Party for dear life. (You are free to continue to pretend that it is because blacks want welfare checks like “the black avenger” Kenneth Hamblin claims if you want.) With a mere 35% of the black vote, conservativism could A) be a bipartisan movement just like environmentalism is right now and B) constitute a permanent governing majority. But it is thanks to guys like Helms, Strom Thurmond, Ed Meese, etc. that conservatives can’t even nominate one of their own to represent the Republican Party in presidential elections. Well guys, I hope it was worth it …

I agree with your point that one can oppose affirmative action without being a racist. But come on, are you seriously arguing that Helms wasn’t a segregationist (and a racist)? I mean, his record speaks pretty loudly for itself. Just one anecdote plucked at random from Wikipedia (not an unimpeachable source, but I’ve read this elsewhere too):

While working on the 1950 campaign of Republican Willis Smith against Democrat Frank Porter Graham, Helms helped create an ad that read “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories?”

Then there was his race-baiting ads in his own campaign, and the whistling Dixie to Carol Mosely Braun, etc. And plenty of other anecdotes / quotes / so forth.

And how do you *think* he would have voted on the 1964 Civil Right Act if he had been in office then? You’re a pundit- do some reverse punditry.

Yes, he had black staffers. So, fine, he was willing to have black people working under him. And maybe his racism and segregationism was complicated in a way that people who like to have kneejerk moral reactions don’t like to think about. But it seems crazy to me to suggest he wasn’t a racist and segregationist.