No Senator No

I am sure Jesse Helms was proud on July 4, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He understood his role in terms of saving the Republic, which included saving the Republican Party in the South. But his understanding of the Republic, while it may have had something in common with Adams’ attacks on freedom in the Alien and Sedition Acts, bears little resemblance with Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.” That’s a pity, because a little historical awareness could have brought about a different world.

I have long contended that Sen. Helms was at the Ross will trial in his mother’s womb. The evidence is, of course, circumstantial – the trial was in April, Helms was born in October. Still, his father was one of three police officers in town, and one of the others was a juror at the sensational trial. At any rate, he was certainly born into a world where that verdict had been given, but the result was quickly suppressed. I knew Sen. Helms because I was a reporter in his hometown. I was not a political reporter covering his campaigns, but I met him frequently at events in Monroe. I asked him in detail if he had ever heard of the Ross will trial, and he assured me that he had not. I believed him. Growing up in Monroe decades later, I didn’t hear of it either.

Until I met the Ross family, I thought that a Southerner’s a stand for equal rights required repudiating the past. There is much to repudiate, not least the behavior of Sen. Helms and his sort. His protests that he was not “racist” depend on defining racism in violent lynching terms, and his brand, in the tradition of Walter Bickett and John J. Parker, is far more insidious for its paternalistic “separate but equal” inequality. But there is a past, with people like Maggie and Sallie and Bob and Mittie, that can be recovered and treasured as we tell our story moving forward. What a different world if that had been Jesse Helms’ story.