Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

What does the Senate minority whip’s comeback mean for the racial minorities?

Media Matters for America takes note of Trent Lott’s “numerous” racially insensitive statements, and not just the most infamous one that the mainstream media recently revisited.

Bloggers had rightly taken the credit for highlighting Lott’s statements back at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party on December 5, 2002, when Lott quipped of Thurmond's 1948 campaign: “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Quoting from Scripps Howard News Service, Media Matters outlines the racist past of Lott:

In 1982, Lott voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act, which authorizes the Justice Department to review election law changes in Mississippi and other Deep South states and to monitor elections.

In 1983, he was one of 90 House members who voted against creating a national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Six years later, Lott was one of seven senators who voted to abolish the King holiday commission, and in 1994, he was one of 28 who favored scrapping its federal funding.

Lott was one of 34 senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which reversed five Supreme Court rulings that had limited the ability of minorities to win job discrimination lawsuits and damages. After President George H. W. Bush vetoed the bill, Lott voted for a different version in 1991.

And in 2001, Lott was the only senator who opposed President George W. Bush's nomination of Roger Gregory, an African-American from Virginia, to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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In 1999, when Lott was embroiled in another racial controversy, he had only one African-American worker, a mail clerk, out of a staff of 65.

In 1981, Lott filed a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit seeking to overturn an IRS decision to deny a tax exemption to Bob Jones University because of the school's ban on interracial dating.

In 1995, Lott criticized Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) for intervening with 39 other lawmakers to get the FBI to release documents in the 1966 death of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer to Forrest County prosecutors.

In 1999, it was reported that Lott had spoken to and met with the segregationist Council of Concerned Citizens on a few occasions. Lott then condemned the group.

Last year, Lott and the other white members of the Mississippi congressional delegation refused an entreaty from former Netscape president James Barksdale to declare that they would vote in favor of a statewide referendum to remove the Confederate emblem from the state flag. The proposal lost.