RALEIGH, N.C. (NNPA) - Up until and including his final burial this week, those on the conservative right, including President Bush, lauded the late former Sen. Jesse Helms as a “great American” and “patriot.”

“Laura and I are deeply saddened by the passing of our good friend and a great American: Senator Jesse Helms,” Bush said in a White House statement shortly after the former NC senator died last week. “Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called 'the Miracle of America.' So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July.”

Noting the archconservative’s strong Christian beliefs, the president concluded, “We pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life.”

But African Americans, particularly here in North Carolina, remember a very different man who was wholly devoted, both long before he was elected to five terms in the U.S. Senate in 1972, and after Helms stepped down in January 2003, to denying other Americans of color, and particularly those of African descent, the very constitutional and civil rights he and most other White Americans historically enjoyed.

''In the spring of 1984 I had lunch with Senator Helms to ask that he support the Martin Luther King Holiday bill for North Carolina since he had fought so hard to try undo the federal MLK Legislation,” Bruce Lightner, a Black Raleigh businessman and civic leader, told The Carolinian. “I thought it would be symbolically important for him to recognize that the tide of the nation was running contrary to his views. We talked for two hours, he was quite a gentleman and most pleasant, and said that he would 'think about it'.

“But what I remember most, almost like it was yesterday, was his spewing venom each night on WRAL-TV denouncing integration and racial progress as a communist plot, followed by a conspicuously prolonged rendition of ''Dixie'',” Lightner continued. “Today WRAL is a beacon of light of insightful journalism. I suppose reason and time just passed the senator by. May he rest in peace.''

Rev. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP, said in a statement Friday, “We in the civil rights community had deep and stark differences with Senator Jesse Helms' public policy positions...He opposed fundamental constitutional rights and the implementation of civil rights protections. But we are all human. Senator Helms was a member of the human race, the human family, and as moral people, we are required to love even those who oppose us.”

Barber concluded, “We pray for his family and those he leaves behind in bereavement.”

Kindnesses that Helms was never publicly known to bestow on his adversaries.

Helms died peacefully in the early morning hours of July 4 at the age of 86.

He had reportedly been suffering from dementia in his latter years after retiring from the US Senate.

Though he is lauded as being the right-wing conservative movement’s greatest champion during the '70s, '80s and '90s, Helms is also known for being an unapologetic enemy to those who fought for equal rights under the very American flag he held dear.
The first line of the NY Daily News’ obituary Saturday read, “‘Senator No’is no more.”

The News noted that the American Almanac of Politics once said of Helms, ''No American politician is more controversial, beloved in some quarters and hated in others, than Jesse Helms.''

To Helms, if only civil rights “agitators” like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left Southern segregation alone in the 1960’s, Whites would have eventually decided on their own when to break down racial barriers, if ever.

''There is a difference between opportunity and force,” he once said as an editorialist on WRAL-TV in Raleigh during the 60’s. “There is a difference between cooperation and compulsion. Much of America is gaining the impression that 'civil rights' and legal wrongs have become synonymous. And since there can be no action without a reaction, America is beginning to react.”

And as to why “Negroes” of the time were not good enough to be integrated with Whites, Helms said, ''No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.''

Almost 40 years later, a mellower, older former Sen. Jesse Helms, then 83, softened his fiery racial rhetoric.

''I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation,” Helms wrote in his autobiography Here’s Where I Stand.

“I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences.''
That measured, considerate tone is clearly not what Helms used back in the sixties when he railed against Dr. “Martin Luther Coon” and “Communist-led” civil rights movement.

Though the conservative senator’s office was well known for fair and efficient constituent service, and in latter years, Helms worked diligently with rock musician Bono to combat AIDS in Africa, his political history was too overwhelming to dismiss.

“The old Jesse Helms is the real one,” Irving Joyner, law professor at North Carolina Central University in Durham told The Carolinian five years ago. “He’s trying to reorient history today; soften the rhetoric now that he’s in his last years. But he can’t do it. There’s too much of a record there.”

Others are insulted that Helms would still patronize African Americans by suggesting they should have waited for their freedom until Whites were ready to give it to them.

“If only we'd just shut up and waited a few more decades,” wrote Black columnist Allen Johnson in the Greensboro News and Record in 2002. “It's as if Helms expected the civil rights movement to happen by osmosis, some grand, rapturous mass epiphany where goodness fills everyone's hearts and we all decide, suddenly, to clasp hands and get along.”

Even a cursory look at Sen. Helms’ record on race - how he voted against every civil rights measure during his 29 years in the US Senate, how he stood virtually alone in trying to block the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – shows a man not interested in paving a way for integration, but doing all he could to preserve the archaic principles of a segregationist way of life he felt served the South well.

A staunch adversary of liberals, Helms rhetorically renamed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “the University of Negroes and Communists” during his fiery WRAL-TV editorials of the 1960s.

When he made an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live in Sept. 1995, a caller praised him “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.”

Helms looked in the camera and replied, “Well thank you, I think.”

It was Nov., 1984 during his reelection victory speech after defeating Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt in a brutal U.S. Senate race, that Jesse Helms literally and unexpectedly held out his hand, and said “Now let me say a word to the Black citizens of our state. If I had said this during the frenzy of the campaign, it would have been dismissed, and understandably so, as a political gesture,” a tape of Helms’ remarks to the hushed room reveals.

“Now that this election has apparently been decided, I want the Black citizens of North Carolina to know, that I want, and I intend, to work with and for all the people, including our responsible Black citizens, who have the most to gain from a strong and flourishing free enterprise system.”

The predominately White Republican crowd cheered.

“I say to them, let’s get together and make that system so that it will create jobs and opportunities and the fulfillment of hopes and dreams. I say to the Black citizens, whether or not you voted for me today, you have my hand of sincere friendship,” promised Helms, adding that he wanted in future years to bring all North Carolinians, including “minorities,” together.

But six years later, Helms all but forgot his pledge, when he ran the infamous 1990 “a minority took your job” White hands anti-affirmative action ad which fired up White voters, including Democrats, against his Black opponent, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt.

Helms won that 1990 U.S. Senate race, and African Americans knew that the man who used the term “nigras” during his 60s television editorials, and called Dr. King a “communist”, would never change.

“African American people basically see Mr. Helms as being bigoted, and from a school of thinking and a time that has long gone by,” Rev. E. Randel Osburn, vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, told The News&Observer then. “He is an embarrassment to the American body politic.”

Born in the small town of Monroe, N.C. in 1921, Helms was reared in a large conservative family, values that stayed with him, and became his trademark.

After attending Wingate and Wake Forest colleges, Helms got a job at The News & Observer in Raleigh as a part-time proofreader in 1939.

He never finished college, opting instead to work full-time at the paper as a reporter, and then, an assistant city editor of the Raleigh Times.

After a stint in the Navy and on radio, Helms, a Democrat, got his feet wet in politics when he advised conservative and segregationist candidate Willis Smith during the 1950 U.S. Senate race against Frank Porter Graham.

Smith won that contest, using race-baiting as an effective tool.

''White people, wake up before it is too late,” one Smith campaign ad said. “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.''

Three years later, Helms wrote a column in The Tarheel Banker opposing the pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling against public school segregation. The column gives him visibility, and in 1957, Helms is elected to the Raleigh City Council for two terms.

After leaving the council in 1960, Helms was employed by WRAL-TV for the next 12 years to do conservative commentaries. Many of them were in opposition to the civil rights movement, which Helms believes is designed take freedom away from “decent” citizens.

After switching over to the Republican Party, Helms unexpectedly rides the reelection coattails of President Richard Nixon in 1972 to the U.S. Senate.

For the next 29 years, Helms opposes every piece of civil rights and affirmative action legislation. He chastises homosexuals, votes against federal funding for AIDS programs, and blocks Black judges from being considered for the federal bench.

In 1982, he voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act, something even his good friend, conservative President Ronald Reagan, ultimately supported. The following year, Helms singlehandedly tries to stop passage of the federal Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, but fails.

''King's view of American society was thus not fundamentally different from that of CPUSA (Communist Party of America) or of other Marxists,” Helms said on the Senate floor in 1983. “While he is generally remembered today as the pioneer of civil rights for Blacks and as the architect of nonviolent techniques of dissent and political agitation, his hostility to and hatred for America should be made clear.''

Helms opposed busing, supported the racist apartheid regime of South Africa, and for years blocked attempts by President Bill Clinton to appoint a Black judge to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Finally, a Black jurist, attorney Roger Gregory of Richmond, Va., was confirmed by the Senate in 2002, but only after then Sen. Edwards threatened to block Helms’ other judicial choices.

Ironically in Dec., 1999, during his nephew Paul Coble’s inauguration as Raleigh mayor, Sen. Helms stood up and held his hand over his heart in reverence as the Shaw University Choir sang a soulful rendition of the Black National Anthem.

The senator’s oft times vehement, yet backwards manner of opposing progressive African Americans was heralded by those closely identified with racial division.
“North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms is striking a blow for Confederate heritage by blocking the nomination of [former Senator] Carol Mosely-Braun as ambassador to New Zealand,” an organization outraged that the first Black female senator and “former welfare queen” successfully blocked a 1993 bill sponsored by Helms to renew a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, wrote in October, 1999.

“She’d better look for another line of work,” Helms, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters, demanding that Mosely-Braun apologize.
“I don’t like her.”

Eventually, under tremendous pressure, Helms allowed Mosely-Braun to be confirmed.
A constant critic of poor Blacks unable to help themselves, Helms had no qualms in investing in poverty. Raleigh city records show that he and his wife, Dot, were landlords to several dilapidated properties in Southeast Raleigh, properties where low-income residents paid hundreds of dollars monthly in rent, but got little service or upkeep for it.

In Raleigh, Helms outraged Black alums of the once all-Black John W. Ligon High School when he told The Charlotte Observer in 1997, “In Raleigh, discipline is no longer possible at [Needham] Broughton High School,” referring to what he felt were the negative affects of school desegregation “after Raleigh’s former all-Black Ligon High School was closed in the early 1970s,” The N&O reported.

Helms called the integration of formally all-White schools like Broughton High “…failed social experiments [that were] a colossal flop…that has caused more upheaval in the schools.”

“Sen. Helms is sick,” Yvonne Trice, a 1965 Ligon alumna, told The Carolinian then. “He’s a disgrace to North Carolina; he’s a racist.”

Another Ligonite, Raleigh businessman Bruce Lightner, also went after Helms with both barrels.

“Some Whites have always tried to hinder or prevent Black people from being educated, even to the point of prohibiting them from learning how to read,” he told The Carolinian then.

“So this is, in my view, simply a carry-over of that racist mindset, and it’s something that we’ve been dealing with for a long time.”

Upon Helms’ announcement in 2001 that he would not run for reelection, David Broder, respected columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece titled “Jesse Helms, White Racist.”

“What is unique about Helms - and from my viewpoint, unforgivable - is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans,” Broder wrote then.

Melvin “Skip” Alston, former president of the State NAACP, once called Sen. Helms “Mr. Jim Crow Sr.”

''He is a constant reminder that racism is alive and well and we still have a long way to go,'' Alston told The News & Observer several years ago. ''He is a dinosaur. He fought against everything that would advance the African American community.''

This story comes special to NNPA form the Carolinian.