The fact that Sen. [tag]George Allen[/tag] (R-Va.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, has some “issues” when it comes to [tag]race[/tag] is not exactly new. As governor of Virginia, Allen opposed a state holiday honoring [tag]Martin Luther King[/tag] and referred to the NAACP as an “extremist group.” In the late ’90s, he issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, calling the Civil War “a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights.” His proclamation didn’t mention slavery.
What’s more, when Allen started his career, he kept a Confederate flag and a noose in his law office.
The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza, in a story that will soon be part of a book on the major 2008 candidates, explores the issue in more detail in the upcoming issue, reviewing Allen’s history on racial politics. I don’t expect Allen or his campaign team will care for it.
In 1984, he was one of 27 House members to vote against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, “Allen said the state shouldn’t honor a non-Virginian with his own holiday.” He was also bothered by the fact that the proposed holiday would fall on the day set aside in Virginia to honor Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That same year, he did feel the urge to honor one of Virginia’s own. He co-sponsored a resolution expressing “regret and sorrow upon the loss” of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision banning segregation.
None of this means Allen is a racist, of course. He is certainly not the same guy today that he was in the ’80s. But his interest in Southern heritage and his fetish for country culture goes back even further.
People who knew him talked about how much Allen always loved the Confederate flag, putting it on his front license plate, “plastering” his school with them, and making sure he wore a Confederate lapel pin in class pictures.
One anecdote was particularly troubling.
It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the school library and other places. All five people who described the incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually put there by Allen and some of his friends. “It was something like die whitey,” says Campbell. The school administrator, who says he is a Republican and would “seriously consider” voting for Allen for president, says the graffiti said, “burn, baby, burn,” a reference to the race riots.
Lizza explains that Allen, understandably, a little defensive on the issue of race and appears to be trying to “make amends for his old pro-Dixie stances.”
He’s trying to get more money for historically black colleges. And he has spent the last few years in what might be called civil rights boot camp. In 2003, he traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, on a “civil rights pilgrimage.” “I wish I had [gone] sooner,” he says. “I was listening to the old civil rights movement, the strategies, the foundations, the tactics, and–in watching all of it, and in my point of view–I don’t see how you can stand being knocked off a stool at a lunch counter and just take it. My reaction is, ‘I don’t see how you can take it.’ And they say, ‘You understand, it’s all peaceful and nonviolent.’ And I say, ‘I just don’t understand this.'” Allen bonded at the event with a former Black Panther who agreed with his take on nonviolence. “Of course, he played linebacker, I find out, and we became wonderful friends for the rest of the pilgrimage.” Allen says that, in a few days, he will travel to Farmville, Virginia, for another reconciliation pilgrimage–this one with Representative John Lewis, the heroic civil rights activist.
Some of the defense still needs a little work. Allen explains the Confederate flag that used to hang in his living room, for example, by saying, “I have a flag collection.”
I have no idea whether, and to what extent, voters will care about Allen’s history on race relations, or for that matter, whether Allen’s efforts to “make amends” will be persuasive.
The issue will, however, be the biggest question mark on Allen’s bio when he runs in 2008 (if he wins his Senate race this year). All the major Republicans have a serious fault — McCain is unprincipled, Giuliani is too liberal for his party, Gingrich has an entire decade to justify, Romney’s religious tradition is a high hurdle for evangelical primary voters, and Bill Frist is, well, Bill Frist.
But for Allen, it’s all about race. How will this matter in the GOP primaries? Stay tuned.