Jesse Helms dies at 86

From the NYTimes obit: "Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator with the courtly manner and mossy drawl who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86."

Obsidian Wings has a useful overview of the wide range of reaction to Helms death.

I didn't think of Jesse Helms as an obvious topic for a blog on race in popular culture and media, but in reading some of the coverage of hi death I learned that he got his start as a radio and television host in North Carolina. The LA Times, for example, writes:

From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political device of using race to propel white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."

The campaign's further contribution to political notoriety was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man.

When Smith won, Helms went to Washington as his administrative assistant.

Upon Smith's death in 1953, Helms returned home to work for the North Carolina Bankers Assn., turning the group's monthly magazine into a platform for his political views. He was persuaded to run for a City Council seat in Raleigh.

But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he held from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts."