Mississippi Leaders Still 'Honoring' Racists, After All These Years

JACKSON — The head of the Mississippi state agency that sent out a tweet this week honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee once attended a rally of a racist organization that refers to black people as a "retrograde species of humanity."

On July 31, 2000, then-Mississippi Department of Revenue Commissioner Herb Frierson attended a "Save Our Heritage" event hosted by the Council of Conservative Citizens, the white-supremacist organization that later inspired Dylann Roof's massacre of black worshipers in Charleston in 2015. The Citizen Informer, the CofCC's official publication, reported his attendance at the event.

The SPLC first published a report on Frierson's attendance at the rally in 2014, which gained new significance Thursday, when the Department of Revenue posted and then deleted a tweet that honored Lee, a Confederate general in the Civil War and slave owner.

"In honor of General Robert E. Lee's birthday and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we will be closed on Monday, January 21," Thursday's now-deleted tweet read. "Robert E. Lee Day" is a public holiday in Mississippi and Alabama, and both states recognize on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Arkansas did as well until 2017, when it ended its observance of Lee's birthday and replaced it with a general Civil War memorial day in October.

Read more: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2019/jan/18/mississippi-leaders-honoring-racist-leaders-after-/