BOLTON, miss. – It is here, in this black city with a majority of 441 people, the representative Benny G. Thompson attends a segregated junior high school. There, his father spent his entire life working as a mechanic and paying taxes, but he never exercised his right to vote. And that was where the future congressman campaigned for mayor in the early 1970s while taking up arms after receiving threats from white people who hate to relinquish political power.
So it came as no surprise to those who know Mr. Thompson well that he was quick to mention Bolton, Miss., After refusing to order the first hearing of the commission investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“I am from the part of the country where people justify slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching,” said Mr Thompson, chairman of the commission. “I remember this dark story as I hear voices today trying to justify the actions of the rebels on January 6, 2021.”
A moment later, Mr. Thompson accused former President Donald J. Trump for “inciting a mob of internal enemies of the Constitution to march on the Capitol and undermine American democracy.”
Mr Thompson, who is also chairman of the House Security Committee’s Homeland Security Committee, has spent nearly 30 years on Capitol Hill, but his committee leadership on January 6 is his most significant turn in the national spotlight. And it is thematically in line with the public life that was forged in the Mississippi, when deprivation of rights was achieved through jokes, intimidation and violence.
“I think he took it personally on January 6, based on his work and what he stands for in order to ensure that people have a voice in the ballot box,” said U.S. Sen. Derrick T. Simmons, a fellow Democrat.
In an interview on Friday, Mr Thompson said so. To some people, he said, the slogan “Make America Great Again” seemed like a “dog whistle” that challenged a world like the White Mississippi-dominated world in which he grew up. He said he was concerned about the gallows that protesters brought to Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 and the Confederate flags in the crowd.
“We are supposed to be a democracy,” he said. “And when we see people carrying Confederate flags in the group, it is a symbol of slavery and absolute resistance to the rule of law. So for me, it was a return to a part of our history that none of us should be proud of.
The topics of the hearings of the committee of the House of Representatives on January 6
With his plain white beard and commanding voice, Mr. Thompson, 74, set the committee in a serious and almost solemn tone. He also gave up much of the spotlight to Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and vice-chairman.
Mr Thompson and other Democrats certainly acknowledge that the fading criticism of Mr Trump is more powerful than that of a Republican. At the same time, the close alliance Mr. Thompson appears to have forged with Ms. Cheney has tarnished his reputation as a fierce guerrilla who is unwilling to work with Republicans.
In Mississippi, this reluctance is often attributed to the emotional traits Mr Thompson has borne since his years fighting for fundamental civil rights against Mississippi whites migrating to the Republican Party after President Lyndon B. Johnson secured the passage of the voting rights in 1965
Mr Thompson “It’s all about partisanship”, reporter Adam Lynch wrote in 2006 in The Jackson Free Press, a liberal newspaper. “He is a very liberal democrat, with no inclination to smile tolerantly on the other side.
When he first ran for Congress in 1993, Mr. Thompson told The New York Times that the strategy of confrontation for blacks in the Mississippi “is one of the main means of survival.”
His activist record dates back to his junior high school years, when he was arrested for demonstrating in Jackson after hearing speeches from Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white race in 1963.
“He was saying things that a lot of people felt, but he didn’t have the courage to say it,” Mr. Thompson recalled in a 1974 interview. are those who do not have decent housing?
He enrolled at Tougaloo College in Jackson, then a hotbed of anti-racist organizations, joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which focused on registering black voters. In Tougaloo, he also met Fanny Lou Hammer, a prominent civil rights activist, and volunteered for her failed campaign in Congress.
He worked briefly after college as a public school teacher, but said his contract was not renewed after he commissioned an essay on “What’s Wrong with the Mississippi?” In 1969, he was elected alderman in Bolton. part of a wave of black officials who held local elected positions in the South as a result of the Voting Rights Act.
Two other black candidates also won alderman competitions in Bolton that year. The city official, Mr Thompson said, initially refused to work with them, addressing them with racist insult. In 1973, whites challenged Mr. Thompson’s election as mayor, accusing him of illegally registering voters outside the city. The election, he said, sparked eight lawsuits.
After taking office, he flooded federal agencies with letters seeking funding and other support for programs he hoped would transform the city. He helped found the state association of black mayors, then co-founded its first association of black county overseers, building networks and helping others be elected to small local positions along the way.
“He probably did more for the election of blacks to local political office than anyone else,” said Danny E. Kupit, a lawyer and longtime friend of Mr. Thompson.
Mr Thompson became Hinds County Commissioner after challenging the composition of commission districts in court. In 1993, he won a special election to take the seat in Congress vacated by Mike Espie, who was elected Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton.
A year before he went to Congress, an incident took place that recently led MP Matt Goetz, a far-right Trump supporter from Florida, to falsely claim that Mr Thompson “actively applauded the riots of the 1990s”.
A few months after the riots that followed the 1992 acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers for beating Rodney King, the head of the Hinds County Bar Association, Harold D. Miller Jr., wrote to Mr Thompson asking him to “take a position in favor of the principle of law and against the philosophy that unjustified criticism and riots are acceptable answers to dissatisfaction with a court decision. Mr Miller was worried that riots would ensue if jurors acquitted Byron De La Beckwith, the white racist who had killed Mr Evers and was facing a new murder trial after two jurors in the 1960s. of the last century they failed to pronounce. (He was eventually convicted in 1994)
Mr Thompson’s reply letter contained no support for the rebels, but gave a taste of his uncompromising style. He writes about the “unlimited violence” that white people inflicted on black Americans during and outside slavery. He mentioned the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the white “killing mobs” that erupted in cities such as New Orleans and Vicksburg, Mrs., during the reconstruction.
“Before 1968, there were no African-elected officials in Hinds County,” he wrote. “What did the Hind County Bar Association do to address this injustice?”
In Congress, Mr. Thompson worked on equality of higher education, opposed Mr. Trump’s border wall, and successfully brought major federal spending projects to his county, which includes the poor Mississippi Delta and the black city of Jackson.
The congressman, an avid hunter, returns to his area most weekends to meet at his store’s Bolton office. It is decorated with images of civil rights characters, photos of Mr Thompson hunting pigs and rabbits and plush heads of animals he shot.
His ruling philosophy is prominently displayed on the poster, which shows the lifeless carcass on a section of asphalt. “The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow paint and a dead battleship,” it said.
Willie Earl Robinson, the city’s volunteer fire chief and longtime ally of the congressman, toured the city this week, citing the town hall, extended fire station and 40-unit public housing complex that Mr Thompson helped build.
“I don’t think he’s angry,” Mr Robinson said. “The thing is, he’s just trying to get things done.”
Several “Re-elect Benny Thompson” signs were scattered around, but they were probably a formality. Mr Thompson’s area is designed to be safe for black Democrats, leaving the other three Mississippi areas generally safe for Republicans.
Mr Thompson said the committee’s work was one of the most important with which he had worked as a politician.
“I want this to benefit this country and the world,” he said. “Because, in my humble opinion, we are still the greatest country in the world. We just had a hiccup on January 6th. And we have to fix it. “
Richard Fawcett reports from Bolton and Luke Broadwater from Washington.
Add Comment