Tim Scott Offered Trump Fannie Lou Hamer’s Soul Along With His Own But Hers Isn’t For Sale
Hope it was worth it, Tim.
Sen. Tim Scott from South Carolina reminded me he existed when he posted the following message after Donald Trump’s second (!) inauguration.
“Today, I join millions of Americans and friends around the world in celebration of President Trump’s inauguration! Under his second term, Americans will have renewed pride in our nation and have high enthusiasm for lower taxes, safer communities, and greater opportunity. I look forward to working alongside the President over the next four years to help him deliver these wins for the American people. Congratulations, Mr. President! Let’s get to work and once again make America the shining city on the hill!”
The Ronald Reagan reference is almost adorable, considering that the current GOP is entirely Trump’s. What’s most amusing to me is that Scott sent this message from the cheap seats. He was not an honored guest who sat with Trump’s billionaire buddies. He’s obviously not the new vice president, who’s younger and has significantly less experience. He’s also not the new secretary of state, another former Senate colleague.
Scott didn’t receive a cushy appointment in Trump’s second administration. That was apparently reserved for unqualified Fox News hacks, partisan toadies, and outright loons like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
No, Scott received the full Nikki Haley brush off. Although Trump at least bothered to explain, in a typically petty message, why Haley’s political career is over. He just shut the glass lid on Scott’s cage without a word.
There are many reasons why Scott richly deserves this humiliation. Despite the MSNBC spin, Scott has never been an honorable person. He’s suggested that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represented the Confederate side of the Civil War. Yet that wasn’t the low point.
Scott endorsed Trump early in the Republican primary — a clear snub to his fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, who first appointed him to the Senate in 2012.
While campaigning for Trump in New Hampshire, Scott rolled his eyes like the least dignified performer in a minstrel show. Watch below if you can stand it.
My father texted me a succinct message: “Tim Scott is a CLOWN.” I imagine it was because of one specific line Scott said: “We need a president who understands the American people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
I’ve written about this before, but I think it bears repeating again. Far too few people know the name Fannie Lou Hamer, the American hero whose words Scott perverted.
Born in Jim Crow Mississippi, Hamer spent her childhood as a sharecropper, picking cotton while living with polio. In 1961, a white doctor subjected Hamer to a hysterectomy without her consent during surgery for a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization as a form of Black population control was so widespread it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Hamer wouldn’t discover that Black people could actually register to vote until 1962. She was 45.
From Rosalind Early’s “The Sweat and Blood of Fannie Lou Hamer”:
The next day, Hamer was on a bus with 17 other people headed to the county seat in Indianola to register. Only she and one other person were allowed to take the literacy test. They had to answer questions about the Mississippi constitution and de facto laws of the state.
“I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day,” Hamer said later. Both she and the other test-taker failed, but Hamer said she would return until she passed. It was no small task. At that time in Mississippi, if you registered to vote, your name and address ran in the paper for two weeks so the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists could terrorize you if you were Black. On their way home from Indianola, Hamer and the others were stopped by police, who said their bus was the wrong color, and fined $100. When Hamer finally made it home, the plantation owner already knew about what she’d done and told Hamer that if she didn’t withdraw her registration, she’d have to leave.
“I didn’t go down there to register for you,” Hamer replied. “I went down to register for myself.” She was forced to leave.
Hamer was undaunted. She eventually passed the rigged literacy test. She paid the obscene poll tax. That still wasn’t enough. Racists, including the police, threatened, bullied, beat, and even shot at her, but they couldn’t stop her. She not only registered herself to vote but helped register thousands of Black Mississippians.
“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared,” she said. “But what was the point of being scared? The only thing [the whites] could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
Hamer and other activists founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, they argued that the state’s delegates were illegitimate because Black citizens were actively denied the right to vote. (No, this is not the same as what Trump tried to pull in 2020.)
She told the convention members about how she’d been unjustly arrested in 1963 and while imprisoned, she was savagely beaten.
I was led out of that cell and into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The state highway patrolman gave the first Negro prisoner the blackjack. It was a long heavy leather something made with something you could hold it, and it was loaded with either rocks or something metal. And they ordered me to lie down on the bed on my face. And I was beat by that first Negro until he was exhausted. I was beat until he was ordered by the state highway patrolman to stop.
After he told the first Negro to stop, he gave the blackjack to the second Negro. When the second Negro began to beat, it seemed like it was more than I could bear. I began to work my feet, and the state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro that had beat me to set on my feet where I was kicking them. My dress worked up real high and I smoothed my clothes down. And one of the city policemens walked over and pulled my dress as high as he could. I was trying to shield as many licks from my left side as I could because I had polio when I was six or eight years old. But when they had finished beating me, they were, while they was beating, I was screaming. One of the white men got up and began to beat me in my head.
Hamer would suffer permanent kidney damage, a blood clot behind her eye, and would forever walk with a limp. All this because she dared assert her rights as a citizen, the very rights that Trump and his goons have tried to suppress.
President Lyndon B. Johnson feared he’d lose the South if the Freedom Democratic Party delegates were seated, and after all, “democracy was at stake” in the ‘64 presidential election. So justice was denied.
On December 20, 1964, Hamer spoke at a rally with Malcolm X at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem, New York. This was where she delivered those powerful words.
And you can always hear this long sob story: “You know it takes time.” For 300 years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change. We want a change in this society in America because, you see, we can no longer ignore the facts and getting our children to sing, “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed.” What do we have to hail here? The truth is the only thing going to free us. And you know this whole society is sick.
Hamer demanded change, a better world, a more just world. Scott dared suggest that Trump is the answer to Hamer’s call to action. Instead, Trump will enrich himself and his billionaire cronies while distracting his poor and gullible supporters with blatant acts of cruelty against people whose only crime is their existence.
Hamer died in 1977 at just 59, a casualty of systemic racism that far too many people wish to deny, but her legacy endures. My father put it best: Tim Scott is a clown, and in the end, his Bozo act earned him nothing.
The sad irony of LBJ appeasing the Jim Crow Democrats at the '64 Convention by not seating the Mississippi Freedom Democrats is that the Mississippi Dems kept him off the ballot throughout the state that year anyway, basically handing the state to Goldwater.
Appeasing evil does not work--you have to fight it in bold, open strokes. Another irony here is that sometimes by doing so you can even win over those who were opposed to you but respect that you showed guts. (Another anecdote--some pollsters in early '68 asked George Wallace fans who their second choice was--they chose RFK, because they thought RFK showed guts and stood for what he believed in. Lesson--projecting strength is a winner, projecting weakness never is).
The problem is we're so many generations removed from Hamer's time that you have a lot of younger people taking those sacrifices for granted, and guys like Tim Scott will always see keeping his career in the GOP as more important than anything his grandparents went through. And to that end, he can rationalize anything if it's to his benefit to do so.
Our neighbors are taken with a madness. It is the madness of folly. One they have given into willingly. Nevertheless, they are captured by it.
They cannot be appeased. Folly never can be. It insists that day is night, that wrong is right, that slavery is freedom, and demands that you not only agree, but praise them for their right thinking.
Folly cannot be reasoned with. You cannot find common ground by agreeing that there might be clouds in the sky so it could be night or day.
Folly can only be opposed. And it must be opposed and crushed utterly and irredeemably, or it will return again doubly determined to crush reason, compassion, and empathy and force people to agree with it on pains of death.