Reuters reports:

A profile of Barbour in a conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, included comments from him about what life was like growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

“I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” Barbour said.
The remark risked making Barbour look indifferent to the sometimes violent 1960s effort to end segregation. Mississippi, like its Deep South neighbor Alabama, was a central player in the civil rights movement.

Barbour has now hastened to “clarify” the most controversial remarks he was quoted making in the piece when he said: “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK (Ku Klux Klan). Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.”

The governor, also a former chair of the Republican National Committee, issued a statement late Tuesday saying: ”My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.”

His clarification, however, might be too little too late with some political observers speculating this might be a “macaca” moment, effectively ending his presidential run before it even begins. 

Barbour has become the punching bag for a legion of columnists. Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post said he was living in a “myth” when it came to race relations when he was a youngster.

And Harold Evans at The Daily Beast writes a piercing essay detailing precisely how the White Citizens Councils were, indeed, the white-collar front for the KKK.