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As Lott apologizes, '81 filing emerges
Compiled from Times wires WASHINGTON -- Senate Republican leader Trent Lott tried to help Bob Jones University keep its federal tax-exempt status despite the school's policy prohibiting interracial dating two decades before his recent comments stirred a race controversy. "Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy," Lott, then a U.S. representative from Mississippi, wrote in a 1981 friend of the court brief that cited prior court rulings upholding affirmative action programs at colleges. Lott's filing unsuccessfully urged the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the Internal Revenue Service from stripping the university's tax exemption. The old court filing surfaced on a day when Lott tried to quell criticism from Democrats and Republicans over remarks he made at a birthday party last week for 100-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. Lott said his state of Mississippi is proud of its 1948 votes for Thurmond, who ran as a Dixiecrat opposed to President Harry S. Truman's support for civil rights. "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott said last week. Lott made a similar statement when he appeared with Thurmond at a rally in Jackson, Miss., on Nov. 2, 1980. After Thurmond spoke against federal pre-emption of state laws, Lott said, "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." Republicans began rallying around Lott on Wednesday, but his latest remarks did not satisfy Democrats, who called on Lott, R-Miss., to step aside as the incoming majority leader and urged the White House to repudiate the original remarks. Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a possible presidential contender, called on Lott to resign his leadership post. Making the rounds on TV and radio news shows Wednesday, Lott said his comments were a "mistake of the head and not of the heart," employing language used by the Rev. Jesse Jackson in his own presidential run in 1984 when he apologized for an ethnic slur against Jews. Lott added, "The words were terrible and I regret that." Asked by conservative radio talk-show host Sean Hannity what "problems" would have been eliminated by a Thurmond presidency, a subdued Lott said he was referring to Thurmond's support for a strong defense, economic development and strong law enforcement. "I apologize for the words, and I'm sorry," he said. "I used words that were insensitive and conveyed an impression that was not an accurate one." In the interview, broadcast simultaneously on the Fox cable TV news channel, Lott pointed to his support for historically black colleges in his state, his hiring of black interns and his appointments of African-Americans to federal boards. "I've made it a real point to make sure we have input from all sectors of the economy, and I'm not saying I couldn't do better and I want to continue to work on that," he said. "Because that's the best thing to do, to help all people, regardless of their ethnic, religious or racial backgrounds, to give them the opportunity to live the American dream." On CNN's Larry King Live, Lott told King that he did not intend to step down as Republican leader. He said no one from the White House or his own party Senate caucus had asked him to step aside. Lott will become majority leader next month when the new Republican-controlled Senate convenes. Democrats and other critics called his apology insufficient in light of his 1980 remarks. "I simply do not believe the country can today afford to have someone who has made these statements again and again be the leader of the United States Senate," Kerry said. Former Vice President Al Gore, one of the first Democrats to speak out strongly against Lott this week, said he did not believe Lott's apology answered the criticism. "It is simply not credible to state that Thurmond's campaign in 1948 makes him think about national defense," Gore said. "It was a campaign based on segregation." He said he doubted Republican uneasiness would be put to rest by the apology. Representatives of other minority groups, including Hispanic and Arab-American civil rights organizations, also called for Lott to resign as leader. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus conferred on Wednesday and could make a declaration of their plans today. Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader who initially said Lott deserved the benefit of the doubt, and Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, urged Bush to speak out personally on the controversy. "The president should make clear that there is no place for any such sentiments in the Republican Party or anywhere else in America today," Daschle said. Top Republicans in both the House and the Senate, after a few days of silence, rallied to Lott's defense Wednesday, saying that he had expressed his remorse and that the matter was being blown out of proportion for political gain. "I understand a lot of Democrats and liberals generally have had a hard time recently in trying to come up with an issue," said Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a member of the new Senate Republican leadership. "What is disappointing to me is that they are willing to pick something to try to smear somebody rather than engage in some legitimate debate about the economy or national security." No Republican senator has called for Lott to step down from the majority leader post he is to take over next month. "The words were wrong, inappropriate, but his track record is one which is very aggressively committed to fairness in our society," said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas and the incoming House majority leader, said in a statement that Republicans had played a "pivotal role" in enacting civil rights protections. "Any intimation that those old wounds should be reopened is unhelpful and unwelcome. I've worked with Trent Lott for years, and he's always been focused on moving our country forward." Retiring Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, the House's only black Republican, said the nation should accept Lott's apology. However, the four Republican appointees to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a joint statement deploring Lott's comments as a "particularly shameful remark coming from a leader of the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln." At the White House, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer declined for the second consecutive day to directly criticize Lott or his statements of praise for Thurmond. "America is a much richer and better nation as a result of the changes that have been made to our society involving integration and improvement of relations between the races," Fleischer said. The 1981 brief Lott filed concerned Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in Greenville, S.C. Its ban on interracial dating among students, which it ended recently, has long stirred controversy, from the judicial nominations of jurists who have been involved in the school's various legal fights to presidential candidates, including President Bush, who have been criticized for visiting the campus. The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 to strip the school of its tax exemption about two years after Lott filed his brief. "The government now advocates penalizing Bob Jones University for its uncontestedly genuine religious beliefs," Lott wrote in his brief. " . . . To hold that this religious institution is subject to tax because of its interracial dating policies would clearly raise grave First Amendment questions." A Lott spokesman said Wednesday night that the Senate leader was not endorsing the university's interracial ban when he filed the brief but rather was expressing a "concern that this could create a precedent for all religious schools to lose their tax-exempt status." In his filing, Lott compared the university's ban on interracial dating to other universities' affirmative action policies that recruited blacks to make student populations more diverse. "If racial discrimination in the interest of diversity does not violate public policy, then surely discrimination in the practices of religion is no violation," he argued. Lott has run afoul of civil rights groups by associating with the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the segregationist White Citizens' Council of the 1960s. According to the group's newsletter, Lott told its national board in 1992, "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy." Lott said Wednesday that the appearance was part of a political forum with a number of politicians from both parties. He did not address his remarks that day. Four years after praising Thurmond in Jackson, Miss., Lott told the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Miss., that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform." Davis, a Mississippian, was the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. -- Information from the Associated Press, Knight Ridder Newspapers, the New York Times, Boston Globe and Cox News Service was used in this report.
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