I’ve always wanted to be a comedian. In fact, let me try out a few of my jokes here with y’all:
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is so racist...
How racist is she?
Cindy Hyde-Smith is so racist that she wants to sit up front at a public lynching!
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is so racist.....
How racist is she?
She’s so racist that she posed wearing a Confederate hat while holding an old Confederate gun.
Ok, last one:
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is so racist.....
How racist is she?
She’s so racist that she and her daughter went to segregationist high schools. The Jackson Free Press found a 1975 yearbook from the Lawrence County Academy the showed Hyde-Smith, then Cindy Hyde, all in the videos and all on the songs posing with other cheerleaders “next to the school’s mascot of a Confederate general holding up a large Confederate flag,” Slate reports.
The news site also notes that Hyde-Smith didn’t just go to a school that wasn’t cool with integration, she sent her daughter to a similar school.
Slate reports:
Brookhaven Academy, the school from which Hyde-Smith’s daughter graduated in 2017, is almost all white. In the 2015-2016 academic year, for example, the school had 386 white students, compared to five Asian students and one black student. Brookhaven is 55 percent black.
The senator’s education “adds historic context to comments she made in recent weeks about a ‘public hanging’ that drew condemnations from across the political spectrum,” notes the Jackson Free Press. The senator has been under fire for saying she would sit with a supporter in the front row of a “public hanging.” She defended the remarks as a meaningless expression, others were quick to say it alluded to a lynching. Several corporations are not buying her explanation and have requested refunds of their donations to the candidate.
The Free-Press piece quotes people explaining that there is no way Hyde-Smith couldn’t have known why the “segregation academies” were set up. “When the public schools in Mississippi were ordered desegregated, many thousands of white families cobbled together what they could laughingly call a school to send their children to for no other reason except they didn’t want them to be around n-words or to be treated or behave as equal to black people,” Former Mississippi Democratic Party Chairman Rickey Cole said. Earlier in the week, the Washington Post took a look at how Hyde-Smith has often embraced “a pride in the Confederacy and its aftermath.”
Cindy Hyde-Smith is in a special election runoff Tuesday against Democratic former congressman Mike Espy, who is seeking to become Mississippi’s first black senator since Reconstruction.
Oh, and Hyde-Smith would be front row at his hanging.
Rim shot!
(Editor’s note: The Root continues to work with Stephen Crockett on his joke-writing.)