“Tim Scott is a CLOWN,” my father texted me on Saturday morning. He’s never cared much for the junior senator from our home state of South Carolina, but Scott’s Friday endorsement of Donald Trump angered a man who I’ve rarely seen angry. (I inherited my mother’s temper, which “would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.”)
Of course, I’ve never held a good opinion of Scott, who showed up in New Hampshire to shiv his old friend Nancy Pelosi Nikki Haley. When she was governor, she made Scott’s career when she appointed him to the Senate in 2013. Haley is desperate for a New Hampshire upset, which seems increasingly unlikely. Scott could’ve waited until after Haley lost South Carolina but instead, he chose early boarding on the Trump train.
Scott told the hundreds of Trump supporters in Concord that he’d “come to the very warm state of New Hampshire” — it was 15 degrees outside, get it? — “to endorse the next president of the United States, Donald Trump,” who he claims will lower taxes (for rich people) and unite the country, an absurd statement from someone who calls his political opponents “vermin.” Immediately after Scott spoke, Trump told the crowd that Chris Sununu, their Republican governor, “sucks.”
Only about 15 seconds of Scott’s remarks are memorable, and I think this moment is why my father texted me in disgust.
“We need a president who understands the American people are sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he said, while rolling his eyes like the least dignified performer in a minstrel show.
It’s unlikely that anyone in that MAGA audience recognized Scott’s reference to civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. 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 P{arty. 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 the powerful words that Scott perverted.
And you can always hear this long sob story: “You know it takes time.” For three hundred 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 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 I’m too sick to my stomach to write any more.
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Stephen Robinson, this is easily the most powerful piece you've ever written for Wonkette, though you have written plenty of them. I feel your father's anger and pain. And yours. Tim Scott has shown us exactly what kind of ass clown he is. Let's collectively avenge Fannie Lou Hamer by ruining his political life.
>> “We need a president who understands the American people are sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he said, while rolling his eyes like the least dignified performer in a minstrel show. <<
Wow. I don't usually watch longer clips, but you mentioned it was 15 seconds, so I played it before I ready your transcript & description. I've long respected you as a writer, SER, but no offence: there is simply no set of words in any alphabet or syllabary, in any dialect or language, that can adequately describe the horror of that clip.
Wow. I've never liked Scott, but I've never known him, and I don't know that I've ever watched video of him. But those 15 seconds transformed me from disliking his party and policies and politics to a visceral loathing of the man himself. Knowing "of" this guy apparently wasn't enough. You have to see him in action to know just how terrible a person he is.
Your dad was right.