Mississippi senator in runoff faces backlash for ‘public hanging’ remark
With her arm around a cattle rancher, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., drew laughter and applause at a recent campaign event when she gushed about how highly she thought of him: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”
But beyond the small crowd at the event, in Tupelo, Miss., the reaction has been markedly different. The NAACP called the comments “sick” after a video of the exchange was posted on Twitter over the weekend; Mike Espy, Hyde-Smith’s Democratic opponent, said, “It’s awful.”
Espy, who is black, and Hyde-Smith are locked in a runoff after no candidate in a four-person race received more than 50 percent of the vote on Election Day. Hyde-Smith has made her ardent support of President Donald Trump, who endorsed her, central to her campaign in a state the president carried by nearly 18 points in 2016.
But Democratic groups, who watched the backlash mount over the weekend, sense an opening. On Monday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sent a fundraising email with a two-word subject line: “public hanging.”
Espy, a former congressman who served as agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton, would not say Monday whether he thought Hyde-Smith’s comments were racist. But he did call them “tone deaf.”
“They are hurtful to millions of Mississippians who are people of goodwill,” Espy said on CNN. “They tend to reinforce the stereotypes that have held back our state for so long and that have cost us jobs and harmed our economy.”
No other state has such a dark history of public hangings, particularly lynchings of black people. More than 600 were killed in lynchings in Mississippi from 1877 to 1950, more than in any other state.
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, tied Hyde-Smith’s remarks to the president, saying he had “created a climate that normalizes hateful, racist rhetoric from political candidates.”
“Hyde-Smith’s decision to joke about ‘hanging,’ when the history of African-Americans is marred by countless incidents of this barbarous act, is sick,” Johnson said in a statement.
Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the Senate after Sen. Thad Cochran retired, said Sunday that it was “ridiculous” to suggest there was anything negative about her remarks.
“In a comment on Nov. 2, I referred to accepting an invitation to a speaking engagement,” Hyde-Smith said. “In referencing the one who invited me, I used an exaggerated expression of regard, and any attempt to turn this into a negative connotation is ridiculous.”