Mississippi senator jokes about ‘public hanging’

Nov. 12, 2018 / 2:02 AM GMT

By Phil McCausland

A video of U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith , R-Miss., who faces a runoff against an African-American opponent, joking about attending “a public hanging” went viral Sunday as she insisted there was nothing negative about her remark.

“If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” Hyde-Smith said during a campaign stop in Tupelo, Mississippi. The man she was referring to was identified as a local rancher.

“If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row”- Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith says in Tupelo, MS after Colin Hutchinson, cattle rancher, praises her.

Hyde-Smith is in a runoff on Nov 27th against Mike Espy. pic.twitter.com/0a9jOEjokr

— Lamar White, Jr. (@LamarWhiteJr) November 11, 2018

Hyde-Smith’s opponent in the runoff is former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy.

The video was posted by Lamar White Jr., the publisher of The Bayou Brief, a nonprofit news site in Louisiana. White told Mississippi Today that he did not take the video, and it was recorded on Nov. 2, before the election.

Mississippi has a difficult racial history that includes 581 lynchings between 1882 and 1968, the most of any state in that period, according to the NAACP.

Hyde-Smith, who’s running to complete the final two years of the Senate term she assumed when she was appointed to replace Thad Cochran in March, disregarded the comment in a statement Sunday night.

“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.”

Espy said Hyde-Smith’s remark showed why she was unfit to represent the state.

“Cindy Hyde-Smith’s comments are reprehensible,” Espy said in a statement. “They have no place in our political discourse, in Mississippi, or our country. We need leaders, not dividers, and her words show that she lacks the understanding and judgment to represent the people of our state.”

The racial elements of the comment were lost on few in a state where 38 percent of the population is black, and it earned a fair amount of backlash on social media.

Stumping in Mississippi which has the highest number of “recorded” lynchings of black people, Cindy Hyde-Smith says she’d be in the front row of a public hanging. Folks like Cindy don’t think or care about being implicitly or explicitly racist. https://t.co/zWjS6w19eg

— Commissioner Tami Sawyer (@tamisawyer) November 11, 2018

Luckily, talk of public hangings in Mississippi isn’t fraught with any kind of, you know, racial meaning, historical resonance, or echoes of a certain late-night, white-hooded social club. https://t.co/LfbW3QKQyJ

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 11, 2018

Hyde-Smith and Espy are facing each other in a special election to serve out the remainder of Cochran’s term after he retired for health reasons.

Republican Gov. Roger Wicker appointed Hyde-Smith to the seat in April, and she has since earned the approval of President Donald Trump, who campaigned for her last month in Mississippi.

Because neither candidate broke 50 percent of the votes on Nov. 6 — both eking out slightly more than 40 percent — the race will go to a runoff on Nov. 27.

Hyde-Smith was the state’s agriculture commissioner and was a Mississippi state senator. She served as a Democrat until 2010, when she switched parties. Upon taking the current Senate seat, Hyde-Smith became the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress.

Espy, her opponent, would be slated to become the first black man to serve as Mississippi’s senator since Reconstruction and the first Democrat in the post since John Stennis retired in 1989.