Official says Wilder made ‘racially biased’ remarks
NASHVILLE (AP) — Lt. Gov. John Wilder made “openly prejudiced and racially biased” remarks to Capitol visitors, according to a Carter County commissioner who wants a written apology besides the phone call he got Thursday.
“During your introductory remarks you stated that ‘because of affirmative action favoring blacks, women and other minorities, people like me (gesturing to your skin pigmentation) could no longer get decent jobs,'” commissioner Robert Davis wrote in a letter to Wilder, who is white.
Davis, the first black elected to the Carter County Commission, also wrote that the 33-year Senate speaker, who is next in line to succeed the governor, “blatantly singled me out and asked if I ‘had anything to say.'”
Davis told the Johnson City Press that Wilder refused to shake his hand at the end of the March 9 meeting with the Carter County Leadership Tomorrow Class.
Davis said he wrote Wilder because the speaker failed to respond to a March 17 e-mail request to clarify his comments from Karen Pierce, the leadership group coordinator.
“You had referenced your beliefs that the United States has been weakened by actions taken by ‘environmentalists and the ACLU’ and in particular, your comments concerning the negative impact of ‘favoring women and blacks,'” Pierce wrote.
Wilder, noting his personal history of supporting civil rights, said Thursday he is sorry if he offended anyone. He wrote Pierce seeking to clarify his comments and called her and Davis Thursday afternoon.
Wilder told The Associated Press he thought both were “comfortable” with what he had said and that Davis “understands what Wilder is. Who Wilder is. That I like black people.”
Davis said Wilder did tell him that, as well as saying “when he comes back, he wishes he would be black.”
Davis said Wilder also apologized “for me feeling bad about what was said. He did not apologize for what he said or how he said it.” That was not sufficient, Davis said.
“I tried to make him understand that was the worst I’d felt since the early ’60s when I first joined the Marine Corps and went to a bus station in North Carolina. They asked me to go to the back door to be served, to not eat with the people I was going to Paris Island with,” Davis said.
The commissioner said he believes Wilder should resign, but the speaker said he has no intention of stepping down from the post he has held since 1971.
Wilder said he was one of the few white landowners in Fayette County who refused to throw black tenant farmers off their property during the 1950s battle for the right to vote.
“Nobody went through Tent City except me. I walked down the street with black people. I thought they would put me out of the Methodist church because of it,” Wilder said. “Black people were nicer to me than white people.”
He said black residents of his county, who make up about half the population, now own their own homes and cars. “And John Wilder made that difference.”
He said the Carter County group misinterpreted his comments.
Wilder wrote to Pierce, “I believe that through the center of the cosmos is Law, with positive and negative forces, good and evil, love and hate, and right and wrong. The United States Supreme Court is not in tune with what is fundamentally right and wrong.”
He said it took justices more than 100 years before ruling in 1957 that “separate cannot be equal; it must be identical.
“This is correct,” Wilder wrote. But since then, the court’s rulings have granted preferential treatment to certain groups based on race or gender, which Wilder said is “violating the fundamental law that all people are equal.”
Pierce did not immediately return a phone call Thursday afternoon.