Trying to figure out this whole Black Hawk thing is a bit of a headache. Atrios is understandably confused about the ties between the two events, while Greg Wythe wants to know how Barbour got photographed with a Council of Conservative Citizens officer even though he wasn’t at the CofCC Black Hawk event. First the facts:

• The Black Hawk (or Blackhawk?) political rally is a regular event, attended by politicians of all stripes. Quoth the Magnolia Report:

  Senator Trent Lott has unwittingly given the Blackhawk Political Rally a lot of negative national media attention. However, in the state, it is still viewed as a credible campaign stop by both Democrats and Republicans, white and black. Several hundred people attended the July rally to hear candidates for local office and a handful of state and district-wide candidates.

• The rally is sponsored by two groups, the Black Hawk Bus Association and the Carrollton Masonic Lodge, according to Council of Conservative Citizens field director Bill Lord (from the WaPo account). The CofCC sponsors a barbecue at the same location that coincides with the rally.

• Lord served as the emcee for the rally in 2003.

• In the past, the rally’s sponsorship is more ambiguous. This 1999 Conservative News Service piece indicates that in 1995, the rally itself was sponsored by the Council. Lord was apparently actively involved in that rally as well:

  Lord described the event as “an old fashioned southern political rally that was completely integrated,” with about half a dozen black political candidates speaking and “maybe three dozen” blacks in attendance as spectators. According to Lord, the C of CC’s sponsorship of the event cost “around three or four thousand dollars. We sold barbecued chicken plates to make up the difference.”

• By all accounts, the Council is an offshoot of the segregationist Citizens Councils, groups with primarily middle-class support that fought desegregation efforts in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South.

Now to the analysis:

If there’s a firewall between the Council and the rally, it’s a pretty porus one. Lord, arguably the most important member of the CofCC in Mississippi, served as emcee. (Imagine, if you will, if David Duke or Louis Farrakhan served as the moderator of a presidential debate.) The Black Hawk Bus Association, the co-sponsor of the rally, buys buses for segregated private academies—an action not much lower on the moral reprehensibility scale than the Council’s white supremicist dogma. It will come as no surprise to learn that the Citizens Councils—the precursor of the CofCC—established the academies in the first place. And the Council apparently sponsored the rally in the past, even if it’s made some nominal separation from it in 2003 (no doubt in reaction to the Lott fiasco, which—quite rightly—made the group into kryptonite for any politician with ambitions beyond serving as county dogcather). So I think it’s fair to conclude, despite Lord’s protestations to the contrary, that the rally has strong ties to the Council and its agenda.

Yet despite these ties, many politicians—black, white, Democrat, Republican—continue to attend the rally, as the Magnolia Report correctly notes. As I’ve noted before, however, this is exactly the sort of thing the Council thrives on: the appearance of respectability. Getting its members in positions to glad-hand political candidates is what they want, and the Black Hawk Rally was a prime opportunity. And it’s time that Mississippi’s politicians told the Black Hawk folks once and for all, thanks but no thanks.