NEW ORLEANS (CN) – A Mississippi lawmaker who compared Louisiana officials to Nazis and said they should be lynched for taking down four Confederate monuments in New Orleans apologized Monday after his comments sparked outrage.
State Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, said in a Facebook post Saturday night that Louisiana lawmakers should be lynched for taking down Confederate monuments “of OUR HISTORY” in a “Nazi-ish fashion.”
“The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific,” Oliver wrote in his post. “If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, ‘leadership’ of Louisiana wishes to, in the Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State.”
Oliver made the comments after three Confederate monuments and a monument commemorating white supremacy were removed in New Orleans.
Oliver’s post and comments to it were taken down Monday, and Oliver apologized.
“I, first and foremost, wish to extend this apology for any embarrassment I have caused to both my colleagues and fellow Mississippians,” Oliver in a statement. “In an effort to express my passion for preserving all historical monuments, I acknowledge the word ‘lynched’ was wrong. I am very sorry. It is in no way, ever, an appropriate term. I deeply regret that I chose this word, and I do not condone the actions I referenced, nor do I believe them in my heart. I freely admit my choice of words was horribly wrong, and I humbly ask your forgiveness.”
At least 4,743 people were lynched in the United States from 1882 to 1968, most of them in the South, 3,446 of them black. More people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state — 581, according to publicly available archives.
Rep. Oliver, a funeral director, represents the district that includes the town of Money, where black teenager Emmett Till was kidnapped and lynched in 1955, allegedly because he’d whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. Outrage over Till’s lynching helped spur the Civil Rights movement. The woman whom Till allegedly insulted recanted that claim in a recent biography, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
Republican state Reps. John Read and Doug McLeod, “liked” Oliver’s Facebook post, as did Mississippi Highway Patrol spokesman Tony Dunn, Mississippi News Now reported.
But Oliver’s comments drew bipartisan disgust Monday from lawmakers in Mississippi and Louisiana.
“Rep. Oliver’s language is unacceptable and had no place in civil discourse,” Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, said Monday morning in an email to Mississippi Today.
Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson on Monday called for Oliver to resign.
“Anyone who champions a fond remembrance of such a violent, racist history is unworthy of elected office,” Johnson said.
“I am offended and outraged that a public official in 2017 would, with an obvious conviction and clear conscience, call for and promote one of the most cruel, vicious, and wicked acts in American history,” Mississippi state Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greeneville, said in a tweeted statement.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat, said Monday that Oliver’s comments show why removing the monuments was the right thing to do, and necessary. Landrieu said it is time to confront racism head on.