Sanchez: Elizabeth Rickey: An unsung hero passes

By Mary Sanchez

What are we to make now of the remarkable accomplishment of Elizabeth Rickey? Who's she? you wonder.

Rickey was a longtime Louisiana Republican activist who made it her personal crusade to expose David Duke as a race-baiting charlatan bent on infiltrating politics with his vile potion of anti-Semitism and white supremacy.

Rickey died earlier this month in a motel room in Santa Fe, N.M., where she had relocated because of frail health. She was 53. We owe this principled woman a great deal.

After his stint as a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke sought a series of elective offices in Louisiana and on the national stage. He managed to get elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1989, defeating the candidate Rickey was working for as a researcher.

Yet Rickey wasn't about to let Duke add any more honors to his political curriculum vitae: As Duke ran for governor of Louisiana, the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, her work in exposing his racist affiliations was crucial in denying him victory.

Even in a time when politics is suffused with racial undertones, few Americans are racist in the way Duke is. Some of our brethren may be gullible, uniformed and fearful, and therefore susceptible to the rhetoric of politicians like Duke. The challenge, though, is to sort the true racists from the simply uninformed.

One journalist who knew Rickey well wrote that she was able to see “that Duke was both more sinister than ordinary redneck racists and far more politically savvy.” That's a big distinction.

It's the sort of insight too often lost on people casting about for signs of racism in the hurly-burly of American politics. I fear we are prone to missing race when it is relevant because some of us are so busy seeing it everywhere.

The way most people use the term today is silly by comparison.

Former President Jimmy Carter recently opined that the “tea party” hijinks of this summer were motivated by racism. Yes, no doubt some of the more outlandish denunciation of President Barack Obama is stoked with bias and prejudice. Yet, as Obama pointed out, he was known to be black before the election and received the support of a majority of the voting public.

In another overblown incident, the nation had to submit to endless rehashing of Professor Henry Louis Gates' unfortunate encounter with a police officer. Each man probably has some bias, sure. But mostly, the incident was two grown men acting like fools, with one trained, paid and given a gun with the expectation that he would always take the higher ground.

But compare that to the face of racism Rickey uncovered in Duke.

As a Republican state committee member from New Orleans, she carefully chronicled Duke's comments that the wrenching stink of decomposing bodies at Auschwitz was simply fumes from a nearby rubber plant. The people had died of starvation, not genocide, he told her.

She trailed him to Chicago, where he attended a neo-Nazi convention, and she taped his speech there. She also recorded late-night phone conversations that turned into diatribes about race-mixing and Jewish conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, Duke was repudiating his past enthrallment with Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan as “youthful indiscretion” of his college days. He held forth eloquently on the problem of affirmative action, other issues, taking care to appeal to right-wing populist sentiment without sounding too extreme. Rickey was annoyed that he had joined her party and that many GOP leaders didn't see the danger.

Rickey is a fitting model for those entering politics today to emulate - she was a party loyalist who was willing to put moral principle above party, willing to risk angering a fringe element. She had a clear vision of right and wrong. Rickey took the time to investigate, and then called the true racist a racist.

She deserves our thanks, regardless of political affiliation. And, frankly, these days we could use a few more of her kind.

n Contact the writer:

msanchez@kcstar.com