Mississippi senator joked about 'public hanging'

A newly published video shows a Republican U.S. senator in Mississippi praising someone by saying: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is white, said Sunday:
“I referred to accepting an invitation to a speaking engagement,” Hyde-Smith said in a statement Sunday. “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.”

Hyde-Smith faces a Democratic challenger, former Rep. Mike Espy, in a Nov. 27 runoff. Espy, who is black, is also a former U.S. agriculture secretary.

Mississippi has a history of racially motivated lynchings of black people. The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People website says that between 1882 and 1968, Mississippi had 581 lynchings, the highest number of any state.

The national NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who is from Mississippi, tweeted Sunday that Hyde-Smith’s “shameful remarks prove once again how Trump has created a climate that normalizes hateful, racist rhetoric from political candidates.”

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-mississippi-senator-hanging-remark-20181111-story.html