Forgiveness and trust are two different things.

Forgiveness can be granted freely to the person who makes a mistake, recognizes it, and seriously wants to make amends. People who have been wronged sometimes try to make the person who does wrong earn forgiveness, but that misses the point. To forgive someone is to say, “I’m not going to let the past stand in the way of your building a different future.”

Trust, though, is a wholly different matter. It has to be earned, action by action. There are no sets of words that can magically rebuild trust once destroyed, or build trust where there never was.

Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott wants forgiveness for saying that the nation should have embraced the segregationist platform of his colleague, Sen. Strom Thurmond, in 1948. Can I forgive him? Yes. Can I trust him? No.

I can forgive him because he, just as everyone else who has been steeped in our nation’s sordid history of racism and has absorbed its values, should have a chance to relearn, to understand the pain caused by their beliefs and actions, and to live the rest of their lives by a different set of values.

I can forgive him even though it’s still not apparent to me that Lott “gets it.” It’s only apparent to me that he realizes he’s made a mess and is now fumbling for a way out of the firestorm he started by saying, in a tribute to Thurmond on his 100th birthday, that if America had followed his home state’s lead and voted Thurmond into office, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

Lott says he was thinking about Thurmond’s stand against communism and his positions favoring limiting the size of the federal government. But everyone with a good knowledge of American history – the kind of knowledge Lott should have – knows that the pivotal issue that led Thurmond and his supporters to walk off the floor of the 1948 Democratic National Convention had nothing to do with the party’s foreign policy’s positions or how big the federal budget should be. The walkout came as the late Hubert H. Humphrey was urging the Democratic Party to embrace a civil rights plank supported by President Harry Truman.

“To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late!” Humphrey said. “To those who say this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of state’s rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”

Thurmond’s response: “Ladies and gentlemen … there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”

What makes it easy to believe that Lott was indeed embracing this hideous aspect of Thurmond’s past – a past that Thurmond has himself renounced – is Lott’s longtime association with the movement to continue the Dixiecrat agenda, which the Republican Party embraced beginning in the late 1960s in only slightly diluted form. From his attempt to keep black students out of the Sigma Nu fraternity at the University of Mississippi in the early 1960s to his speeches and writings in the 1990s for the Council of Conservative Citizens – an organization that to this day promotes segregation – Lott has worked against the cause of civil rights and racial reconciliation.

Now Lott wants us to believe that he is a changed – or more accurately, changing – man. Yet even he recognizes that what he said can’t be simply erased. In his interview with journalist Ed Gordon on Black Entertainment Television on Monday night, Lott said, “The important thing is to recognize the hurt that I caused and ask for forgiveness and find a way to turn this into a positive thing, and try to make amends for what I’ve said and for what others have said and done over the years. I’m looking for this to be not only an opportunity for redemption, but to do something about it.”

If Lott is seeking a chance to start again, by all means he should have that chance. A chastened Trent Lott just might be what the nation needs to rejuvenate the effort to repair the damage done by America’s legacy of slavery and racism.

But it will take years of hard work for him to earn the trust of many Americans of all races, and that is why a Republican Party that wants to earn the trust of blacks should choose another Senate leader who does not have the baggage Trent Lott must now unload.

Isaiah J. Poole is opinion page editor for the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pa.

Copy the Story Link