1968 N.B.A. All-Star Dick

Usage examples of barnett.

If he could pull this off, Barnett would be anointed by segregationist multitudes as virtually the Second Coming of Christ, as both peacemaker and conqueror.

On the surface, Governor Barnett ruled a lush and tranquil land blanketed with luxuriant forests of virgin pines, tupelo, sycamore, persimmon, magnolia, holly, sweet gum, and hickory, from gentle foothills in the north to cypress swamps curtained with Spanish moss and Gulf Coast resorts in the south.

As a boy in Leake County, Barnett would sit on the porch under a chinaberry tree and listen to his father, John William Barnett, tell tales of his years as a Confederate soldier, witnessing the siege of Vicksburg, having his horse shot out from under him at the Battle of Shilo, and seeing his own father, Captain John Henry Barnett, return home from four years in the Confederate army in clothes riddled by Union gunfire.

As a young man, Barnett built up his savings in an old coffee can on a cupboard shelf by picking cotton stalks as a field hand, working as a schoolhouse janitor, operating an outdoor barbershop, and organizing a fourteen-piece brass band that played county fairs across the state, with Barnett playing the French horn.

In the summertime, to pay his college expenses, Barnett rode buses and trains through Alabama and Mississippi as a door-to-door salesman for Wearever aluminum products, dragging a pair of huge sample cases that held seventy-two pounds of cooking utensils, pots, and pans.

After graduating from the University of Mississippi law school, Barnett built up one of the biggest and most profitable law firms in the state, specializing in personal-injury damage suits against corporations.

In 1959, on his third try for governor, Barnett was elected to lead the poorest state in the nation.

On the campaign trail, Barnett was transformed from a kindly grandfather figure into a zealot of scorching defiance and ferocity.

In a news film of the speech, as Barnett roars, you can almost feel the paint on the walls melt.

But Ross Barnett was heir to a political tradition that often cursed Mississippi with leaders of neolithic racism and appalling backwardness.

As a result, hundreds of citizens lined up every day to see Barnett, and he took special joy in parading schoolchildren into his office to shake his hand, sometimes 150 at a time.

On the subject of race, it was Bill Simmons, not Ross Barnett, who ruled Mississippi.

AMERICAN INSURRECTION Like Ross Barnett, Citizens Council chief William Simmons was a child of the Confederacy.

Even Walter Cronkite was saying on TV late that night the Kennedy-Nixon battle was so tight that it could come down to the eight electoral votes controlled by Governor Barnett to decide the presidency.

As his advisers debated the options, Ross Barnett revealed two weaknesses that are common to politicians, but 64AN AMERICAN INSURRECTION would prove potentially disastrous in this crisis: He wanted everyone to love him, and he constantly changed his mind.