Harvey Gantt
Helms’s Democratic Challenger in 1990 & 1996

(Attack Ads During 1990 Senatorial Campaign): "The latent fear of another race taking a job away from you in the South particularly, I think, was like a double whammy.  And it, it dealt with people’s worst fears. Their worst fears.  In one sense, we thought the ad was political genius. In the other sense, we couldn’t believe that someone in 1990 would run an ad like that."

In 1963, Harvey B. Gantt was the first African-American to be admitted to Clemson University in South Carolina. He received a degree in architecture with honors from Clemson and a master's degree in city planning from MIT. From 1974 until 1983, Gantt served on the Charlotte, N.C. city council. He was then elected and reelected as the first black mayor of Charlotte, serving in that position from 1983-1987. In 1990, he staged the first of two heated, yet unsuccessful, senatorial campaigns against Jesse Helms.

Art Censorship:

"I'm an architect, and to get into an area where he was going to start to make an issue about the kind of art, the kind of expression of creativity, that was appropriate for the American public, I thought went a little bit too far and bordered on censorship.  But it also reflected a kind of narrow view in my opinion of what Americans should think or expressions that they should give to their creative work.  And I thought it was just out of line and it was, in a sense, an attack on all creativity, but also a reflection of his interests in probably seeing programs like that banished from public funding altogether." 

Widening Racial Divide:

"The question is how many people would use that tactic just to win an election, because the residual effect of it is that you make the state even more divisive and the racial divide gets wider and those of us who run to serve the entire public, in my opinion, ought to be trying to do things to bring people together, not divide them."

Effects of Using Race in Politics:

"For anyone to run a race in the '80s or the '90s or the 21st century in which you so blatantly use it, it sets back the entire American political scene, in my opinion, because to lead in a democracy requires trust from the leadership and if you believe the leadership, if you believe your president really doesn’t have your best interests at heart, or your senator is going to vote not with your best interests at heart, how can you have a good feeling about what he's doing?"

Voting "No" on So Many Things:

"He gathered a lot of fame because he voted 'No' on so many things.  He held off a lot of things because it’s easier to hold up things in the United States Senate, so he got a lot of fame for holding up judgeships and other kinds of things.  But I can’t think of a single piece of legislation that he ever led that has caused a sea-change or major change in the life of this country or for North Carolinians. But he'll have a record as a colorful, cantankerous senator who was highly respected by more than 50 percent of North Carolinians every time he ran, for the five or six times that he served in the Senate."

Jesse Helms

"That Word:"

"One of my best little friends when I was very young--I must have been five years old, somewhere in that neighborhood--was a little, what we called 'colored' boy then.  Good guy, and we got into a little bit of a discussion about something and he called me a 'white cracker,' and I didn’t know what a white cracker was, but I assumed it was bad so I used 'that word,' and my father heard me.  And he came and told the little boy, said, 'Wait right here.' Took me in the house and said, 'Now, I’m not gonna spank you, but I want you to promise me you’ll never, never use that word again.' And I never have."

Supporting Willis Smith Over Frank Porter Graham in 1950:

"I just did not agree with Dr. Frank. He was a good man, but I thought he was naive and he was too close with some people that I didn’t think he ought to be close to at all, and I told him on that occasion that, I said, 'If Willis Smith runs, I’m gonna help him, but I never intend to say anything bad about you, because I don’t know anything bad about you.'"

Editorializing in the 1960s:

"Then came the turbulent '60s, and mercy, everything happened. We killed a president, and everything. The Vietnamese, the Vietnam War. Everybody was at everybody else’s throats about the thing, fussing and cussing and carrying on, and it was an interesting time to try to editorialize. And looking back on it, I don't think I did all that good, but I think I didn’t do all that bad either, because I was not in the mood to support these people who stormed the streets and broke out windows and all the rest of it. I thought that was carrying their right of free speech a little bit far, you know, and said so."

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"A lot of people have forgotten that some of the people most opposed to Martin Luther King were Baptist black preachers. They didn’t want him to come into their town because violence came with him. Now my personal objection to Martin Luther King was the kind of moral man he was not. He was traveling with another man's wife, just flagrantly, and so his message was lost as far as I’m concerned. I just saw it as a message of pretense and I did not feel when the matter came up in the Senate that we ought to shut down this country one day a year in his memory."

Jesse Jackson:

"Jessie Jackson is not a wallflower. He will enter where the angels fear to tread, and not many people want him around to tell you the truth, and it proved to be a small disaster for Jim Hunt that they came down and were photographed together."

Proposing Amendments:

"My purpose was, one, a hope that I could get the amendment passed and about 50 percent of the time that would happen. Other times we at least had the realization that we had put the senators who voted against it on record, and they had to go home and explain to all those people who supported Jesse Helms how come they voted against Senator Helms’s amendment to do this or that or the other. That was largely my purpose."

Not Trying to Censor Art:

"This business of filling a glass with urine and putting a cross in it and giving them five or ten thousand dollars for that, that's not art, that’s filth. That doesn't have any message to it….I'm not trying to censor art because it’s not art.  It’s certainly not art that ought to be by taxpayers' funds, and that was precisely the point I made. Now those people, if they want to raise their own money from private donors, if it’s so good, why can’t they get the money from the corporations? You know why? Because the corporations are not going to give them any for that sort of thing."

Homosexual "Lifestyle:"

"I don't care what they do in their bedrooms privately, but when they do it publicly or when they insist that it is a reasonable way of life, which I know it not to be so, they are trying to make themselves appear to be just like everybody else. Well they are not. They are not, and they know they are not and they’ve got an inferiority complex about it."