| Meet important figures who influenced, and were influenced by, Jesse Helms: |
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Claude Allen
Helms 1984 Press Secretary
"I know people would call him 'homophobic' and a 'woman-hater' and a 'racist.' The Jesse Helms that I got to know, very close and personal, was a man who was very compassionate, very private in his charity."
Claude A. Allen served as Jesse Helms’s 1984 campaign press secretary, and then as a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1985 to 1987. Having graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1982, Allen received his law degree from Duke University in 1990. He then clerked for a federal judge, practiced law in Washington, D.C., served in the Virginia Attorney General’s office, and became Secretary of Health and Human Resources for the State of Virginia. In 2001, Allen was appointed by President George W. Bush as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He served as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in 2005 and 2006, providing advice on all non-economic policy issues including education, health care, labor, housing, veterans, HIV/AIDS, and other domestic issues. |
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Bono
Singer and Activist
"Anyone can cry 'crocodile tears,' right? Anyone can say, ‘Yes, I understand.’ You leave the office and that’s the end of it. This man went to work. He really went to work."
Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin, Ireland, Bono is the lead singer of Irish rock band U2 and a well-known activist in the fight against AIDS and poverty in Africa. In 2002, he co-founded DATA (debt, AIDS, trade, Africa) to raise public awareness of these issues. On behalf of DATA, Bono has lobbied U.S. presidents, congressional leaders, and heads of G8 nations. In 2001, Bono met with Senator Jesse Helms to discuss the African AIDS crisis and retirement of Third World debt. |
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Patsy Clarke
Co-founder, MAJIC (Mothers Against Jesse in Congress)
"I do not hate Senator Helms. Please let me be honest about that. I truly don't. I do hate what I think he has propagated."
Patsy Clarke was a Jesse Helms supporter through the early '90s, and her late husband had been a Helms advisor. In 1994, after her son Mark died of AIDS, Clarke wrote Helms asking him not to pass judgment on AIDS victims. Helms wrote back that he wished Mark "had not played Russian roulette in his sexual activity," and was later quoted saying the disease was the result of "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." In response, Clarke and Eloise Vaughn, also the mother of an AIDS victim, established "MAJIC: Mothers Against Jesse in Congress" to oppose Helms’s bid for a fifth Senate term in 1996. |
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Rev. Jerry Falwell
(1933-2007)
Founder, Moral Majority
"Jesse Helms was the thorn in the flesh to the Democratic party from the day he walked into Washington. And for 30 years, they all wanted him out, ever and always."
Jerry Falwell was a fundamentalist Christian pastor and televangelist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and founded Liberty University in 1971. With the help of Senator Jesse Helms and others, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, mobilizing Christian conservatives to political action with moral and social issues, including opposition to abortion, gay rights and pornography. The Moral Majority played a major role in electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 and Jesse Helms to his third U.S. Senate term in a heated 1984 battle with Democrat Jim Hunt.
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Harvey Gantt
Helms’s Democratic Challenger in 1990 & 1996
"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. |
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Dr. Frank Porter Graham
(1886-1972)
UNC President (1930-1949),
U.S. Senator (D - North Carolina, 1949-1950)
"A lot of very shady tactics were used in the Willis Smith campaign against Frank Graham, and Jesse was in it up to his neck." - Ernest Furgurson, Helms Biographer
Frank Porter Graham served as University of North Carolina president from 1930-1949. In 1949, North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott appointed the liberal Democrat Graham to the U.S. Senate after the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton. When Graham ran in a 1950 special election to maintain his seat, Jesse Helms, then a young radio commentator at WRAL in Raleigh, supported Willis Smith, a conservative Raleigh attorney challenging Graham in the Democratic primary. Despite Smith’s assertions that Graham associated with Communist-front organizations, Graham won a strong plurality--but not an outright majority--in the first primary. After three Supreme Court decisions furthering desegregation inflamed racial fears, Jesse Helms encouraged WRAL radio listeners to go to Smith’s home to urge him to call for a runoff. Smith agreed, and the runoff election turned on the fears generated by the race issue.Willis Smith defeated Frank Graham by a narrow margin. Shortly thereafter, Smith appointed Helms to the top job on his Washington Senate staff.
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