Former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a conservative icon who represented the Tarheel State in the Senate for 30 years, died early this morning at the age of 86.

Helms served in the Senate from 1972 to 2002, where he became a leading voice of the right wing of the Republican Party. Nicknamed “Senator No” by his many critics, Helms was a fierce anti-communist whose support for Ronald Reagan in 1976 proved a critical juncture in Reagan’s eventual rise to the Oval Office. To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement.
But as much as he was lionized by the right, Helms was vilified by the left for his “Old South” racial politics, as well as his open scorn for the press, gays, liberals, and the United Nations. During his 1990 reelection battle with Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, his campaign ran an infamous ad that shows a pair of white hands crumpling up a job rejection letter, as the narrator says, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”

In the early 1960s, Helms became an on-air commentator for WRAL-TV in Raleigh and began to gain a statewide following. Helms vehemently opposed the civil-rights movement, and he made a frequent target of the University of North Carolina, which he saw as a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state. “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights,” Helms said in a 1963 TV editorial.

Slowly, but slowly the “Old South” good old boys, the people that fought against civil rights and such, are slowly dying off.  In a way it is good, maybe then we can put the racial BS behind us and move on to a better country.