"Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson made headlines this week for his anti-gay sentiments in a GQ interview. Now another statement from the interview -- this time about the black community during the pre-civil rights era -- is stirring more controversy.
GQ's Drew Magary sat down with the "Duck Dynasty" patriarch for a candid interview about his road to fame. The 67-year-old journeyed from substance abuse to devotion to God to small-screen celebrity, all in the backwoods of Louisiana. According to Robertson, growing up in those Louisiana backwoods in the pre-civil rights era was not bad for black people.
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person," Robertson is quoted in GQ. "Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
Before the civil rights movement of the 1950s, Jim Crow laws enforced a system of subjugating African-Americans in the South by upholding racial barriers for years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The cultural climate in the Southern states was one of "disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired violence," History.com notes.